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PBC 7abcd
subject: Join and Bssie DuBois d.i;l Agier
interviewer: Dr. H. Kersey
tape a, side one
sj/Mji
B: ....and Mrs. Quincey had that historical collection, and what
became of it, I don't know. I tried to get her to let Ellen Morris
have it for the state historical....
(break in tape)
K: Today is July 18, 1980. This is Dr. Harry Kersey, Florida Atlantic
University. Today I'm interviewing Mr. and Mrs. John DuBois of
Jupiter, Florida, and assisting me in this interview is Bill Archer
of Florida Atlantic University. I'd like to start our interview,
if possible, with just some general family background information,
if you would. Either one of you can start. When you came to the
area...was either one of you born here?
B: John was born here, John was born here in 1899, July 23, up the old
house on the hill, which is now a museum after being restored
approximately to it's original condition.
K: Where did your family come from?
J: Well, my father came from New Jersey, on the And
my grandfather was a farmer with an apple orchard, raised potatoes.
I had to pull them up by hand and put them in barrels, put them
on wagons, take them down to Seaport, put them on a boat to go to
New York.
B: John's father had a cousin who maeovt...John, how was he connected
with the government __, was he in charge of it or what?
When your father came down.
J: Oh, he was a friend of the family, I think, I don't think he's
PBC 7abcd pg. 2/tape
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J: actually a relation. But when my father was sixteen, he was
already, he came down to, to Florida, and he had an aunt who lived
up on the St. Johns River. I can't think of the name of the place,
but stayed there a little while, and then he went on down to
Titusville, and then across from there to MerrittSIsland where
Mr. Heath, a family friend, had a home, or had an- orange grove
wLhre-v-er, and he worked in the orange grove and made out
?. is, is
Florida in the summer, it was apples or potatoes, icl s4o -r4>^+
Did that for several years and put in a grove, he was our/ A c\" n LL
koA pick oranges and hoedweeds and built rAf<_ Later he
-7
learned how to run
oranges over to Titusville to be shipped to the northern __r__-_
which was, Titusville was the end of the railroad in those days.
A little later when Flagler decided to build his railroad on
the other side from Titusville, he bought a sharpy, which was a
flat bottomed scow with two leg o' mutton sails and some forty
bri C \.e1 brAcfrs 'A IIr
feet long and k le AU he ak me .. bring .ometh
dxwrr to uh, Palm Beach -hereA-!-= i -Ir &sAC C. A and the
pne boom was coming on about that time and he joined the
lifesaving station crew in Jupiter, and about, what was that
) F ?
B: Well, it was in operation from 1886 to 1896.
J: Yeah, well, I don't know whether he was there attthe very start
or not, but anyhow, the lifesaving crew didn't work the year
,round ar7 Surmtr omA-r fL- had a holiday because that was
7 see you so much, so he bought a
11.4IV *
S I
I
PBC 7abcd 3/a
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J: piece of ground across about a half a mile from the lifesaving
station and cleared it and put a, ten acres of pineapples and
worked over there on his days off and i- -/" er wYtnr\
We had a man build a ,e_ -me 4 house there for him, that is a
building which I still have. And the Vineapples gave up and,
and he got married and brought Michelle down here to Jupiter.
tore down the building and brought it, set it up on the edge of
the water and used it as a storehouse for nets and honey barrels/
and what have you, and a little workshop. And he, when they were
married in 1898, he had built a house ontop of the shell mound
to bring his bride up to and we __. There were
four children in a few years. Myself, I was the oldest and my
brother Henry-and my sister Anna, then my brother Neal, and we
were raised there on that shell mound. We went to school in
the school boat ,j and it was a which took uz over
to, to Jupiter. That was a town that started after the railroad
came through, and it was named Neptune. And I went to school the
first year in 1905. Our report card shows that it was Neptune,
Florida.
A: Was that West Jupiter, or was that...?
J: Well, no, that was what is now the town of Jupiter, you see, in
1892, the town of Juniter was laid out over here on the side of
the railroad in that area, and the post office was there
and a motel....
B: Now, when you say railroad docks, John, you mean i ____t_ _
railroad docks.
J: ....that's a railroad. They were practically opposite the lighthouse,
PBC 7abcd 4/a
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J: docks in the lighthouse of Jupiter, and where the town of Jupiter
is now. In 19, 1980, there was a building up of buildings all over
the original layout of the town of Jupiter.
A: The school boat picked you up at your home?
J: Well, at the nearest dock that hre&could get to. Our dock was so
near the inlet that at times when the flCoodwaters were running
out, it was dangerous to try to land, and so we had to walk down
a half a mile to what we call the Sperry docks where the jj l
children and the DuBois kids and Kitchens and so forth got on the
boat, and then they stopped over at the lighthouse dock and picked
up the ones there, and then up at the, at the...the old man that
ran the school boat lived up the Loxahatchee, up near where the
Boy Scout camp is of this state, and in the morning he came down,
picked up the kids on either side of the river and delivered them
to the Jupiter docks and then came on over to the lighthouse dock
and the Sperry dock and picked up the kids over here, and that's
the way it went. I think I caught my first bluefish drawing behind
the school boat. (Laughs)
B: Well, it made the trip interesting to have a line out and do a
little fishing.
K: So Neptune, then, as I recall from the letter that you wrote and
so forth, was actually the original, at the original site there
of Jupiter?
J: Yes.
B: Well, you see Jupiterwas Mrs. Carlin had the post office over
there, and she got her commission in 1887, and the mail was there,
was recieved, and that was called Jupiter, Mrs. Carlin's hotel,
sj
B: and she was Captain Carlin's wife and he ran the life saving station.
Well, that was considered Jupiter, and then when the railroad came
in, why, they called a station at the south end of the railroad
bridge, they called that Neptune. And they had two post offices,
one at Neptune, and one at Jupiter. Mrs. Carlin still had her
post office, and there was a post office over by the railroad
station. And then in 1908, they decided to consolidate them;
they took down the Neptune sign and they, the two, the, and this
continued Mrs. Carlin's post office, and then it was just Jupiter,
and that was over by the railroad station.
CBreak in tape)
K: Okay, I want to back up a little bit and ask you, John, about your
brothers and sisters. Are any of them still living in the area?
J: Well, they're all living, and they're all in Jupiter yet.
K: Uh huh.
B: Not your sister Anna, she's in West Palm Beach.
J: Well, in the area still.
B: And his brother Neal and Henry, Henry just came to the door there
and brought him some (7)
K: So they're all still living in the, in the same area. When, okay,
so you started at school, what was Neptune then...where did you
continue on after that?
J: Well, I think I went there uh, the new schoolhouse was built when,
19...?
B: 1911.
J: 1911, so there was quite a few years over at the old schoolhouse
on the, the Manatee there.
5/a
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PBC 7abcd 6/a
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B: Over, over on A1A.
J: A1A, but....
B: The old Ziegler home, with the big....
J: It faced on the river there, and you wouldn't believe it, but
the sanitary conditions didn't seem to work, and pollution
and one thing or another, they, they had the toilets dompel
out over the river, and you walked a little dock out there and didn't
solve it, but that's all there was to.it, plunk init the river.
The school, there were two, two schoolteachers, one for the
primary rooms up to the third or fourth grade, and then the others
grades up to....
B: I think it just went to the tenth, didn't it, John?
J: I guess so. Of course, they weren't accredited schools or anything
in those days. One of our, which turned out to be a prominent
citizen later went to ..
B: Stetson.
J: Stetson, and of course, he had to finish out his high school course
there and, and....
K: That was very common in those days.
J: And, well, it seemed like he was going up there forever.
B: Well, John's sister Anna did the same thing when she reached the
tenth grade, she went up to Tallahassee.
K: Um hmm.
B: To Florida State College for Women.
K: It was not uncommon around the turn of the century for most
universities, particular, even in the midwest, to have what they
call their high school and academy element for people just, for
PBC 7abcd 7/a
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K: that which come from communities that didn't have a complete
secondary school. So that's interesting that that same pattern
was followed here. Now, as I recall, there was no Palm Beach
County before 1909....
B: That's right. Dade County.
K: So who, who was.....Dade County was supplying the money for that
school and the teacher's salaries, I guess.
B: John had an aunt, uh, his, his Uncle Will's wife, Aunt Hattie Gail
Sanders, and she was the first teacher in the little school over
in Palm Beach. And they raised the money to build that school, and
I suppose that, that Dade County paid her. But she was quite a
young girl at the time.
K.: Or they might have just left it up to the local district to raise the
money. The county systems weren't quite like they are now where
they pay for everything.
J: I think that it, I think it was, sir. Proper subscription and
labor.
B: They built the school.
J: Yeah, uh huh. The building is still in existence.
B: It used to be on the Fipp's estate and they moved it down to, to
Fipp's Park. And it's down there in Fipp's Park. I have a picture
here of Uncle Will presenting a picture of his wife to the, to the
school, which they hung up on the wall.
K: So in addition to your father, other members of the family had
moved into the area?
B: John's grandfather homesteaded down on Lake Worth.
J: Oh, yeah, they came down to Lake Worth before he did almost, about
PBC 7abcd 8/a
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J: thecsame time. My grandfather, maternal grandfather, came from
Kansas, he was a farmer up there, and the winters were cold and
everything and so he decided to come to Florida. His son had
already come down following his bride-to-be, Hattie Gail....
B: He made a tape for us,
J: ....so he told grandfather, and how he could take up homesteads
down here, and how there was plenty of work, and so on, and so
he came on down. And later, my mother graduated from something
or other there in Kansas. What, what did they call that school?
B: A A or school, or something like that.
J: Anyhow, she came to Florida and took the teacher's examination
and got to be a schoolteacher. And her first school was out west
of Stuart, there, which is now \ ir that neighborhood.
B: ____.
J: And she wrote a story about this which was published in'newspapers
and things. She, she won a prize the first time she, for the
best Florida tale or whatever they call it. She got transferred on
down to Jupiter and was teaching here in Jupiter when my father
was on the lifesaving crew at that time, met her on what you call
a blind date. In those days, there wasn't anyplace that you could
go to or do. Go down to sit on the beach and watch the waves or
climb X lighthouse. And so they rode over, they were staying there
on the south side of the river and with a lady named Tanker, she
boarded there, and anyhow, they went over to the lighthouse and
climbed up the stairs and got up to the light, why, they got .a
good look, they got a good look at one another for the first time.
CLaughter) So from then on, my father was pursuing her and she
PBC 7abcd 9/a
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J: finally agreed to marry him, and so went ahead and bought the
shell mound and built the floor, story part of it. And she,
they started housekeeping there.
K: What was her name?
J: Sue Sanders.
K: So she was really teaching here in the first.
J: Oh, yeah.
B: Oh, yes. One of the first teachers in this area.
K: Is a copy of that story available that she wrote?
B: I think I have it there, I think I have it.
K: That would really be interesting.
B: Uncle Will Sanders went down and worked on the Key West extension,
and he was on the houseboat that washed out to sea, and there were
a number of the men drowned, and he wrote that story, and he, he
had taught at the agricultural college in Manhatta, Kansas, for
about eighteen years. He was well, he could write well, and he
wrote the story of his adventure down there on the Keys in 1907
during the hurricane, and he sent it to the Reader's Digest, but
he had some reference in there to a, what Father Jerome called a
blasphemous blacksmith, and he, and the Reader's Digest turned his
story down. It was a wonderful story. And so then he wrote to
me, and he, he was living over in Inverness, and he said, "Bessie,
is there some way we can get this story published? I'd like to see
it in print." So I wrote Dr. Depot and sent the story to him and
fe -Pc-i bl'zhfk
he accepted it right away, and later, it was rspub44ihed in the
Miami Herald, and it's still, it's _, the story.
K: the story that his mother wrote about her teaching
K:-~ the story that his mother wrote about her teaching
PBC 7abcd 10/a
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K: experiences, that's the, in here too.
B: Yes, I, I had it in the historical edition of the Stuart News. I
wrote quite a bit for that historical edition.
K: Yes, those, I'm looking forward to talking to you about those
other sources, the written sources. When did you come into the
picture?
B: Well, I....
K: Here in Jupiter, maybe that's....
B: Yeah, well. My family, my father had a, had a, was a wholesale
florist and he had greenhouses in Short Hills, New Jersey. And
in 1911, he had gotten so fed up with trying to raise flowers in
the wintertime and keep his furnaces and boilers and everything
going, and he wanted to grow things where it wouldn't freeze, and
so he sent, he had a friend in Washington, and he talked to him,
and he ran his pencil along the Gulf Stream until he came to
Jupiter, and he said that town is the closest to the Gulf Stream
of any place in Florida, and he said that place would be least
likely\freeze. So papa came to Jupiter in 1911, and he became
so enamored of the place that he took an option on fifty acres
of land out on Limestone Creek. And then, of course, my mother
was a city girl, she was born in Brooklyn, and the idea of moving
to a place as primitive as this didn't appeal to her, but then
we had an ice storm, and it completely destroyed my father's
greenhouses, just wiped him out completely. So he, all he could
think of was coming to Florida on this fifty acres of land, so
we boarded the F(I He came down first and rented a house
and we shipped our furniture down and then we boarded the, my
PBC 7abcd 11/a
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B: mother and, I had two brothers and a sister, I was the oldest in
the family, and I was eleven years old at the time, and my mother
and we three boarded the Flagliner Apache, came down to Jacksonville,
and then from Jacksonville, we came down on the FEC railroad.
We visited, we had an aunt in Jacksonville, and she'd come down
here when she was a very young girl, married a lumberman out in
Palatka. She was really more of a pioneer than any of us. And
then, so we came down, and papa had a house rented for us, and
cO r m P5 cC
he was already planting his plumt;sa ferns up on the fifty acres,
and he began Florida. And my brother, of course,
we went everywhere by boat, we had a little rowboat, and my
brother loved it. Got a motor, so my brother Bob ran a motorboat
up and down the river, and we went to school on the school boat,
and really....
K: So you, you went to school together?
B: Well John was, John's three and a half years older than I am.
K: So is that an overlap?
B: He was upstairs, and I was downstairs.
K: You were downstairs, in the same building?
B: Yeah, I was in the sixth grade and Graham King, Dr. Graham King
from Delray, who used to practice in Delray,6back living in Jupiter
now, and he and his cousin land I were the whole sixth grade.
But then I did get upstairs later.
K: Bill had a question about this.
DBC 7abcd 12/a
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A: Yes, you didn't mention the year you came.
B: 1914. And we, and then my mother developed typhoid fever and
died in 1917. So at fourteen, I became housekeeper at home,
kept house until I started keeping house for John back in 1924.
K: Then he was, uh, your father, he stayed in this nursery business/
the ferns?
B: He was one of the first landscape men up in, he did a lot of the
H- o~e S i-,A
first landscape work up in Hope Sound. My brother was in business
with him, and they, they landscaped some of the earliest homes
up there. Did a lot of landscape work, and both of the boys,
my brother later would, took over the business. My father, the
home that my father built for us burned down in 1934, and my
father lost his life. So, uh....
K: Did, uh, let me get back to John just a minute on this. I take
it you've been in the area all the time after you finished school,
just stayed here and lived. What sort of business opportunities
were there for a young man, ambitious, soon to have a bride?
J: Well, my father, when he came in to live on the shell mound, he
thought he could plantout an orange grove and start making money
that way. But so close to the ocean, and they didn't have
proper windbreaks and wha not, so the oranges didn't come on,
the family came on faster than that, and so he, he raised bananas,
planted bananas, and before the United Fruit Company ever heard, ~re-
ever heard of. And his, he had a little motor boat, and he delivered
those down to West Palm Beach and up to Fort Pierce and around and
he got a penny a finger for the bananas, which is a pretty good
price in those days, but raising bananas this far up in Florida
PBC 7abcd< 13/a
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J: has disadvantages of hurricanes and frost and the varmits, and
so he had a time raising those bananas, and so he, somebody offered
him some bees, and so he bought about a dozen hives and they
thrived and did all right, so every time he could, he bought up
a Acr-e of bees along the river, Loxahatchee and down
there. What was the east coast now in those days, and I was
there helping, and so when I got through with school here in
Jupiter, why, he says to me, he say, "Why don't you try bees up
and down on the road?" We'd just heard about a fellow in Delray
and another one in Boca Raton, another one in Deerfield that had
bees that could be bought, and so I put my bicycle on the train
and went down to Delray, and went to see this man that had bees
there.
B: Was that C_?Jn______
J: No. And so his name was Keenings....uh, we made a bargain with
him and bought his bees, but we had to move them from there and so
went on Boynton and there was an old man there that had a bunch of
bees, and evidently, he'd kind of gotten tired of fooling with
them and was going into some other business, I don't know if it
was a grocery store or what, but he had all these bees around in
his beehives around in his chicken yard and along side of his
house, scattered all around, and he wanted me to move them from
there because when they were, the bees, when they were good and
strong, and there wasn't any honey, and anyhow, they would sting
the chickens, and they'd sting anybody that came around, and so
he wanted me to move them across the highway, he was...so I had to
clear up a bunch of land there and, and I, I built a little building
PBC 7abcd 14/a
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J: there, eight by ten, and we set up the bees there. I, I bought
myself a Model T Ford, it's kind of like a pickup truck, but it
had a cab, a top over it, side curtains and what have you. So
that's what I had to go and see my first bees with. Was quite
a trip from Jupiter to Delray in a Model T, and so, and then
when you got off the highway, why, if it was sandy, why, it would
pull and so you'd have to load it up with wheelbarrow, and anyhow,
I bought myself a real truck, real speedwagon they called it.
It was much better, I could them around, and could
go down the road a lot faster, and I could carry more bees. Before,
we had been extracting the honey at each, at each
which was quite an operation because you had to take the extractor
and alum cans and put them on the stove
got down there and let some almost out of luck.
But anyhow, we started with a new speedwagon to have a central
extracting place here at home, and we brought them, brought the
honey all from the river in the boats to the dock there where
the honey extractor was, and that's the way we worked.
had the World War I started about that time, and, and It paid
for those bees the first year and started making money. Things
went along pretty good. used to bring after we
were married, why brought the, when we were extracting
there at home, why, Bessie used to help me and so I'd
every time she got stung, I'd take her to the movies. I think she
put the bee andwiggled it until he stung her, but anyhow, I don't
think we had to, I had to take her more than a couple of times.
Anyhow, we raised the, put the honey in barrels and at first, before
PBC 7abcd 15/a
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J: we had a bridge and a road over to the people in Jupiter, they had
to put them on a scow and haul them over and load them on to the
flat cars there, or box cars, and weigh them and all that. And then
they went to Jacksonville and put on the Flagline steamers. Anyhow....
K: You were doing a real volume business then?
J: Yeah, we raised 90,000 pounds of honey one year. But along about,
1920....'25 or '26, the people started coming into our place, we'd
gotten a bridge across and we were the first place you could get
to the ocean and river fishing north of the bridge in Palm Beach
itself. And so the fishing camp practically forced on us and then
ond night hurricanes came in 1926, and it blew a lot of the bees
over and, but I straightened them back up again and first, 1928,
happened the same way. So it looked on it, it got where I had to
make a decision whether I was going to run a fishing camp or stay
in the bee business, I couldn't run them both 'cause it wasn't
easy to get somebody to help you in the bee business, the person
would get stung. And so I turned them over to my brother, and he did
real well on them. Sometimes I wondered if I hadn't made a mistake
in turning the bees over to him. But if I'd have done that, why,
the camp never would have progressed to where I could sell it for
the price and retire on it. (Laughs)
B: And don't forget, we started a restaurant up down in 1928, '29.
J: Oh, yeah, we, we did quite a few different things because we had
four children and it takes, we ran on hand to mouth there for years
to keep things going. But people kept coming, couldn't keep them
away, so....
K: iWw, all of these operations, the home, the honey, the fishing camp,
PBC 7abcd 16/a
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K: all were right in this area where we are now?
J: Right, we're on the land that my father....
K: Original ten acres?
J: Original eighteen acres.
K: Eighteen acres, okay.
J: I, I, we, the county didn't buy all of it; that is west of this
DuBois road coming in, they didn't sell that. My father started
my brother in the fern business. That is, he helped him and gave
him land; I guess it's, I guess it's sold
Anyhow, I had the fern ranch across the road here, and when they
first started out, for the first ten years, why, it was a real
profitable thing and they used to put Bessie working her head off
about marrying a guy like me that....they could buy their ready
made clothes from the stores and whalnot....
B: Well, all's well that ends well.
J: ....I didn't have a new car then, I had the best I could buy. They'd
say, "Uncle John, what year is that car rated?" And so, you know,
like that, you know.
(Laughter) But I didn't pay any attention to it, I just kept going.
Struggling away.
K: Well, the land then that's in the park now, how many acres of the
original?
J: Oh, it was, I increased the number of acres by letting the inlet
district put sand on the shallow water, joining the, my property
here. They, when they first started the inlet, they put the sand
over on the north side of the inlet and filled in thousands and
thousands of yard;of sand over there, but then I got a little sand
PBC 7abcd 17/a
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J: so it looked like I might get to be the owner
I was a crook in all kind of things. So, but they never could....
B: We bought so much land in the state, so we're....
J: .-..prove anything wrong and so, I had people come and they'd want
to buy a lot and they'd be right in the middle of it, my acreage,
I'd have to give them a right of way road into it and all that.
I wouldn't settle. Some people thought I was crazy for not.
I knew that time would come that, that I could sell it all in
one lot, get through with it, and finally when they had this bunch
of money that they voted on, and it was to buy ocean frontage
with, and lands adjoining are comparable, and so right then I
saw that was my chance. Sell it all in one piece, and so that's
what we did.
B: Well, we'd run the park for forty-five years and people had become
so accustomed to coming here that it was, the park was already
here, I mean, it was used as a park all that time.
J: Yeah, it was a growing, it was a growing business when I sold it,
and they didn't do anything to it for some time. They, they had
to build a larger restroom, I had built larger ones, and they
were adequate for ordinary going. But on a, say like a holiday,
fourth of July or something, they, the septic tanks and things
would run over all the....and it was....and so they, when the
county got there, they tore down my bathrooms and built....
B: And used them for quite a while before they tore them down.
J: Yeah, they did. They used it just like it was.
K: What year did they purchase this?
B: 1972.
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K: And this was the whole acreage, then?
B: No, you see, they bought our property first, and then mother had
sold the house on the hill to a Mr. and Mrs. Neal Vickers, and
they in turn sold their property to the county, and then John's
brother had a piece next to that, and they bought his piece, and
then they bought his brother Henry's piece, so they gradually bought
out the entire family.
K: Right. So all of, they did finally get it then?
B: Yeah, they got...
J: At the time when I was selling, the thing was, I had them to agree
that it would be DuBois Park, in honor of my father. I reserved
a seventy-five foot lot on the water to the west of the section line,
which was DuBois Road, and so I still own that, and then when
they finally made a payment, we sold it in two or three different
patches so that we wouldn't have income tax all in one year, and
anyhow, once I got the first money, why, this house here came
up for sale, and so me and a variety agent, whatnot, we could....
selling home and buying another one and all that rigamarole,
we got a little advantage from that and so it saved a lot of
trouble, because if I'd tried to build that on a seventy-five
foot lot....
end of tape a, side one
_ A
PBC 7abcd 19/tape a, side 2
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B: ....and daughter owned a lot next to this, and have their home
there. So we're next to our daughter and son-in-law's home. They're
in Costa Rica now,:and their, their son lives in the house, Jed
lives in the house. So they're close by us and then we own a lot
next to us, so we have a little buffer zone so we're not....
K: Um hmm.
J: The, the old house that my father built on on a pineapple patch
is, finally ended up right along side the road there with some
additions on it. It's still, I think, probably the, one of the
oldest houses still standing in Jupiter.
K: Possible to go down and see that...
B: Oh, yes. We have it rented now...in the neighborhood.
K: This is the original house that he had?
J: That my father built out on a pineapple patch, yeah.
K: Um hmm. How about in the park itself?
J: They tore down all the buildings that I built there, the restaurant
building, which was thirty-five, forty feet square, and my
honeymoon cottage, they called it, where we....
B: John had that house built, what, before we were married, we were
engaged for nine months, and he built that house and it really
was a wonderful nice house.
J: Back when my father left home because, in Jersey~because he'd
always work for his father but he'd never pay him anything. And
so the boys all left home as fast as they got old enough to
and could. And so he decided that he was going to try to keep
his boys together there, and so when I, when I helped him fish,
why, he gave me a ten per cent of the net catch, and....
PBC 7abcd 20/tape a
sj
B: John, you didn't tell them about your father's illness.
J: Well, I'm not that way.
B: Okay.
J: The, so in those days, why, there wasn't any movies or any hot
rod cars or anything you spent your money on, so I put it in the
bank and saved it. And when I got married, I had money to pay
for everything.
B: See, wasn't that smart, I married a man with money.
J: My father worked so hard, worried and one thing or another, that
he developed pernicious anemia, which they can keep you alive
nowadays but anyhow, he, he aged in three or four years from a
fifty year old man to seventy-five or eighty years, and then
caught pneumonia and died.
K: What year was that?
B: March, 1924.
K: I'm always fascinated in hearing how people made money in this
area, you know, to survive.
B: It wasn't easy.
K: No, it wasn't, and this story of; I've talked to people down in
the southwest area, Chepalessee C??) Island and the Naples, Martha,
hunting alligators, trapping, fishing, it was all put together,
it was a package of, and it was seasonal. Well, it was what seemed
to be in season played a large part of it, and what was marketable.
And the shipping through Jacksonville or Tampa, the way you talk
about shipping your honey by railroad up, they would ship very often
out of the Ten Thousand Isands on little launches and boats, and
there, there just weren't that many ways to make money in Florida.
PBC 7abcd 21/a
sj
K: And I've heard this story over and over again.
B: My father raised these asparagus fermosa ferns, and they would be
bunched, and they would ship them in crates. He'd go up to the
East Coast Lumber Company in Fort Pierce and buy his crates and
those would They'd put these bunches of ferns in
the crates with a big lump of ice in the center of them and ship
them north. And there for a while, it was a very profitable business,
but then all of the sudden, the left, and people began using
other ferns in the florist business, and that was the end of it.
So then he went into the landscaping. But that, that fern business,
all over the state, somebody said there should be something written
sometime about that because it was quite a flourishing business here
in Florida for a while.
K: Just in ferns?
B: But then of course...my, John's brother Henry, when he graduated
from high school, he came up and worked for my father and learned
the fern business from him, and then he went into business for
himself. His father furnished him the land, and he, he built the
sheds, and....
K: Uh huh. When the railroad came through; I want to backtrack just
a little bit, when the railroad came through here, would have been
the Flagler Railroad I'm talking about, would have been what, about
'93, wouldn't it?
B: '94.
K: '93-'94, in there. Uh, at that essentially put the old celestial
B: Out of business.
PBC 7abcd 22/a
sj
K: ...out of business totally.
B: And also the steamboat line that came from Titusville into Jupiter.
They took two of those big steamers at St. Augustine and St.
Sebastian, towed them up the Loxahatchee River and left them to
rust away.
K: Just let them rust away there. Did this change, uh, I wonder if
that had a big impact here. Do you remember hearing from your
father the impact of that railroad arriving here?
J: Well, he, he bought this great boat and ran that, you know, for
a number of years. My father wasn't a great one to talk about
his past. I wish I had learned more about what he did and what
he didn't do. I fell heir to a bunch of letters that he had
written home to his mother when he was in, up at Grove,
and they're quite interesting.
B: Jerry Weeks did, did a talk with the Floiida State Historical
Society on the orange industry and so on.
K: Up at Jupiter, or at Fort Pierce, rather?
B: Yes, And, and he had read John's father's
letters and incorporated them in the talk. That was 1887, along
in there somewhere.
K: So, I, what I was trying to draw here, I talked to families, for
example, up in Stuart, like the Kitchens.
B: Oh, yes.
K: And Mrs. Taylor now, and I remember the great change in their
lifestyle in her father, who used to run the boat up and down.,,
B: I have an article in the Gateway Magazine that I wrote about
Captain Kitchen's trade boat, and...
PBC 7abcd 23/a
sj
K: Right. When, then when the railroad came through, what monumental
changes in their life; they had to move from the water to having
the store, and then I talked to her about his trading patterns in
the store, the railroad seemed to have both positive and negative
effects when it came through, that's what I was driving at.
J: Yeah, some people went for broke, and some of them could see
the light and went on and got better. But a lot of them couldn't
it. Now down towards, let's say Pompano, you see, the water
way there was, a lot of people thought that, that that was going
to be the town and so forth over there, but when the railroad
came, it was _miles to the west, why, it died right
there. And we bought some bees at Pompano; they, they
... .___ Company, which was a big honey or bee supply place,
and apparently during the early war years, they bottled.honey, and
they had found, they a bunch of bees there that they were
experimenting with1sort of, and they got through with them, why
they sold them to my father, and so we went down there in the
motorboat, and rowboat, and brought those bees
back and put them out at Deerfield, and boy, that was some trip.
It rained, and sandflies were bad....(laughs)
K: ...much of a pollen source?
A: What nectars were there?
K: Oh, the nectar for the bees, the pollen source?
A: Where'd they get it from?
K: Oh, Bill had a question, he said, where did the, what did the bees
use as a pollen source?
A: The pollen, the nectar, and so on, to make the honey?
PBC 7 a(2)
page 24
mjb
J: Well...
B: It was from palmetto.
J: ...different kind of flowers, some of them, had pollen and honey, both/and
others didn't. Now, like goldenrod, they had pollen and They- hd-smell
J~-rd-ed e bought an old fellow's bees one time and Farley tried to buy from him
and no, he wouldn't sell and so about a year later he got a postcard from him and
4lsaid, "One hundred and fifty bees. I'll sell them." And so what had happened, these
bees had gathered a lot of this pollen that had this funny smell and he thought that
there was something wrong with.l.3
(Laughter)
J: ...but Farley knew better than that.
B: You didn't mention the scrub palmettos. That was
J: Oh, well, the scrub palmetto was the best source of honey back in those days. I
only have these -- what do you call these red berries that grow along --
they have a honey that looks like but
it doesn't seem to make much difference to the buyers. Now days they harvest
everything on health foods and all, but I suppose that, that there's a place there
good for.
A: What prompted the question, you mentioned that the oranges didn't do well here.
I was wondering what sort of flowering, was it commercially raised or the like, they
would give the bees the necessary nectar to raise, as you said, 90,000 tons a year.
J: Well, out here, the groves out here west of Jupiter, I had bees there for several
years and they didn't do especially well because they, in the flat around, why they
had what they call it comes along in January and February and
the bees can build up on that and be good and strong for the honey flow which
comes later palmetto and often the big groves were the hundreds of it,
believed the higher bee keepers' bee hives bees replaced in their
groves to facilitate things and and others _
PBC 7 a(2)
page 25
mjb
K: So everything grows naturally down here or much....
J: Black mangos that grows in the swamps around the rivers. There's a lot of it
down there in the keys and there used to be an old fellow named
at the _who had, I guess he must have lived there on
Creek which goes through all and he had his bees on a boat and
he would take them along and stop off at different places for different crops of
honey.
B: There was some peculiar people ....
J: They're doing the same thing now with big vans, trucks on the highway. People from
the north will bring the bees down south here to and to care for
put them to somebody else who's already here, so
This bush that has the red berries on it, what do you call that?
A: Would that be the Brazillian pepper?
B: Brazillian pepper?
K: Brazillian pepper?
Tf: Yeah, Brazillian pepper. That's coming up all out through the glades, all along
the highways and we're going choke up, drink up all the water.
(Laughter)
5. But they get a lot of honey from that and its pretty good honey, I guess and I
don't know whether they can do like the dairymen do, take the cream out of the
milk, take the bad tasing pollen out of the honey or not.
(Laughter)
K: What did, what did that honey sell for, do you recall, back around World War I?
:: Well, we were getting 2, 21, 3 cents a pound. That would be about 35 cents a
gallon or something like that and we....
K: Then as now, the middle man was making money.
; Well, the middle man gets his share of it. My father, we was way off down
here in the and there weren't many grocery stores where you could bottle it and
sell it and trying to make comb honey to sell. There wasn't any market for that,
PBC 7 a(2)
page 26
mjb
J: either and he decided he wouldn't fool with bottling any honey
because if we've honey then it sugared and a little bit would run out
down the lTbel and somebody would think for and go to pick it up and
heat it and rebottle it and all that, so it was a, a lot of trouble and so we
just kept a few more bees and raised more bulk honey.
back 7 )
K: You said something a whileAthat was interesting, when you got the inlet district
to raise the sand, I guess, that the inlet some, some
question about it. Does that imply that there were political problems with
this?
S: Well....
K: Trying to get into your political involvement, here.
'J- No, they just didn't understand how things worked because somebody put an island
in front of your property on the opposite side of a channel and/we couldn't see
over to the other side of the river like we had before, why that wasn't any,
wasn't considered a detriment to their land, it was just progress. People put up
these condominiums and they're getting to be a little more careful now, but some-
times they put them up and the shadow would cover some fellow's ( P {/ard
E7_ yard-
or something or other or cut off his view and big money like building a condjmin-
ium and and, but-what it was, when they, they changed
the channel back in the years when the lake wasn't getting in much money. There
Wvorq&comeftime when we didn't get enough in to pay off the bonds that
came due. We were paying interest on interest, you might say and so whatever they
wanted make any improvements on anyway. They dug near what was the deepest and
best channel down through the mouth of the inlet and I could put
it over nearer the, lOrt_ side and when they did that, why it started filling
in in front of my docks where I used to have ten, twelve feet of water. I had
tw feet. I built a big bar out there all along in front of me that
hung down where it's land now, you see, and so one time when there were about to
dredge the inlet, they didn't have any place to put the sand after the
PBC 7 a(2)
page 27
mjb
J: started over there,, you see. They didn't need any more sand. They'd already gotten
it all. The thing about it was the people that owned that land in there also owned
the bonds on the land, so they always got the sand. If even I asked for it they
wouldn't give me any. And so what they, they couldn't put it anywhere else, I
gave them permission to pyt it in front of me. Well, they put in a lot more than
I expected and shut me off. I couldn't get out and so I complained and they had to
dredge a channel in down through the shallow water there where they'd let it fill
in or where it had filled in on account of the dredging they'd done on the other
side of the quarry where
A: Would that be this west section, the western point here of the park?
J: Yeah, right there in front of where I used to live.
A: Right. Okay.
J: That's, I gave permission to put the sand along there and that's where it got to be
on and then you couldn't, I couldn't have asked and had a foot of sand there and
have it, try to do it myself, but getting the inlet district to do it, they could
designate who was to have it somehow or another and they may h~te done the damage
and so they just let me, they gave me some sort of deed to it. I, I, but it,
prov'
while really ull-d-up on it, why tb-i- part of the land that I,
the inlet district had put there, and part of it was sand that I had a drag line
come and take there and it was outside the boundaries of the inlet
and so there was some arguing about that. It was, I couldn't anyhow, they, I had
to allow so much for bass.
K: When, when was this, the
J: Oh....
K: Roughly.
J: Somewhere in the
K: Fairly close to the time, though that the land was
Shortly before the....
J: Several years.
PBC 7 (a)2
page fV27
mjb
K: Yeah, yeah.
J: I think they put a whole lot of it out in the, on the front side of the land there.
You see what they did, they let a-contractor fellow put the sand along where I asked
for it. Well, and when he 49t through with that and there was still sand, he was
to put it over on south of the inlet. Well, you know good and well, he just piled
the sand up there till It was way out in the right of way of the
inlet. Well, I knew it they wouldn't stay there, so I'm, we met, made an agreement
with them, that all the land east and north of a certain to be the inlets
and what was west of it and south was to be mine and so first thing you know, it
kept coming in and coming into it. It left the inlet lying out in the water and
it was eating what I was supposed to own away.
A: That little creek that you had the foot bridge over, was that the boundary line?
J: No, I claimed the Florida on the other side of that on account of
that's where the water originally went out of. I had pj of it,
one thing or another, sure. But it did. But when they pumped sand in there, why
it changed the looks of it all together and so they finally ended up by making me
agree to go 50/50 with the inlet district,
A: Uh huh.
J: It was, well say, just about ours, and I got twenty-five but
took out this and that Mine was down to $18,000
and theirs was still $25,000.
(Laughter)
J: That sounds funny now. Kinda hard to remember all the
But I think you thovght1-4-- 't and fought them.. 4-ln-o.Idong
fc--------
what I claimed, but I've been lucky in other things, so I,
named down there, I don't know who all, you
know in West Palm Peach and Key West so there was a lot of good folk, that kind of
stuff, and I find that __that I would, theyL4d-be-s-we thought
so I don't press my luck any more.
PBC 7 a(2)
page 28
mjb
K: There's an old fisherman here Let me ask you a question, we were talking, writing
up about the oyster bars locking the riverbed. Were oysters ever harvested
commerically here?
T-e j
J: Uh, yes. -We opened oysters and shipped them down to the hotels during the season
in West Palm Beach.
K&A: Uh huh.
J: Looked like a pile of oyster shells that they opened up over there. lAremember-the
oysters were up in Hope's Sound mind you. All of them, that is, from the light
house on up, wherever there was bars,ef natural bars there from when they
K: ?
J: There was good oysters up there. I remember
Yme ___ then when they opened the inlet more, why they
seemed to die out up there because they got too much salt water, I think.
K: Uh huh.
J: And the oysters up by the railroad bridge and on up that way, they were
all the way up to now it's
between the north river and the south river. fe oysters all around
f\ us-and they -wre good ones.
K: Did you ever do any harvesting up?
J: Oh, yes. I've served them here in the restaurant for quite a few years and working
stop but the thing was, you know, that they had some trouble down
in the south end of Lake Worth where people thought they were going to sit there and
eat oysters down there and the people would come to the restaurant and say, "Where
do you get your oysters?" "By the river up here." Then they'd
and say, "Sure." We dock, so next thing we knew, nobody ordered any
oysters, so I couldn't get them and I had to buy the darn oysters from Chesapeake
or someplace shipped in, you know, and they wasn't washed in fresh water and they
didn't taste like natural oysters here and they, the fellows that sell the, sell the
PBC 7 a(2)
page -32 30
mjb
J: oysters, it was against the law for them to put salt in them and it was real tricky
to store them and not have __, but I got
clams out of that little creek down there by the bridge for years, and had clam
chowder.
K: So everything, was normally accepted, the sea ?
K: Were they interested for commercial fishing andwas much a-t t2L1ce in the
river?
J: There was a few sailorSthat and I ain't so sure whether they did harm or not because
pulli-ng those kind of scraped that moss and crap off of the bottom
SThey had a fish that they called a strawberry bass or there's
lots of different names for them, but it was the same fish that are in the rivers
over in China and there's certain times of the year that you could ship those to
New York and get three or four times the price that fishermen would pay you here
at first if you the fish house. I bought
the things to serve in the restaurant, but they wouldn't sell me any if it took
away so many that they couldn't ship a barrel.
K: Well, why don't we take a break? We've been going pretty steady; we'll come back
to it.
B: Fine.
(END TAPE A; BEGIN TAPE B)
K: We're talking a few minutes ago about the lighthouse, time when they wanted to get
rid of the lighthouse and so forth. What are your earliest recollections? John
had said that you had some courting that took place at the light house.
(Laughter.)
B: That was, he wasn't, mother and father weren't the only ones,
K: Oh,yeah. That had already been sort of the central feature here, I guess, from
the time that you came.
PBC 7 b(l)
page -3
mjb
B: Yeah.
K: Was it still operating, it was operating, of course.
B: Oh, it's been operating.
K: Always.
B: It's only failed to operate, I think, twice. Once when a drunken or man who was
head shell shocked or something failed to wind the weight. No, he wound the weights
up too tight. They came down through the steps. That was what happened,
(Laughter)
B: And then I think he, there was one night that it failed because of a drunken keeper.
But it failed during the '28 hurricane because the power went off.
K: Uh huh.
B: And then they had just managed to put electricity instead of the mineral lamps and
the power went off and Captain had a very bad case of blood poisoning
in his arm, but he managed somehow to get those mineral lamps put back in place so
that the light was, there was a light. But unfortunately the mantles had to be
turned by hand and his son,who was sixteen, Franklin, insisted on going up in his
father's place and he turned that mantle by hand during the worst of the hurricane.
And they claim that tower sways went to 17 inches during that storm and stayed up
there and turned the mantle,Ruth Brown Owen was our congresswoman at the time and
invited him up to Washington for a special commendation. Very nice. Treasures
that, he's dead now, but his wife brought that over to the museum,,commendation from
her. But I think it went off for a little while during the '49 storm, didn't it
John? You, it doesn't do to just turn the light by hand. It has to be timed so that
the flash comes at the proper moment. I don't know whether the flash can be seen
at sea, though, during a bad hurricane or not. It seems very probable.
K: The history, I guess, of the community is pretty much based on the lighthouse.
Everything grows up....
B: the lighthouse was the first thing here. We had, it was lighted
first time in 1860 and then, of course, the civil war started and they put the light
out for, till the end of the war. A group of what they called southern sympathizers
PBC 7 b(1)
page 3432
mjb
B: armed, came up and turned the keeper away, turned the light off, took enough of the
mechanism to make it unserviceable, buried it down Jupiter Creek and so the light
was out during the war and the blockade runners came in with their contraband up the
Indian river and ____~i____ in n ifn .
K: Uh huh.
B: And Captain Davis from Key West was the first keeper for a couple of years. John
has heard this And then Captain Armor became the head keeper in
'68 and he was keeper there for years.
K: Uh huh. Pierce's family came in there to assist, I guess.
B: Pierce's, Pierce was an assistant keeper to Dr. Armor in 1872. Captain Carlton
was also a keeper there in 1872 and that's when the shipwreck of the Victor
occurred, the Mallory steamer that came ashore
tremendous amount, a hundred thousand dollars of merchandise floating ashore. And
the Seminole Indians arrivedseven canoes, seven canoes up and they participated in
the salvage, camped out on the beach and certain things. And....
K: Sewing machines?
B: Yeah, they had a sewing machine float in. The Pierce's got that. The Pierce's
had lost everything they had. They'd come down here after the Chicago fire and
they had camped, they had some kind of a shack up on the Indian River there and
everything burned down. They lost everything and so they were on their way down
when they met Captain Armor who'd heard about this and was on his way up there.
They, they were, they, different pioneers were very supportive in those days. They
tried to look out for each other and he'd heard of their troubles, so he came up and
offered him a place on that, at the lighthouse as assistant keeper. Of course that
gave them a place to live, too, because they had quarters there,
K: One of their daughters was the,...
B: Lilly Pierce VO55_
K: Yeah.
B: Oh, bless her heart. I knew her well. I've got a lot of her letters from where
PBC 7 b(1)
page -3-
mjb
B: she used to write to me quite often.
K: And the Voss's have been around a long time.
B: Gilbert Voss, of course, her son, is a ....
K: What, you know, all of these people that passed through, and historically we know
they were here, who were the first settlers around the that would stay permanently?
B: You mean in this area?
K: Uh huh.
B: Well....
K: Say, to start stores or to start other enterprises for the town to actually build
up.
B: Well, there was Kitching had a store; he was one of the early store keepers.
Thomas Zieger was on of the early store keepers and Mr. Frank Barrows was on of the
early storekeepers. Frank Barrows, of course, was the brother of Joe and Amos. He
came here. You see this 1908 business. He was the postmaster, I think, in 1908 and
changed the postmaster, post office over here. And he's a, when we came to Jupiter
in 1914, there was a Kitching store, Z/egr store.
K: Now this was the brother in the Kitching in Stuart.
B: I think they were all the same family. Back in Huntington Kitching was owned thirty-
seven acres of land, water front up on the Loxahatchee river, way up-river and the
little creek was named Kitching Creek. I was curious if the state map when they put
it in Kitchen Creek instead of Kitching because 1 thought it was a shame that they
didn't use the Kitching name because it wasn't Kitchen Creek; it was Kitching Creek.
At any rate, my father bought the property from Mr. Huntington Kitching and then
when World War II came along, they took that property away from me as part of Camp
My
Murphey, so I had inherited the property fro 'father when he died and so I lost
it,though.
K: Had you always been interested in writing the history, of keeping the history of this
area?
PBC 7 b(1)
page 53 3
mjb
B: Ever since I was a little girl, I was always going to write, I never got a chance
to really do anything about it until I got started on this. I think the first
thing I ever published in Tequesta was "Centennial of the Lighthouse", And my son
was living up in Arlington, Virginia at the time so I would and I,
to the archives, prowl around. I got quite a bit of information of the lighthouse
on those trips. So I wrote a history of the lighthouse. It was published in
Tequesta. It seems 1960, in September. No, it was 1959. Anyway,
that was the first one I got published. Later, Lilly Pierce Voss helped me to with
this story of the It was another one that got published ir
Tequesta and I did a story about the history of the Jupiter inlet which was also
published in Tequesta. Later I did one on the lighthouse keepers and
published in Tequesta.
K: Right. I'm familiar with those. You know, people, very often, who live in an area
all of their lives or most of their lives have never done anything about it. I've
gone in to, to, this question's always asked of historians, well why you? Why not
somebody who's lived there? Well, most people who live in a place don't think about
it; they just live. They just live their lives and they don't stop to record it.
That's why we are encouraging kids in school now to get into local history. We're
starting some programs with the children in Boca Raton in the Fall in terms of
interviewing their grandparents, interviewing friends and neighbors...
B: Oh, that's a geat idea.
K: ...gathering local history. It's a project that I've been wanting to start a good
long while.
A: It goes back to what John said earlier, that he was sorry that he hadn't quizzed his
father more and learned more about what his father did and why.
K: Sure. And I think the new trend is history is bottom up history. Round up from the
people, not just the great men and women, not just leading figures, but what did the
average people do? How did they carry on life? How did people survive here? That's
why I asked the question I did about the first people who really settled here and how
PBC 7 (b)1
page 443
mjb
K: they made a living.
B: Well, he went, went to the store in those days and of course, there was no refrigera-
tion and so you bought things that were dried or canned or there was always a great
big block of cheese on the, on the meat block and there was a, usually a lot of salt
pork. People used a lot of salt pork in those days. And so you learned to do with
what you had and what you could catch, I heard John tell a story one time about this
man that was hoeing in his garden. He looked up and he saw this fish-hawk flying
by with a pompano in his talons when he let out a great shout and the fellow dropped
the, dropped the pompano down right at his feet so he picked that up and had it
for lunch.
(Laughter)
K: Live off the land.
B: You know, that's how, that's how you got along. And my father used to up to Tex
Lake and bring back a boatload of oysters and he'd put them in a -- John's father
did the same thing -- they'd put them in a box in the dark, salt, down and if they
was ever needed, open up some oysters. Lots of times if John's father's, if someone
came or they didn't have anything on hand particular for supper, he'd say, "Boy's
go out with the cast net," and they'd go out with the cast net and catch a big
cast net full of mullet. They boys would dress them and bring them up to their
mother and she would have them fried for supper and she was a very good cook. She
fried beautifully.
K; Do you remember the BowerS' store?
B: Oh, very well, yes.
K: Tell us a little more about that.
B: Well, you went in there and you saw the Indians come in once in a while, I can re-
member the first time, though, I ever saw any Indians. It was when they came in a
covered wagon into Kitching's Store.
K: Uh huh.
PBC 7 (b)l
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B: But Bowers' store was back down by the dock in those days and we used to get off the
boat, the school boat that was close by. And Mr. Bowers had a, had a brother-in-law,
Kelly Ogilsvy, and Kelly was always in the store. He was a character. Wonderful
I, I was very fond of him, but Kelly could tell the tallest stories.
He loved to tell tall stories and if a bunch of Negroes came in the store why, you'ld
hear that accident up the coast where some Negroes were killed. They'd get all
excited over their names and everything, you know. And it, it, white people was al-
ways white people and he told these stories so many times and one time -- I'm getting
off the subject here -- anyway, one time, he was known for these stories and so one
time the train, the draw was open and the train went right down into the draw. That
was back in 1934 and John's sister was postmistress down at Lake Park and it was her
habit to go out and wait at the side of the river, tracks and when the train came
in, they'd throw the mail out to her. And so, she was there waiting and a salesman
came by. He says, "No use for you to wait." He said that, "The train's gone through
the draw." And she said, "Who says so?" Well, he said, "Kelly Ogilsvy." She laugh
and sat there for another hour. So, poor Kelly!
(Laughter)
B: But anyway, they used to, oh, Kelly could tell some wonderful stories. Not all of
them were, I know after one of the hurricanes, they were in a new, the new store,
back by the railroad tracks. Kelly knew all of the, he was, he belonged to the
Masonic lodge and most of the railway people belonged to Masonic lodge and they all
knew each other. And Kelly always drifted out to the door to wave to the engineers
who'd come by. But -- I forgot what I was going to tell you, about Kelly and his
store....
K: The Bowers' store, then was right next to the railroad tracks.
B: Always next to the railroad tracks.
K: I remember Ruby tell about floating it down the river, a story where
they moved the store at one time.
PBC 7 b(1)
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mjb
B: Now that one I didn't remember. It must have been before my time. John might
remember that.
J: what?
B: Floating a store.
K: That they moved a store, the old Bowers' store. Do you remember that?
J: Yeah, + moved it when they moved the depot.
B: Well, that's when they built the big cement store, John, that Mr. Sims built.
J: Yeah, but they moved the, they moved the part of the building down there. It
burned up after a while.
K: Uh huh. It burned later on. But they'd moved the store from another location,
J: Oh, it was there on, way up on the land they have, although it was the river on
K: Uh huh.
J: There was this little spur railroad that they'd run down there to Mr, Flagler for
Mr. Flagler to unload his locomotive on and to bring more, you see, we couldn't,
I guess Bessie already told you about the two bridges...
B: No, they hadn't....
J: ...the Loxahatchee Bridge and the Stuart Bridge took more time and they had the
railroad built right up to them in Stuart and -nti-at Jupiter. It went on down to
West Palm Beach. It was' 00ox br bbes /, so they -b r). I COlY'O0 jc
in there and then they'd bring stuff down on the water and float it onto the
lOorY)Lk) ,e ,,,,, and on to town,
B: That was to get material down to the Ponciana hotel.
K: Right.
B: It was a tremendous job during the ....
K: So the store is where the store was?
J: Yeah.
B: Yeah.
PBC 7 b(1)
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J: Yeah, it was right there along side of it. They had a fellow who had bought it
there lately and had just sold it now. But they were having trouble with who
owned the land there. The state owned it or whether the railroad company owned
it or whether Bowers and there was some trouble there. They finally straightened
it out, I think that they're part of it, but they, the restaurant was, they,
they were paying the railroad company rental because they planned to own it.
B: The story I was trying to remember to tell you was when, after one of the hurricanes.
I think it was '33, we went over to Bowers' store and t+m--end Kelly told us about
when the, when the storm got at its height, the building began to sway a little
bit. Can goods would get....
J: That's the new, that's the new big store.
B: Yeah, the new cement building.and the canned goods began to pop on the shelves
and things began to get kind of sticky and so they all went down and put their
backs up against the building on the lee of the storm.
J: Outside.
B: Outside and he said while they were there, well they saw this freight car just
propelled by the wind moving up the tracks and Kelly told me that story and I
began to laugh at him and he got so hurt. Actually it was a true story and finally
went into the ice house up at Hope Sound, crashed.
K: Oh. Now when she was giving the story about floating the store down from its
original spot, I wasn't sure because I didn't know the geography of the area that
well, when she said they floated the store down to the main part of town that
must have been what she meant and set it up there and then built the new building
as well?
J: Yeah. Uh huh.
K: Did you ever....
J: They ran the store there for a while while the new building was being built, I guess.
You see, that store was built by one of the oldest settlers in Jupiter, Uriah Sims,
and he was down, he had a homestead up on...
PBC 7 b(1)
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B: Sims' Creek.
J: Sims' Creek over to Indian f Road and they
built houses along side of it an all. The development is terrible, but 94-lM4 n
Sims, when things got bad, D press in and so forth,
he went to Panama, you see, he was an engineer builder guy, so they went down and
stayed in Panama for years and years and years before he came back to Jupiter and
when he come back to Jupiter he built that store and bridges on the, what is now
A1A down to, into Riviera, all those different bridges along there.
B: Alternate A1A.
J: Some of them, they were made for just two lane traffic. Fact of the matter was,
these cars and trucks are so big now that one would have to wait while the other
one came across the bridge. You couldn't fit them so they tore those bridges out
some of them and some of them they straightened and just left the bridge sitting
out in the bushes there, but those bridges, they're....
K: So he built the new store?
J: Yeah.
B: He was also the first ..... in the city of West Palm Beach and
he's also the father of Ethel Pierce, who's the second wife of Charles Pierce.
K: remember the Bowers' store down there by....
B: Have the both of them. When I came in 1914, it was down by the old railroad tracks.
J: Well Bowers wasn't the one, wasn't the one that started the stores. Some fellow....
B: Was it Widin? Cabot?
J: No, Brookers. I think they bought, Brookers,Brookers had already bought from either
Miller or Glidden or both of them. You get back far enough where just after the
got
landeopened for homestead, why they were things going on then, but like these
Brookers, they sold out and went to Homestead or someplace and had a lumber business
down there and they were well to do. They, before they bought the store there, why
they alligator hunters, one of them and they'd go out there in the, ,/ '
Shu th
and hunt those alligators.
PBC 7 b(1)
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B:
I had a first grade teacher over here, used to board with us years ago, and that
was the, she got the biggest charge. The little kids would come to school. "What
did your father do?" She'd have to make a record, you know, of each one. "He
hunts." That's all they could get out of them.C lau f
Uh huh. Be a hunter.
Yeah.
.... moonshine,
I've done a little bit of everything; that's true. So the, the stores really were
the beginning of the community, then, for people to come in and trade and buy.
B: And the store keepers....
J: Yeah. Al Widin was the first one that had a...
B: Meat farm.
J: ...he butchered. He had a what do you call it when you butcher cattle?
A: ?
J: Amaritheum, or something like that.
B: That's a flower thing, Papa.
(Laughter)
J: But they butcher those cows that were raised on wire grass. You had to melt
them with a pair of pinchers.
K: Oh.
(Laughter)
J: But he put in his boat or palmetto fronds, new ones, lay them, he'd
and them lay the over them to keep the hot sun off of
them.
B: And the flies.
J: He'd go up and down the river selling his beef and that
I think he .ee4s to build a bigger
B: Well, when we first came to Jupiter, that's the only meat we, fresh meat we had.
PBC 7 b(1)
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B: Somebody would come along in the wagon, you know, and they'd have palmetto leaves
left on the back of the wagon and the meat played out on the palmetto leaves and
you picked out a piece of beef and you didn't have any refrigeration. The only
ice we had was you'd get a little piece of one that came up to the fish house.
Why, you could go down and buy a small piece of ice and use it for ice tea or
something, but you didn't have any refrigeration, so the only thing to do with
that beef was to put it on and start it boiling right away and it was so tough
that it had to boiled for a long time, anyway.
K: There was a commercial fish house here then?
B: Oh, yes. There was a commercial fish house. Shorty Root, he was another
characterand he, he had, very clean, He had his nets all piled up there and
the ice would come up on the train and he would have a big fish box there and he
would keep the ice.
J: They shipped the ice in peat bag with sawdust around it and it would weigh 300 lbs.
when it started out. Time it got to it only weighed 50 Ibs. So the
fellows who were more well to do and came down in the winter months like Sperry
and Hoover, why they had to have a little ice for their, run the household with
and so they had a special boat that came down to buy them up supplies and gather
up the ice and so forth, and they had another boat that was to go fishing in and
Sperry had a speedboat that he could run down to the Ponciana Hotel with his
green stamp and one of them had. We all had big money in those days.
B: Did you ever read a book by Kaufmann on treasure hunting and so on?
K: Uh huh.
B: Did you read that?
K: Yeah.
B: Well, he wrote one story in there about the BayouTresure and we recognized our old
friend Shorty Root who had the fish house down there and the one who really was the
hero of the tale because he -- I don't recall the hero of the tale -- he for years,
he had a big iron pot and he supposed to have it hung over the back end of his
PBC 7 b(1)
page -t C/ 2-
mjb
B: houseboat and every time he got a little extra money, he put it down in the iron
pot. Well, during the hurricane, the iron pot broke loose, They couldn't find
it and poor Shorty, he lived kind of slowly after that. But that story is un-
doubtedly the story of, that Bayou Treasure is undoubtedly the story of Shorty
Root.
J:
B: Yeah, you've got some name. But I met Mr. Kaufmann down in Halsey's one day and
I said, "Now look here, if that was Shorty Root's treasure you found, I think you
ought to put a little stone on his grave up there." He just grinned and didn't
say a word,
K: ...They had a ferry .... Bring ____-_ across?
J: Yeah.
K: That was till the bridge went in in the twenties? Till the bridge went in in
about '25 or '26?
J: No, the bridge didn't go. They had a one-way bridge, that is a narrow bridge....
B: A bridge built in 1911 was a one-way bridge.
J: A one-way bridge.
B: Yeah.
J: Yeah.
B: But before that they had a ferry and Mr. Sam Nichols told me that,
K: Oh, oh,the one up by the railroad.
B: Yeah.
K: Oh, yeah, ok. That's nice
B: And Sam Nicols told me he came down one time and he honked for the ferry and the
ferry, there was a big hurricane on the way and he wanted to get to his family
in West Palm Beach before the hurricane struck. And so he said he got down there
and he honked but the ferry was all snugged down for the storm and didn't come,
so he finally drove that car across the railroad.
PBC 7 b(l)
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A: Oh boy.
B: Said he just barely got across when the train started coming.
K: Oh.
B: Its a wild tale.
really
K: Yeah. Well, it sounds like the whole area then/didn't start developing at all
around here until the twenties.
B: Well, it really started developing, the first real development took place in
1956.
(Laughter)
B: It stayed a small town until that Charles Barton bought that property from the
Bessemers across from us, the north side of the inlet and he started that beach
colony. Then he also developed Tequesta. But then things really boomed when
Pratt Wickham moved in, all about the same time. Until then we were a small town
and stayed that way and like it.
J: We had of the county, they'll deny it now, but they designated Jupiter Beach over
here as colored beach. Put up signs.
A: I remember it.
J: But they didn't stay there overnight hardly. I found them years later out in the
woods west of Jupiter where they dumped them all. And so I think the Bessemers
decided it;iwas going to be colored up here and they sold to Martin.
B: Three hundred thousand dollars for a beach colony.
K: Why, had the Bessemers been around here a good while or were they more than
owners?
J: Oh,yeah. They owned it, the land, that is Mrs., that is she was sister to....
B: .She was Phipps, wasn't she?
J: Phipps, yeah.
B: That's over there.
J: Sister to them and she....
PBC 7 b(()
page-" c/(
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K: Owned thrs Bessemer trust?
A: Yeah.
K: Owned it, ok..
J: Or, but he tried to scare me away from here. Oh they'd been a Negro settlement
down here and everything.
B: We perservered, we....
J: We till I saw it. So I wouldn't let them scare me, so they finally
got tired of holding the land there and sold it to somebody else and he filled
in a lot of it, planted trees around it, one thing or another and so he made
some money, I think, but not near as much as, I guess he didn't think there
would ever be a golf course there.
(Laughter.)
K: I guess not. How about the political life of this community?
(Laughter)
B: Oh, it's Oh dear me, the county commission race is really
something. Oh, we, old folks come to the fights and all kinds of things in
the county commissioner's race.
K: From the north end of the county, then?
B: Yeah, we have great excitement.
K: How about the...
B: Very bitter.
K: ...how about the town itself? Did you have a town council or a town ?
B: Yeah, they did. They did. But we were on the outskirts of all this, you see.
J: I, uh, we never were in the incorporated town of Jupiter, if you want to call it
that. We were over here and there wasn't any bridge or anything and they came in
a boat over here to just like my father. See, in those days you had to have
twenty-five male signers to get anything like that started in Tallahassee and so
the came over here to my father to get him to sign, to start the
And 'said to them, "Well, whatcha going to do for me way over here?" That kind of
PBC 7 b(l)--
page-4LAY
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J: stopped them for a while and they said, "Police protection." "Well," he says,
"What do you think I've been doing here for the last twenty years?" So we got
left out again. We'll never get back. They tried to to takeAin several times
but I always voted against it.
K: So your decidedly unincorporated.
B: Area unincorporated.
J: The town of Jupiter, the followers, they had had some choice guys on there.
This life-saving station round here was government property and they, during
the boom they planted it and were going to sell it, but then the boom busted
and so there they were and so they, the town of Jupiter applied for some of
it and they, they got a strip of it and they, they since leased it tothe
county where all the buildings are and all that along there and then they have
other pieces in there, too. But, they leased it or sold it or did something
to that land where the buildings are now and they built the cottages along there
and you could get a lease or a deed or something or other and build yourself
whatever you wanted to along there and so _Cross, she got on to them
about that and they had to give up the idea and go back to the town. They
were just taking it in there. They built that TWA or whatever it was built that
log cabin there and they started a restaurant.there and put on of the council-
men's son-in-law in charge of it and they did a lot of things.
K: Now, oh, here's a map. That's going to help me, now.
B: I don't know whether it will or not.
K: Oh.
B: Half of the first Jupiter reservation, 1865.
K: Oh ho. Then it won't help me,then.
B: Our town council, I mean, I doT'-gkeknow what, administrator, county administrator
I think wanted that map of the Loxahatchee River.
K: Uh huh. So the old fort was right up there at the fork and South Palm andcL /5.L r
River....
PBC 7 b(1)
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B: See, there was two locations.
K: Sort of like Fort Lauderdale -- two different forts. Uh huh.
A: It's like where the inlet -- oh, here's the inlet down here,
okay. Coming up.
K: Uh huh.
A: Right.
K: Coming up from down here.
A: Let's not
K: Would you repeat that about getting Jupiter back on the
B: Well this is the first one that had Jupiter back on the depot instead of
Neptune.
K: Uh huh. That was what, 19--,...
B: A young man who had a photograph album, not a young man, and he gave me the
picture to have reproduced.
A: I see the caption is 1914. Is that when the name....
B: That's when I came to Jupiter and that's where the station was, then. It didn't
have anything to do with the Neptune. That is the railroad dock, I guess.
K: Huh. And that's Bowers' store next to it.
A: Yeah.
B: Yeah.
K: Uh huh.
B: Bowers' store, Ziegler's store and the post office were all in that little, it
was our shopping center, what's called.
(Laughter)
B: Here's my old friend Kelly Ogilsvy. Honestly, Kelly! That long serious face
there.
K: Now he was the....
B: I can remember when the first telephone was put in Jupiter. He had the first
telephone down in the store there and Mr. Laird is in the picture, I think,
PBC 7 b(1)
page -46 7
mjb
B: one of the telephone officials.
K: Hmm.
A: This is Stan Dobbs, isn't it? Yeah, left to right, yeah, Stan Dobbs. I
recognized him.
K: Uh huh.
B: Well, I wouldn't have known him.
A: Yeah, from the telephone company.
K: Kelly Ogilsvy, now you said was the brother-in-law of....
B: Brother-in-law of....
J: Frank Bowers.
B: Yeah.
K: Uh huh.
B: Set our school house there.
A: That's a picture of Wilson.
B: No, no that's my brother Jack.
A: Uh huh.
B: And this is theOregon. It's one picture and this is the Oregon in action.
You see, the Oregon stopped off Jup,iter It caused quite
a furor because they thought we were about to be attacked by the Spaniards, so
when the they got all the life-saving men in the lighthouse, all
armed to repel the invaders and when the boats began to come in through the
inlet, why they discovered, of course, it was the U.S. Navy.
K: How deep is the inlet? What sort of craft would that take? A ?
B: Well, that was the funniest thing. There's this woman who wrote about
McKinley, the book about McKinley and she has the Oregon sailing right in through
the inlet which is, of course/ridiculous.
K: Yeah, I was going to say.
J: Well....
PBC 7 b(1
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B: I was telling you about Shorty Root. This is the famous houseboat.
J: The Jupiter inlet is the natural gap in the barrier reef. There's been an inlet for
the surplus war from below Delray up to Stuart to run out in the early days. It was
just one big lake back there in the rainy season or after a big hurricane and you
don't find any other inlets till you get down to Boca Raton, there's a natural
inlet, but Jupiter across the bar rocks, they can find ten or twelve feet of water,
sometimes after a big rain, why it was washed out, so they could bring in quite a
large vessel.
B:
J: There was some old fellow that was reputed to have found a trunk on the beach and
in it was quite a lot of gold and so he went up to Jacksonville and spent most of
his money, but he bought this schooner or some kind of vessel and he came back in
the Jupiter inlet....
J: ...got together palmetto piling to take down to Key West. Piling was scarce down
there and there was lots of them right along the river and they came up and tied
up their vessel there inside of the inlet and went up the Loxahatchee and they had
such a good time hunting and fishing that they forgot all about the inlet
The tides ran shallower.and so it just so happened, there wasn't any rain that year
and the inlet closed up. Left his vessel sitting inside there and coudln't get it
out. There wasn't, the intercoastal waterway wasn't dug out for a sailing boat of
that size and so it just sat there and the sails rotted off of it and one thing or
another and the old fellow had to walk to-4Ke-, back to Jacksonville. All he had
to eat was turtle eggs and found him some bottles of rum along there. Hot rum and
turtle eggs. Finally he got to where he could get something better to eat. He
was pretty sick of eating that. Imagine.
(Laughter)
A: I can make you '-this is an invoice from Brothers?
J: Uh huh.
PBC 7 b(1)
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A: Now this was in 1928. Flour 80; cheese 50; ham 30U; bread 60;
onions 20; roast $1.25; beets 50U; pears 40; for $4.35. Another
one I've got here: steak 80t.
J: Well, how much steak was that?
A: The didn't put any rates John, just give them out.
B: Well, they had to sit there and write all that out by hand when you went in and
bought something, which must have been an awful bother when I see how they check
them out today.
A: Sugar 40; macaroni 20; sausage 55.,
J: They give you, they had a little notebook that was carbon paper and they'd write
down there and give you the colored slip. If you would keep that -- there was
quite a few of them -- add it up, see if this they came out with it.
A: Eggs $1.95. Must have been a heck of a lot of eggs.
J: Yeah, well....
B: Eggs and milk were awful high when we were in
J: My father had a cow and he used to take down to the neighbors a quart of milk for
eight cents.
B: I loved uncle Pier, when uncle Pier, John's uncle was an old Klondike prospector
and he'd come to visit once in a while and his stories were always priceless
and he, he told the story about when Grover Cleveland, he came down, of course,
and camped on the rock ledge on his honeymoon and he used to make
a trip to Florida almost every year. He loved to come to Florida. He loved
fishing and so John's father went over to Jupiter and they had this cow and they
called it Mrs. Cow and the cat was Mrs. Cat, but anyway, John's father came run-
ning up the hill for all he was worth and he yelled to Uncle Pier, "Go down and
milk Mrs. Cow! Grover Cleveland is over on the railroad siding and he wants an
oyster stew." So they hurried up and milked the cow, brought the milk over so
Grover Cleveland could have his oyster stew. And that was....
PBC 7 b(1) c(l)
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mjb
J:
B:
K:
B:
was the tobacco tycoon, I
think he was, his
father or he, was the
millionaire in the United States and he had this huge houseboat and he would anchor
it over here by the inlet and then he had a whole flotilla of boats around it. He
would have a boat for his horses and his, and they would have carriages and they
would have speedboats and fishing boats and all of this going on over there by the
inlet and he described Mr. to me. Anyway they, was quite
interested in this and so I came,when I was over here to Smyrna, I came across a
picture of houseboats, so I did the story for the Gateway and used
the picture. I got it from Uncle Pier. He was a big
K: Well, what I would like to do at this point is stop this tape. Wait a minute --
let me stop it -- and say I'd like to go back and listen, absorb it, take it down,
and then if we could, maybe do one or two more tapes on specific points at a later
time rather than trying to get everything on one tape. We will, of course, have
it recorded and send you copies of it, as usual, and send copies to Dr, Proctor
in Gainesville. So thank you very much for the tape.
(End bl, begin cl side b2 is blank)
That was, I was a baby.
Yeah, that was when John was a baby.
This was a newspaper clipping?
No, this is actually just happened. It was one of Uncle Pier's stories when
he came down. He was there staying his, John's father when this occurred and
then he told me the story, of course, of house
I did that for the Gateway magazine. of course, who
was it
first
PBC 7 c(l)
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K: Today is August 15, 1980. This is Dr, Harry Kersey at Florida Atlantic University,
I am conducting the second interview with Mr. and Mrs. John Dubois,.Jupiter,
concerning the history of their family in this area. Let me start our interview
today by asking you some specific questions about Jupiter history, the area history
in this area and your family's involvement in it. One question that I've always
had because of my own interest in Indians is the impact of Indian trade in different
and
communities in South Florida and I just wanted your opinionAyour thoughts of
anything that you recall about the role that Indians might have played in the
growth, the economic enterprises here, the trading of the stores like Bowers' or
others. How do you feel about that, either one of you?
B: Well, we lived right across from -Kitching's store and of course that
was very handy for the Indians to come in and to come right into the store in their
wagons and I can remember them coming in -ir 1914 when we first came in a covered
wagon with oxen and they had live hogs in the wagon. _terrible scream.
These hogs was making, they were being dragged out of the wagon and the corral up
there that they could put livestock in to be shipped by train and they would trade
with Pa Kitching and he would keep, the store keepers in those days would keep things
like calico and staples and things that the Indians needed and they would trade furs
and things of that sort with the storekeepers.
K: The use of wagons seemed to be, from what I understand, unique to the Indians up in
this area. -Why -hey didn't use wagons, obviously, as much down furthe/1where the
water was higher and they had to do a lot of poling and they came in, brought their
hides and their furs into places 4w Scranahan's in Ft. Lauderdale and so forth, but
I've read several accounts and now you're verifying another one about how they used
wagons a great deal. I guess it was the general nature of the terrain up here that
they could get away with that.
B: Well, Joe Bowers used to bring his oranges in in a great big covered wagon with
double teams of oxen and they would bring them into the store to ship from the
PBC 7 c(1)
page -5+t-
mj b
B: railroad here, but they came in on Indian town road.
K: Right. Well they were, from your recollection, were they in frequently or did they
come in, as in other places, maybe once a month or twice a month or was there a
pretty steady traffic?
B: I think there wasn't any real rhyme or reason to when they came in if I remember.
I don't remember that well, but I know when you talk about the Indians, they had
favorite people that they liked to visit and Captain Armour who kept the lighthouse
for forty years/was one of those people and in 197-, in 1872 when the Victor
wrecked, why they happened on the scene with seven canoe-loads of Indians, They
were stopping by to visit Captain Armour and when they found out about this shipwreck,
why they camped on the beach and salvaged a lot of this stuff that came in and I was
writing for Tequesta about that and I wanted to verify what the Indians did and so
I said something to Mr. and he asked Billy Bowlegs and Billy Bowlegs, I
guess, was, he was from Jupiter at that time, but he remembered them coming in with
all the salvage they got from the ship.
K: He would have certainly been around at that time, living as long as he did,
B: Well, now he would have been about twelve years old.
K: About that, about that. The, the Indians who came in here were, of course, were
Indians, the northern branch of the Seminoles. The Creek speakers
lived out toward Taylor Creek and
B: Michigan Creek?
K: What?
B: Michigan Creek?
K: As far around as that and, but again the group up here were always separated from
the s COS" -peakers further south. They had different patterns and joined
different people. In terms of the Bowers' store and the Kitching's store, these
families seemed to have a lot of interaction with the Indians, a great deal. Of course
Bowers through his brother's...
PBC 7 c(1)
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K: ...connection down :at Indian town, A lot of them assumed the Bowers name later on.
Did you ever get any feel for how the townspeople felt about Indians? In some
communities, storekeepers liked the Indians, not only for their business but as people,
but I've had an impression, you know, ...
B: Oh, yes.
K: ...in his book and in talking to him, he had the impression that the Indians weren't
always welcome in the community, that the townspeople, if they didn't openly dislike
the Indian, they felt that they were a little dirty or weren't....
B: They never felt that way about them here in Jupiter. Course we lived, now John lived
on the over side of the river and I don't know whether he, how many Indians he saw
there. On our side, you see, we were right there near'Kitching store and you could
see them as they come in, but in Mr. Greed's book that he wrote on the history of
Jupiter Island, he tells about how his mother, when the Indians would come in, they'd
invitedthem to eat, but they'd make them go take a washing for it,
K: Uh huh. Well, this was not uncommon in certain places. John, do you have any memories
at all?
J: I naturally remember the Indians before 1914 and old Pa Kitching had them before 19--.
Pa Pitching and were in trade with them. They traded with Bowers'
store and a trader would come in there and buy one item at a time and pay for it
there. They brought in a lot of clean hides, kind of a store
room attached to the store there where he kept his surplus store, and whatever
great piles of alligator hides, coon hides,and things. Of course part of that was
white people were catching the alligators more than the Indians were in them days,
It was a animal and they really slaughtered the alligators. The Indians,
I can remember a time when this Indian girl or woman came back from, I suppose it was
Oklahoma, and tried to persuade the Indians here to come on over with them, over
where they were, that things were better, I can remember her standing there trying to
talk to this old Indian Chief, a a-headed old fellow with a long shirt tail on.
That is he didn't have any trousers and so, but apparently she didn't make any
PBC 7 c(1)
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J
K
J
: progress because of and she was wrong _
: Lot of missionaries, a lot of Indian missionaries from Okalhoma came down.
: Well, I don'tAwhether there was a lot of them, but I remember this one woman
standing there in here high-heel shoes, lots of missionaries in the tribe to, wanted
to save this old man, but he was better for it than she was. And
he was pretty drunk.
K: 'Oh, he was pretty drunk at the time, too.
J: Yeah, that was always trouble with him. The man would get drunk when they let him
there. They weren't supposed to be selling any liquor, but somehow
or another they found it. I remember this one incident in the Bowers'
store there, this Indian brought in his can that is what do you call grease?
Lard?
B: Lard?
J: Yeah, lard and so he was buying this can of lard and so Mr. Bowers took the ladle,
dipped in his mashed it down on# there and poured till it cleared up
and set it on the scale and set it down on the counter and the old Indian said,
"Uh," and he took his hand and he pressed it down and Mr. Bowers _
then he just calmly filled it all up again and waited again and
(Laughter) Tel' l -;-' .I i-ic Z/Ji/tx 7i^^^-
J: Thought maybe that the but he wanted his can full, damn full. They would
buy bread and
K: Did they move to Kitching's for any particular reason? Did Bowers' close down? Is
that why they went to Kitching's?
J: No. Well, Kitching's was a lot nearer their camp. They had a place out just about
on Center Street, the very opposite -- what is that street,goes down through
B: Mary Avenue.or something?
J: Mary Avenue, yeah. Well, lta-t was real high ground where they could camp, If it
rained, why they water wouldn't settle in the tents and
PBC 7 c(1)
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J: a little competition never did any harm, Indians and I think Bowers
always treated them fair.
K: Uh huh.
J: I don't think they made a lot of difference to the town. They, some of the Indians
in the early days would bring in -rmeat to sell and maybe a nice tan skin or
something.
B: And huckleberries.
J: Yeah, they, I think they even came around over to our house way in the '30's with
huckleberries to sell.
K: Uh huh.
There seemed to be a pattern up here that,wasn't, again, found as much further south
-- the bringing in the berries and this sort of thing. The Indians seemed to come in,
do their trading and leave, and didn't have much interaction around the stores in
Miami and Fort Lauderdale.
J: No, they didn't trust they white man too much, that is, they didn't live like the
white man. They were still living in their chikees, travelling in their covered
wagons, and-thS when they travelled, they took everything with them: their
pigs and the chickens, ducks and picaninnies.
(Laughter)
K: That term, that was something I found during my book, the use of the term
"picaninny" as opposed to "1 or whatever else, cause that was
just a very common, Florida use of the term.
B: Mr. Hisbett did some of the, did the pictures for that later book
and evidently he brought his son Ernie out there when he was that small, and Ernie
went out and visited them some years later and Billy Bowlegs said, "Me knew you when
you were just picaninny."
K: Yeah. Mrs. Taylor, up in Stuart, remembers when she was a child, an Indian asked
her father, "Is this your picaninny?" You, know the term was used interchangeably
by both. It wasn't derogation by the whites and the Indians. The Indians used it, toc
by both. It wasn't derogation by the whites and the Indians. The Indians used it, toc
PBC 7 c(l)
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mjb
K: It was just a common use, so I find that very interesting myself.
J: I can remember a time when they were in their dugouts, they came down there in front
of our house in the old shell mound there and they were spearing fish. They'd have
a spear on the end of their long poling pole and they'd pole it out in front of them
and give a stab like that and come up with a fish on the end of it. They would
get, spear fish on it.
K: I don't think I've ever heard of that before -- spearing with a pole.
J: Well, yeah, they'd have a long pole and they would...
K: Yeah, uh huh.
J: ...and they would wade and go like this and Jonathan Dickens would bring
those striking sticks, they call them. I suppose in those days, they didn't have
a spear. They just had a stick with a sharp point on it or something like that.
K: Further south they developed some very special arrows and they gave up shooting
the arrows. They just used them for spearing the fish.
J: Well, these arrows -- what were they made out of reeds or...
K: Yeah, very light...
J: ...they weren't very light wood were they?
K: No.
J: They were kind of a cane.
K: Kind of a cane.
J: They could harden those in the fire to where they'd shoot anything
K: So they used those and then a lot of them, they didn't even use a bow. They would
just use later on by hand in the real shallow water.
J: Yeah.
K: pole. Well, that's interesting. This sort of confirms the way I
thought it was. The Indians were colorful but not crucial.
J: The fish would come in the Jupiter inlet there at certain seasons of the year, great
schools of them and the Indians probably knew what time of the moon and everything
come and be ready. On the west coast of Florida, they have what they call [stomp
PBC 7 c(l)
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J: fishing there and the old cracker natives used to come down to the coast in the
fall of the year when the mullets were spawning and they put a, what they called
a stomp net. The mullet would .wu in and then they put the net
across it and then when the tide went out, they were left in a lot less water and
they could get in there and drag them out with, _e'_e or cast nets nets.
to Y /
The mullet were put in a smaller areaAwhere they were easier to capture and
they would save the red roe, they called it. That was a great favorite with the
SThey'd salt that down and that kept things
(Laughter)
K: This camp that you mentioned out on -- what Center Street or near Kitching's --
was that a temporary camp or...
B: Oh, yes.
J: Yes.
K: Just when they came into the area.
B: Yes.
J: When they left, they didn't leave anything behind.
K: Yes. See, that was much like when they came into Fort Lauderdale, there was
some open ground near Spanahan's store and they would just camp there temporarily,
I think.
J:
K: Okay.
J: I think before, at high, at different high water times, that they could pole their
canoes right all the way from Indian town to Jupiter through the backwaters of the
Loxahatchee because there's a tale that old Billy Bowlegs tells about he had a
brand new canoe when he came to Jupiter to meet some friends, sell a few hides and
he met some old folks from down further south, e+ose-to Miami, and so apparently
he didn't need to take his new canoe with him and so he hid it out in the saw grass
someplace and when he came back, six or eight months later, to pick up his canoe
or dugout, why, the worms had riddled the bottom so...
PBC 7 c(1)
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B:
J: Yeah, so he was falling right out of his dugout, cypress.
They're very fond of fresh wood and cypress and their just like
to water worms.
(Laughter)
J: So I don't know whether he had to walk home or how he got home, but,.,,
K: He was an interesting character, a man who -- I think Mr, and others
catapulted into prominence -- but never became a real leader within the tribal
structure. I think he was more important to people outside of the tribe as a
teller of tales and as a figure that he any gained any recognition,
J: Well, he had an amount of education, that he could order things out of the
catalogues for his, different people and for himself.
B:
J: He was a great one to have fancy clothes.
(Laughter)
B: The time that he came over with Mr. Divan, he said, he said something to
Mr. Divan and Mr. Divan said, "Billy Bowlegs wants me to tell you that his
grandmother was here at Jupiter" I guess they had some kind of a.d
or something and while they were, the excitement that everybody was watching, ni
she's slipped away.
K: At the fort.
B: Yes.
K: His grandmother.
B: Yeah, his grandmother.
K: I understand they still have over in Sebring, the shotg
ance
ow
un,
Billy Bowlegs' shotgun, by his house.
Mr. -- Okeechobee -- Maserve, Alex Maserve told me that he used to hunt with him
and did out there and Okeechobee, of course,
were friends of bis.
PBC 7 c(1)
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B: That was very, there was a young Boy Scout -- well, he was one of the oldest
scouts -- Scott Hight and Scott and some of the other scouts decided that they
wanted to learn some of the Indian dances and songs and so they went out to
Billy Bowlegs' camp and _, wherever it was, and they said they came into
the camp and he wasn't there. So they all kind of sat around and waited for him and
they suddenly he appeared. They heard no sound; he just appeared in the middle of
them and when they told him what they wanted, why he taught them the songs and he
taught them the dances and they got constumes to, Indian costumes, and they used to
give a regular show for the scouts at intervals and they say it was very wonderful.
We were invited to hear it, but I never did get up there.
K: Right. We have, he lived alone out there, He was pretty much of a loner, He was
not -- and that was because, I think of his family background -- he was one of the
few who had a Mikasuki origin living among the Cow Creeks and that was, as I
recall, that was sort of different, too. Okay, well, if you recall other things,
we can always come back to these subjects.
B: I know they had great respect for him, the other Indians, because when they wrote this
ceremony up at Park and the poor old fellow had
difficulty rising, one of the other Indians -- they wanted to help him, you could see
they were just concerned -- but nobody dared to put a hand out to help him and when
someone took a picture of them complete with Billy Bowlegs, they begged to have one
of his pictures very much.
K: Uh huh. His, oh, I think he was venerated as a person. I was thinking more about the
political structure of the tribe, so that kind of leadership that he never got to the
inner circle there. Okay, if the Indians played that role in the development, let me
back up historically a little bit and I guess this would be a good education for all
of us on the real role of the Celestial Railroad in the development of this area that
some people have said, you know, that'swh/y the area developed. How do you feel
about that?
PBC 7 c(1)
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B: Well, of course before that Celestial Railroad came into, in commission, why they,
the Indian River steamers would come down the Indian River and dock across from the
light house and then they had a hack line that took passengers down to the head of
Lake Worth and they say it was a real rocky road because they didn't rub all the
palmettos out and they bumped along, pretty rough going. But when they, when they
laid this, the route for the Celestial Railroad, that made this the transportation
center of southeast Florida when Mr. Flagler's railroad came in and that was really
the reason that the county was changed, the county seat was changed from Miami to
Jupiter. Now that was voted in 1889. The railroad was, the track was laid but
it wasn't quite completed then, but it started running in 1890 and of course, it
was seven and a half miles from Jupiter to Juno. First they had another steamer
to Lake Worth that met them at the end of the Celestial Railroad. Celestial
Railway, by the way, didn't have any turntables so it went straight down to Lake
Worth and back up to Jupiter.
K: Yeah. I guess the people who would talk about this were referring to the fact that
with a hack line you were limited to carrying passengers, light freight, but once
you got a railroad in, that just really opened up the rest of the area which
Jupiter Without a turntable, what about repair shops and
things of that nature?
B: They had repair shops here, I'm pretty sure because they, for instance, when-trrt ,
when they had .to repair the engines.
K: Well, I guess what I'm trying to get around to also here, one time there was a big
plan, I recall, to make Okeechobee the repair center and put all the shops for the
Florida East Cast. I don't know if you ever heard that story.
B: No, I haven't heard it.
K: But one time they were going to make Okeechobee as a planned town and that's why they
have those big, broad avenues over there and it was going to become thecompany town
for the Florida East Coast Railroad and then the man who was going to do that died.
I've forgotten the vice-president. Maybe it was Ingraham, the fellow who _
PBC 7 c(1)
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K: land comapny, and so they left all the shops upallh Saint Augustine, but any time you
have railroad shops and company headquarters, obviously there's economic impact. I
guess what I'm getting at here, was there anything like with the Celestial Railroad?
Did they bring in shops and a number of railroad people here or was it so small
that....
B: I don't, I don't believe so.
J: I think they had sidings where they could run, you see, they eventually had more than
just one locomotive. I think they eventually ended up with three locomotives and there
were sidings and places where they could store those or repair them and that was right
near the~,:V docks there were the steamships ran. They were later, they were right
there were McGill had his pineapple patches and things and whenever they
put in the railroad, why they reverted back to the original owners and so....no,
I'd rather sit here, my legs don't get all hyped up so.
B: Okay.
(Laughter)
A: Let
I mean
K: So, what are the families tie here? ?
B: Well, there were families that came here to be with the railroad. I know there was
Captain Maddox, He was the, tiSbWS conductor on the Celestial Railroad
and Rice was another. He was the engineer most of the time. I
remember the name of the man who was the fireman and I have it written down but
can't recall it.
J: Long.
B: Long.
K: These were the families that came and stayed and there's still their descendents in
the area?
B: Well, now, I, I, Mrs. Sumner up in Fort Pierce was a granddaughter of Captain Maddox
and when we went up to Saint Augustine, for the State Historical Society Meeting, she
took me out to the cemetery, out in Saint Augustine to his grave and then his, her
PBC 7 c(l)
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mjb
B: father, who was called Kid Maddox, received some type of reward for saving a fireman
when they had some kind of an accident down here near Urban River bridge, somewhere
down in that neighborhood and he worked She had more clip-
pings and things about her father, really, than she did about her grandfather.
W1 : uh -)
was more interested in her grandfather, of course, and their dealings on the
Celestial Railroad. Now the car that shows in the picture is half baggage and half
passenger car.
K: Uh huh.
B: That's what they had in those days.
K: And then, of course, with the coming of Florida East Coast, they pretty much....
B: They sold all of the rolling stock in 1898 of the Celestial Railroad. Now people
prize a spike or a tie. I have a lock, some one gave me, piece of the
railroad iron. spike. spike, you may have one.
K: Super. It would be worth having, wouldn't it?
A: Uh huh.
K: Take you up on that. That's interesting. Just trying to plug in. Now, of course,
John, did your family have anything to do with the railroad per se?
J: No. My father didn't work for government or the, well, he did work, I supposed''
the government with the life saving station. He was a member of the crew for the
duration of the thing, I guess. During the summers-months when the ocean was,
the hurricane season was over, why they shut the station up for a couple or three
months and he bought some twenty acres of land about a half a mile away over on the
intercoastal waterway and he cleared it up and planted pineapples there and he would
work there on his days off and so forth and he'd build, had a packing house built
there and it was building 14 x 28 and when the pineapple business went out of style
i', he tore that down and brought it back up here to Jupiter where the ld shell
mound is and he tore it down piece by piece and it had a little scow and he bring it
back up to the He built the old house of them. I don't think he
hardly lost a piece of wood.
PBC 7 c(1)
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(Laughter)
J: And that building is still here. I imagine its the oldest building still standing
that was built here in Jupiter. It was built in, well, I don't know just when,
the 1890's, somewhere back there and tore it down and 1905 or '06 or somewhere along
in there, brought it home. It sat out there vacant for a number of years. As a
small boy, why, sometimes I went with my father out there and the pineapples, even
after he'd quit taking care of them really good, why they still had pineapples on
them and so he would pack what he could, put them on the express
train and ship them away and I can remember he had a cider press
and he would take these pineapples and ring the crown out of them and put them in
this little box and it had a kind of like a spade and he'd chop them up and put
them in the press and then he had a, a plank that he stuck under the window sill or
something, anyhow, he'd press down on there and the pineapple juice would come out
into a pitcher. We had fresh pineapple juice to drink. No sugar and no ice, but
still it was pineapple juice, pure and simple.
K: He was shipping away, though, on the FEC at that time?
J: Yeah, uh huh.
K: Yeah, cause they'd sold out by that time,
J: He'd go out there. The pineapples patch there, apparently the frost would settle
somehow or other in this land, and so first he covered them with straw to keep the
frost out. You see, the frost would generally come just when the pineapple was
starting to bloom and it would kill the crown or the blossom end of it and then
the pineapple would come up and be bald headed, not so good for fruit, but good
enough for pineapple juice and so then helglass and put a shed over them and
The price of pineapples went down so bad that he just, he
couldn't afford to fertilize them. He had to stay home. He'd.already bought the
shell mound place here and he had to stay around and work. He, during the winter
season when the Ponciana was open, why he could catch pompano and the price was
pretty good. They'd give you 25 pound which was quite a price for pompano in
PBC 7 c(1).--
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J: those days, but as soon as the hotel shut, well the price went down by eight or
ten cents, _, so it wasn't worth hauling all the way to
West Palm Beach for __ into the railroad downithere. The express
train didn't always run the right time of day to put them on and we didn't have any
ice, so we had to hurry with them down to Atlantic Fish Company in West Palm Beach.
We fished for other kind of fish, but pompano was our main thing we fished at night
with gill nets. At first we had( O row boat, row skim. It had two
sets of oars in it and it had a, we put a net out from shore to the southeast and
then the GulfS+farM tide would float it along. These nets aO'cA have very heavy
leads on them and they'd drift north and the outer end would drift faster than the
shore end, so the next thing you know, the net was running parallel with the beach
and so then they'd take it up and pick up the fish and crabs and the sea weed and
row on farther south, maybe, a quarter of mile and set it out again and I know the
old man, if we were catching four or five fish in a set, he figured that was making
wages and so we stayed Sometimes, though, we'd catch, in one
set, we'd catchy fifty or sixty pompano and we'd end up with fifty or sixty dollars
worth of pompano to take to West Palm Beach. It was hard work. Later on, why, my
father bought a little gasoline motor and put it in the skiff and we could go and
come like that. It wasn't so much hard work rowing and then if a norther' was
coming up, why sometimes it'd come up so quick that you could only row back a mile
from the south to get the inlet to come home and in the dark, black
night, you couldn't always tell where the damn inlet was anyway!
(Laughter)
A time or two, I didn't know whether I was going to get home or not.
K: This was, how old would have been when you were doing this, mostly?
J: Oh, anywhere from fourteen on up to eighteen or nineteen.
K: Before we take a break, let me last, ask one last question. Maybe this, this one
about the activity around here doing the twenties and maybe I'll have to lead
into it?
PBC 7 c(1/
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B: You're talking about the bootlegging area?
K: The bootlegging was, rum running I know was pretty rampant along the coast here.
B: Oh, it was, it was. Our inlet was, you'd hear them roaring in in the night.
(Laughter)
J: For some reason or other, they, in those early there, the inlet was good enough so that
the government patrol boats would come right on/ft and they'd come in and anchor back
up in the channel there and, of course, there were always scouts and one thing or
another to keep the boats from coming in. They'd go somewhere's else or land on the
beach and on those, especially on moon light nights, why the dogs would all, barking
all the time. Somebody snooping around and all, give them the blink, blink, blink so
they'd know whether to come in or not. I know there was a government agent that was
trying to find out what was going on down here about Rob Baker, the sheriff, and so
on and so on. He wanted me to, if a rum boat ever came in, why, he wanted you to
call him and we'd go and see what happened, if we could catch him. So this night,
why, a boat, I can hear it coming in -- bump, bump, bump, bump,bump -- you know how
exhaust way down near the water floated good and so I ran up to the house where he
was supposed to be. I didn't know whether he would come, whether he was there or not
and sure enough he was there and so I got him in the car and it was kind of moonlight
and I didn't turn the headlights on and we ran over to this bridge and I parked my
car back aways from the bridge and we snuck down there and sure enough, I could hear
the boat coming and so Mr. Fatmer, he was, that was the name of the government agent,
so the moon was shining so bright that I thought the guy could see me there on the
bridge, but evidently the tide was just low enough, he barely could get under it, so
I was afraid to jump on the thing coming under it. We might get squashed under there
or something, so I waited till the bow came out of the other side of the bridge and
I jumped down on it, with my gun in my hand and announced who I was and what they were
to do and they just sat there petrified and then the motor was still running and it
was in gear and it kept right on a going and Mr. Palmer, he was there on the shore,
and the boat, I had to climb over the sacks and one thing or another and get right
PBC 7 1)-C2)
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J: back in there with the guys and turn the damn boat around myself and bring it back
and Palmer thought didn't hear anything, and so he didn't know what the hell had
become of me. He couldn't see nothing. He got down there in the shade of the
trees are in the dark and he come tearing down through the palmettos, &ay4- "
John, ." And so I got the boat back there and so then I didn't
know what to do with it. I wanted to call and the....
B: .--- _-
J: Yeah, they, the was over at the radio station, the only one that wM,
would be open that time of dayand so I said, "Well, you stay here and watch the
boat and I'll go over there and 1 eLl e l-" He goes, "Oh, we'll take these
prisoners with us." And he says, "You got handcuffs, ain't ya?" I said, "Yeah."
I had to put the, handcuff them together in the back seat. We drove over to the
radio station and called customs and they came on out and took charge of it and
so that was the end of that. I don't know.
B: Tell them about the handcuffs, John. Those are the ones you got off the
Not the but the They were intrigued with those hand-
cuffs, they were such ancient ones.
,Scrorl.
J: Well, they were hand-made and they went on with a speel. If it's on a
you'd have to cut them off.
(Laughter)
Spool wound down and so, well, anyhow....
(End side cl, begin c2)
K: Did, well, am I to assume from this that you had been a deputy? Did you have some
sort of official power?
J: Oh, yes. I was the, I was constable for District I. I had as much power in my
district, and I had a -- what you call it from the governor -- as the sheriff
did. I could arrest if the sheriff, if he'd a done something up there in my
district.
PBC 7 cC2)
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mjb
K: How long were you constable?
J: Well, I got elected way back when nobody ever questioned it. I was constable for
twenty years.
A: Oh, my lord.
B: Yes.
J: And then finally, they, the mayor voiced a petition up and got enough signers so that
the governor appointed me.
K: What, what years are these? ?
J: Well, I got the, thing right here. I got my paper from the governor out there with
his name on it.
K: So, you were a law enforcement man?
J: Oh, yes. I used to go with the what they would call
officers. Somebody would call into theprohibitionoffice down in West Palm Beach.
He might been another that was mad at somebody because it was on
his territory or something or other or sell whiskey to the wrong person, anyhow,
they would come up to me and, "John, do you know where such and such a place is out
along Limestone Creek?" or something like that. Want me to take them to it, so quite
a few times I found some stills for them. They never found any, caught anybody,
actually and one time up here, Martin County, why, there was an old
$- I v hq had a filling station and it was right on the new Dixie highway had just
been built through there and it was clean and he had a eating place and sold his stuff
there.
B: John, tell them about the time you broke up the Ashley still.
(Laughter)
B: That's a good story.
J: The what?
K: The Ashley, Ashley still.
J: Oh. Well, the answer through with Florida, that was
I guess part of the whole time. And they were kind of like on a high, sand place and
PBC 7 c(2)1
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J: from their, from their home you could look out off over the prairie most anywhere and
see who was coming and who was going and all that. So it was kind of hard
to ever slip up on anybody there and find them and so this time, why, I went up there
with them. They were going to show me this still that they'd found and so I was curious
to see. I'd seen some of the other stills that had been abandoned, maybe there was a
half-a-dozen, but they'd dug it down a open-surface well and had a pump out on it, a
force pump and then they had these big cypress boxes that were water tight and they put
the masher in that. They didn't use barrels. These were scattered around there. There
wasn't any still there. I think the got in there before the mash was ripe
and made, didn't run it, so it was starting to sour there in the boxes, so these guys
decided, well, we aren't going to catch them here no how, but we'd better destroy what
we got here and so they got, took off their coats and got out their axes and start
chopping things up and there's old slop going out all over the ground there. They piled
it up, made a fire, just kind of in a hollow like between trees on this side and on that
side and palmettos and what you call sand pond. It was a lake. If it rained real hard
it would be a water lake, but dry weather, why it was ideal because what's the
use of cleaning up land when you can find some that's already clean? You tf,4&e, us
Florida crackers ain't going to work to hard.
(Laughter)
So it, fire was a turning there, you know, and going on and I could hear voices off in
the distance and so the head of the outfit had had everything going and the fire
was about under control, why, said, "Let's go over to old Bill's house and get a drink
of water." Alright. So I piled in with the rest of them, going to Bill's. I drove up
in the yard...
B: That was Bill Ashley.
K: Uh huh.
J: ...old says, tells he wants a drink -- "Oh, sure, sure" -- and so he's got
the pump handle and he work it up and down real hard, you know, and get the water good
and fresh and cool and trying the dipper and one thing another and so old
PBC 7 c(2
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J: says, "Oh, who's masher is that over there we just burned up?" And
said, "What mash? I didn't know there was any masher over there." Well, alright.
So, we drank it up and then old Bill talked this way and that and how you feeling
and so on and when he's leaving, why, Bill say, "Well, boys, you up this way again,
stop in and see me." So....
B: I think one story about Peters is very good. He went out to some place out, I guess,
in West Jupiter there where somebody was selling moonshine and they went into this
house and they found a gallon of moonshine there,alright and nobody, the man of the
house wasn't there. The woman was there and so she begged so hard not to be taken off,
to wait till he got home. So he sat there with that gallon of moonshine on his knee
waiting for this man to come home and she was busy cooking around there and all of the
sudden she turned quick and hit that jug a smart lick and smashed it and he was just
drenched in moonshine, but the evidence was gone.
K: Now was a local.or was he a ?
B: He was one of the prohibition agents.
K: He was the one that was up this way most of the time.
B: He was one who was with them the night that George Morris shot Monteur and Patterson
in West Palm Beach and he was with them, but somehow he escaped. He didn't get shot.
The other two men were killed.
K: There was never between the Ashley's and ke Sheriff Baker.
B: Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
(Laughter)
K: I recall that was a pretty, pretty serious sort of....
B: Well, he killed the sheriff. They was brothers. That made blood feuds right there.
K: When you went up to the house, was this before the shoot-out up at Sebastian? Was
that before the gang got ?
J:
K: Now this would have been before what, '24?
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J: Yeah. My uncle was in the fire department down in West Palm Beach e4fmed- that those
fellows, he saw them and then brought them in very shortly after. Anyhow, they, they
looked like that they'd been shot with handcuffs on.
B: Their wrists were all....
K: Uh huh.
B: Well, Mr. Fee made a talk to the Pioneer's Association there one time and his father
was the undertaker up there in, up here somewhere, I guess, and they slept on a
sleeping porch right over the undertaker's establishment and said,the sherrif came
up and he sas, "Fee, get up and come down here. We got the Ashley boys down here."
Old man Fee was taking a chance and he says, "Are they dead?" And he says, "Deader
than mackeral."
K: I didn't know you were going to get that sort of law enforcement story.
A: Yeah.
K: I certainly want to see that. Well, why don't we take a little break and
and we'll come back after lunch. /BREAK/ John, you were saying that
after that case where you jumped on the boat and it was drifting down the river, you
had to go to court in Miami and appear. Is that what you were saying?
J: Well, this bonds that these fellows gave, why, I don't know, but this colored boy that
was one of the men, he was there with a real dressed up Jenny on each arm and a panama
hat and they never finally got around to judge said he was just.l"hey kept putting it
off till they got the judge they wanted to be sitting on the case and they, they
i'11 fined him maybe $50 and gave him a suspended sentence of thirty days or something,
but the funny part of the thing was that this court down there, in those days the
buses hadn't established themselves enough so that to get down there,.if you had to
leave before 12:00 on a Monday or on a, why, you got down there and then if he
excused you, why, then that was another. You got paid for about three days and
mileage and that was in those depression days was pretty good money, sitting around
doing nothing. But after a year or two they got over that and they got back to the
bus, bus thing so there wasn't any money in it anymore.
PBC 7 c(2)
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mj b
(Laughter)
K: No money any more in the court?
J: No. Well, I didn't go except I had said so. I had to go to Jacksonville a time or
two and it was, it was time this man Palmer I was telling you about, he was trying to
get conspiracy charges against different ones and that isn't easy to do.
B: That was David Palmer.
K: David Palmer?
B: He was with the FBI and worked out of New Orleans.
K: Oh, he was with the FBI instead of the prohibition. Yeah, yeah, that's good.
Every time I get last names, I sort of inwardly shudder -- oops! I've got to go find
the first name now. We backtrack in a way, but that's.... Okay, well here again,
if you think of anything else, having to do with that prohibition period
in the twenties. You started mentioning there my next question about the impact
of the depression here in the town.
B: About all we did, we had the depression here but the inlet closed. We were in the
boat trade, so....
K: The inlet closed weatherly from the storm?
B: No, it just filled up. It did that every now and then. It's done that periodically
for four centuries.
K: Silting over or?
B: Just drift in, the sand, and bar forms and it just gradually filled up.
K: And so how long was it that way?
B: Well, I can't remember when they dredged it out, John, it was....
J: Oh, it was anywhere from a year to two years and during the war years there, after
the p was -as off/there and so forth in that and it was
five years and they had the patrol up and down the beach and all that
kind of stuff and all this, something in the paper here not long ago about these
German submarines landing saboteurs on the beaches here near Jacksonville and....
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K: That was four miles below my house.
B: Oh,my.
K: Yeah. We, I remember that very vividly because I was a child growing up on those
beaches.
J: Well, we didn't see anything of it except we heard about it.
B: Well, one day they, they found a place where there was a place where there was a
scuffle on the beach and one of the patrolmen disappeared. We used to hear all kinds
of rumors, of course, because if we had a lot of the men be around here various
times. We had three daughters and the men all, in fact, Suzie's husband is one of
the young marines that was over with the, guarding Navy station up there. They
had radar installation It was very secret at that time.and they
had marine guards at the gate and marine installation.
K: This was all World War II.
B: Right. Our son-in-law was stationed over there. He celebrated his eighteenth birthday
over there, I think. Anyway, he and Suzy acquainted over that way.
K: Did, well ,you know, this is such an obvious question -- the big changes in life as a
result of the depression. Now, in a community like you've been describing where peo-
ple really, there is no industry here per se, people would be making their living
pretty much the best way they could, anyway, did life change that radically?
B: Well, it got pretty, we sure had to scratch around. I know our youngest child, a son,
was born in 1929 and by that time we had, we were just really scratching. I mean, we
didn't know until shortly before that daughter was born whether I was going to be able
to go to the hospital or not and John, providentially, received a check from the
customs for a boat that he had discovered or something and turned in and that just
paid for the hospital bills, like it came from heaven.
K: I don't think that most people, even those in Florida, realize that Florida had been
in a depression two to three years ahead of the nation.
B: Well, the depression and the '28 hurricane came bang together.
K: Right. Right.
PBC 7 c(2)
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B: That the whole thing.
K: I'm doing a book review now for the University of Florida press to see if it should
be published on the depression and they were asking me if I thought this was realistic
to talk about the depression from the late twenties and I think in Florida, anything
else would be a lie. Florida was depressed two to three years ahead of the national
depression and people don't realize that.
A: Where did that '28 hurricane come in? Right here in Jupiter?
J: Well....
B: The center came into West, West Palm Beach.
K: '26 was Miami and two years the West Palm. The two back-to-back like that just
collapsed the land boom...
A: Yeah, so everything devastated. Yeah.
K: ...collapsed the land boom and everything started going down the tubes.
A: Uh huh.
K: So by '29, Florida was in pretty desperate shape.
B: Banks were closing outside, __, everything else.
K: Everybody else thinks of the Depression, you know, after the '29 collapse, but
Florida had a two year jump on everybody else.
B: Well, whbn that, when that inlet closed and things got really bad, why John had
been constable and so, he, Mr. Vanderbilt, Harold Vanderbilt and the mailman
wanted a guard and all those very wealthy people were hiring people to guard them
and John, my brother, happened that he was working with gardeners over in PAlm
Beach. He was in the( garden supply business and spraying the
estates over there. In fact with all the caretakers, so he heard that they wanted a
guard so he passed the word to John, so John went down and applied as a guard, so
he guarded Mr. Harold Vanderbilt during the worst of the Depression
and that kind of pulled us through.
K: Uh uh.
PBC 7 c(2)
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J: Yeah, but that wasn't, I wasn't making any money then.
B: Not very much, but it would be helpful what little you did make,
J: I think about $60 a month out of it.
B: Well, I ....
------------- -- >
J: I had to- ri e run for my Ford just to get there and back rmst =of=-te.. e.
B: Yeah. The value of what $60 would do in those days compared to today.
J: Yeah, that, well, they fed' me, well, from the boss's table there, after they had
settled themselves _and then they'd bring out a plate for me. Boy, it was
the biggest plate I ever saw.
(Laughter)
B:
J: I started gaining and I never did get over it.
(Laughter)
K: Did the, say did you work, how long were you down there? During the thirties, mostly?
J: Well, I was there just one t~me or two?
B: I think you were there just one winter, John.
J: Yeah.
B: It was when we had the restaurant.
J: I went to see the boss and told him how everything was and he said, "Well, sorry to hear
that, but if _c ll, S-`he1 all the the rest of/would want too."
He says, -ley/Ithat you can recommend," so I recommend my brother-in-law
and he so he stayed there two or three years.
K: Uh huh. You say you already had the restaurant. When did you open the restaurant.
B: The restaurant was opened late in '28, nearly '29. No, it was late, it was '29 because:
HarryAfour-and-a-half months old when we opened the restaurant. He was born in August of
'29, so it was the winter of '29. We closed it in '42 when the rationing became severe
and we were blacked out and everything else and....
K: That's a vivid memory of mine as a child -- the black outs. We would have
PBC 7 c(2).
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mjb
K: night living on the beaches here in Florida, but did people move away from the area,
do you recall? Was there a loss of population?
B: ./__- People who lived there back in those days had been living here for genera-
tions and they weren't about to leave. They would move
J: Yankee investors had, the carpetbaggers and
B: damn yankees most of the time.
A: Is that one word or two?
(Laughter)
K: Did -- oh yeah -- did the war then, World War II/start to bring things up? Was there
any, other than the build-up of the naval facility?
B: It added to the population because they had 10,000 men stationed at Camp Murphy and
of course, you've got the Navy stationed here at Jupiter. Down at West Palm Beach
they had Camp Higgins, which is where the patrolmen patrolled the beach and there was
a considerable addition to the population, I would say, about then and then a number
of those men from Camp Murphy came back down here and settled afterwards. They liked
it.
K: Built up the Coast Guard station.
Since then, I guess everything's been at a constant growth,
B: Oh, yes, from then.
K: Now, you mentioned the sinking off the coast here, running around of, I haven't read
that book of yours yet, the book, that particular one, where they're what, one or
two that, ?
B: Well, the first ship that was torpedoed was the Republic. It was an empty tanker and
it was traveling in ballast and they torpedoed it and it was also sound and first, when
the first picture we have of it, why the bow is out of the water and it's kind of at a
slant, but then it, when I later, when I finally had a chance to go up and see it, it
had slipped down into deeper water and just the masts were visiblea.- he next day,
Fa qe bra>Il lq/'2.
after the Republic was torpedoed, on February ? -24-, 1.942, the people coming along the
highway could see this great blare of light on the horizon and that was a full tanker,
PBC 7 c(2)
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B: the W.D, Anderson, one of the largest tankers that was from this area at that time,
and it went down in very deep water. I don't think they've even found that tanker
yetand they, the men on board were at their evening meal when the torpedo struck.
It went, really went up fast and there was one young man on, two young men on the fan
tail of the vessel and they both dove overboard, but one hesitated too long. The other
Jr-it-rua er
one dove overboard and he swam A he was a very good swimmer, came up and he
was still in-bu-i4wagoil, so he went down again and swam under water until he was
SFinally he got up, came up and he was clear and he was in the water
for two hours before the coast guard guard made one last sweep and picked him up
and he was brought to a hospital in Fort Pierce. I have a picture of him. He was,
and then, of course, there was a freighter, the Delial, which was torpedoed. But of
course, the first, the worst thing that happened during this period, was the two
tankers who collided when traveling on the black out. One was a
One was full and and one was empty. Both belonged to the same company, the most ex-
pensive shipwreck that company ever had the insurance man told me. Eighty-eight men
&cd- L/\AL
died in that collision and the -ul-f iand drifted right off the
and it burned 52)days, but they were finally able to sink it and later on,
when the Gulf Bell, they put the fire out in the Gulf Bell and it was towed into
Port Everglades, but the, the Gulf Land, after it sank, a young man, a young navy
captain by the name of Brown, volunteered to come down and help salvage it and he
was able to raise it up. When they got it up, the bow broke off and the bow's still
down around Hobe Sound, They towed her up the rest of the way
so they found the bones of fifteen men in;:the showers and they
brought them down to a Christian burial in West Palm Beach.
K: All this in '42?
B: Everything happened about '42, yes.
K: That was about the real end of U-boat, end of '42, '43.
B: Well, then they got the thing organized a bit. At first the U-boats would come right
up and surface right off here and they'd telegraph,
PBC 7 c(2)
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B: Morrison Field, or somebody'd report it and telegraph Morrison Field and by the time
they'd telegraph Washington and got orders, why, the submarine's gone. Then they got
the blimps. 4Bi44s p.
K: Yes, about '43 was about the end of the U-boat men.
B: And then they organized the convoys and I stood up on the house on the hill one day and
watched one of the convoys go by. _____a long line of ships as far as you
could see in each direction there and just, very ghostly. They were all painted gray
and they would just move along with, you'd see the destroyers moving around them but,
but, 0 _______/_
K: That was really -44Hbe through the streets of Florida by
themselves make up time for us. It was pretty dead.
A: Something Bessie mentioned earlier about the inlet here, how for centuries it had been
closing on a regular basis with the influx of sand. Now before they started dredging,
since the inlet with the fishing industry and the had so much to do
with the economy, how did the thing get opened again?
B: Well, when they have a real high lot of water, hurricane or a real lot great deal of
water fall in the, with the what -- you know, the season -- why, the water would build
up and they'd get such, bunch of, power of water behind that sand...
K: Flushing out.
B: ...yeah. Sometimes it'd burst itself open, but most often people would dig a little
trench and then it would just sweep out.
A: Uh huh.
B: Ives' report tells about the mail carrier coming down here,-Camp Davis, and he made a
little trench through there and camped out nearby and during the night it opened up so
wide that it washed his camping equipment out and they almost went out with it. That
was 1844-and they armed occupations that were, of course, that were all up and down the
coast then/ and the fact that the wawf office agreed that year that they'- open all th
inlets up and down the coast and since they had to be supplied byAl there was a great
boom of settlers.
PBC 7 c(2)
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K: They'd have similar thing down at the Blue River inlet.
B: Yes, I wouldn't wonder.
K: Mott, Mott's journal speaks of this, They were coming along one day and this enormous
hunk ofJSke a bomb, exploded in the inlet flow of water out of the glades and out
of the Blue River settlement, That's what they would do. They would literally flush
themselves.
A: John mentioned while we were at lunch, you were talking to Bessie, that the city of
Jupiter handles the dredging because they've never been able to get federal funds,
J: No, not the city of Jupiter.
A: Oh.
J: It's a special...
K: Inlet district.
B: Yeah, uh huh.
J: ...tax district.
A: Yeah. A special tax district because the federal government has never become involved.
B: See that was formed in 1921. I did a history of Jupiter inlet for Tequesta back in
1968, I think. Somewhere along in there, I just, what I did was that I mentioned
every incident in my books that I had found mention of the inlet and so down to the
present and then, of course, I had John's experiences in the commissioning. He was
a commissioner for twenty years and so I had all put down just what I could find out.
K: The inlet commission was founded when now?
B: 1921.
K: Uh huh. And you were one of the first commissioners there?
J: No, I wasn't my first. I didn't, well, it was, it was ten years or more before I ever
worked on it and more. Then I was odd man for another ten years.
K: But you were on there twenty years.
--, --
B: They used to
bring the rock down from-Pe-1 Maine on sailing vessels at first to drege
the inlet and we went out a couple of times to the sailing vessel,
PBC 7 c(2)
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B: visited the wife of the captain used to be....
K: Be on the coast that ran it, that is up around Jacksonville and the
inlets there, mouth of the river. I remember last time we were here, you told me you
had no involvement with government around here and now I'm hearing about an inlet
commission, constable.
A: He wasn't involved. He was.
K: I'm sure we're going to keep unearthing these things as we go along. Was that a pay
job, an elected job,but not a pay job?
J: Yeah, yeah. You got so much a meeting, $2 a meeting and you could make as much as
$100 in a year's time. Of course the secretary and treasurer, the two fellows that
were, you know, there was three of us, why, they didn't give me anything. I just
got my $2, but some of them got $200 and if they had a special meeting, why, they could
get a little bit more and this and that.
K: Now was this an elected, an elected job?
J: Oh, yeah.
K: _
31- w'as
J:A- E-Qf/four years or something,
K: Uh huh.
J: So, I went through all kinds of elections.
K: I was about to say all these commissions and special districts were to my knowledge
elected. I didn't know it was different.
J: No. When we first started out, why, Martin county and Palm Beach county weren't
divided yet, so whenever they got divided, why, then trouble began because the Martin
county people floated a big bond issue and did some work on the inlet and it was a
failure but they still were paying for it like a dead horse and they was down into
Hope Sound, too, and so when the Jupiter inlet people wanted their tax money, why,
they didn't like it very much and so we had the option of setting the amount of money
that was to be raised, you know, how many bills and so on and so they disregarded what
we suggested in order to use half of it and so we didn't realize it the first year,
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J: maybe, but anyhow, when we found out about it, we had a lawyer naturally, and so we
told them that they had to pay that up and so we'd paid up ours and refinanced bonds,
finally. The times were so hard that we barely could pay interest on the bonds and
couldn't take up the bond when it come due, you know, but that was and so here it was,
Martin county had only paid half enough and we got on them and they had to pay, much
against. They had a, a young!man up there name ______
A : ...
J: What was the name of that lawyer .........___. .. He
and gotten himself removed from the district, mind you, but they still had to pay
even 4t hetCi
himnafter that -t-i-- it was all wIriten up,
K: Now does the county line run on the middle of the Inlet, north side?
J: No. Up at the Martin county line now,.,.
A: Few miles north.
J: What?
A: Just a few north of the inlet,
J: And so...
K: They're changing now....
1 //
J: ...they had themselves removed but the salt water from the inlet now goes/up in Hobe
Sound there and the nice clear water and everything and they're getting the benefit
of it more than we are here in Jupiter, almost and theyl/4 a damn e for it.
We've tried to get them back Into the district, but people with money don't like to
pay taxes. Hard to get anything out of them,
A: So the line is about four or five miles north at the end of this, John? Rough.
J: No.
A: On the other side of the shopping center.
J: Uh huh. Just barely where you turn there to go down.
A: Yeah.
K: But.doesn't it meander south more out west of here around the Girl Scout camp, Boy
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K: Scouts, __?
J: Well, it's got some little ____in today's newspaper there,
they....
K: County line road or something.
A: Uh huh.
K: I was just trying to picture the inlet on that line that goes north
C 7 COY-("O p 1) I 2. ; r, )
in here. Yeah, well, if they organized the eeontd+-fn in '21, Martin county wasn't
formed till '25, as I remember.
B: Right.
K: So they had four years of having to put up with that. Right?
A: You were talking government with John before and I heard him mention election as
constable and I heard him mention somebody else was appointed.
J: Well, that was after...
B: I don't think there was any....
J: ...there wasn't anything, there wasn't anything to do. There wasn't any court, the
judge -- what do you call it -- the constable court?
K: JP.
J: JP.
B: Everyone was justice of the peace.
J: There wasn't any anymore and so he died and they never appointed one.
A: You mentioned somebody that wanted the job got appointed.
J: Well.
B: He was elected, John. I'm pretty sure.
J: No, he wasn't.
K:.
B: He wasn't?
J: I wonder about that.
K:/FFlorida got rid of the JP'sJ The JP courts would have been in the sixties, wouldn't
it?
PBC 7 c(2)
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J: Well, they tried to get/lof all of them. There was an old fellow down here at West
Palm Beach that hung on there for years and they couldn't get rid of him.
K: But as I recall, in the '68 constitution, they dropped it as a constitutional law
and that's.... I could be wrong on that.
J: This fellow I was telling bro, it was his father that was a JP down there.
B: Rickers.
J: Rickers, Tom Rickers.
B: He, he gave a talk at the historical society in Palm Beach on night. He was really,
really very entertaining in a_
J: He didn't look anymore like old Tom Rickers, a fat and round-faced fellow.
He'd tell about what the old man did and everything. It was
amusing, a lot of it. It, I'd like to hear, he'd, was as powerful as a sheriff, JP
courts they coudln't get around them. That's the reason. I don't know why they wanted
to get rid of them because....
K: You didn't have to be a lawyer to be a JP.
J: No, you didn't.
K: You asked why, that's why the legislature, dominated by lawyers, wanted to be rid of
them.
J: Plus the constables didn't have to be trained police officers.
K: I had a grand father who was a JP, He ran a court a few years. I heard about that.
(Laughter)
J: Well, you see, there's so many different things that happened and went on during our
lifetime. It would just make an awful big book if you put it all down. Nobody'd be
interested in it much. Some of it would. Some of it you don't want to tell too much
about lying around here, and you don't want to embarrass.
K: Well, you always get to write a first refusal on a manuscript like this. Well, they're
no, I threw away an exquisite chapter in one of my books for just that reason.
B: Oh, dear.
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K: You know, because all of it was..,
J: Too personal?
K: ...well, it was truth, but you would have had a hard time verifying it...
A: Yeah.
J: Yeah.
K: ...or saying.it, well it's public record or if somebody got embarrassed over it,
but there are a lot of things that people will tell you that put things into context,
but you don't want it in the final written record.
B: It's like Uncle Will when he wrote the story of the 1907 hurricane and he told in it
about this blacksmiths and the blacksmiths, when they looked as if they were going to
be out to sea on this houseboat, and they approach n island, an island/and
apparently they might have gone aground on the island and then they would have been
saved. But, and so he began praying to the Virgin Mary to save them. When he wasn't
saved and when the boat was swept out to sea, why, he cursed her. And so Uncle Will
had put that episode in his story and he sent it to the Reader's Digest and they
refused the story and he sent it over to Father Jerome at St, Lucy and he said, "If
you take out that part about the blasphemous blacksmith, you might sell it." And so
then he took it out and then he sent it down and asked me if I could get it published
for him and so I said, "Well, you want to get paid for it?" and he said, "Oh, no,"
he wouldn't care if he was paid for it if he could just get it in print and I said,
T- C C-- titdnto
"Well, that's fine. I'll send it down to Dr. e So I sent it down to
Dr. -C and he put it in the Tequesta and then Lamb Harold later picked it up and
did pay Uncle Will, sent him a check for a small amount for a story. But it
was a very graphic story and it was very well written, but....
K: Yeah, I think if the question is valid.
B: Turned down the Key West extension, you see, in it.
K: Yeah, yeah.
J: Well, he taught school up in ...
B: Manhattan, Kansas.
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J: Manhattan, Kansas. He was a,...
B: Eighteen years.
J: What was it he taught about farm machinery and all that?
B: I don't know. He was an engineer. He had an engineering license.
J: He wasn't one of these unschooled boys, anyhow,
K: Well, no. I've heard a lot of stories that I'm sure that the people tell me were
absolutely true, but there's the question of does this really add to the historical
significance or is this just another spice it up with....
B: Are you going to offend some particular group or something like that?
K: Does it really make any difference that the man who was hired as an Ottoman warden
had been one of the biggest/_, hunters...
A: Yeah.
B: *ea-&. f Ah
K: ...by night and taking money from Ottoman society by day.
A: Did it change history or did it make history or was it just one of the side events?
K: Yeah, the, you know, the old time set a thief to catch a thief sort of idea.
B: Well, I wouldn't welcome that. Are you taping that now?
A: Oh, yes.
B:
A: That's alright. This taping is...;
rh ,T-
K: We could get an eighteen minute gap/las easy as the president.
A: Oh, oh yeah.
(Laughter)
A: And that's on tape.
K: No, I think that....
B: Well, I've often wished that I could get that book,privately published book.about
Joe Ermin, that has been published by his family, I believe, and they live up in
Vero and so, Joe Ermin used to come up to our restaurant back in those days and he,
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B: he always, he loved to help old ladies and he would help them with their finances and
they would come to them and they would come to him and he would help them with their
financial affairs and finally one old lady came to him and she said that a friend of
hers, a Mrs. Henry, she was afraid that she didn't have enough money to live on4'and
Riw~aw^, she wanted to know if he wouldn't look into her affairs for her and so he
agreed to do that and %B, after he began checking into Mrs. Henry's affairs, he found
out that she really didn't have enough to live on and besides that, she was an aunt to
the presidents wife. So g9Sr he wrote to the White House. President and Mrs. Hoover
were then in office and immediately he was invited to escort Mrs. Henry up to the
White House. He did and she was very lovingly received and carefully taken care of by
the president's family, but he got Joe Ermin off and that was just about the/lthat these
two men had been killed in West Palm Beach, Patterson and Monteur and so he was
quite concerned about the whole buisness and he got Joe Ermin in there and they talked
about it to some extent and he really put the heat on Sheriff Baker after that and the,
L na f"" -/ 46,
the president especially offered Mrs. Monteur a position in the Bureau of tWe___
provided she'd come to Washington. What they did for Mrs, Patterson, I'm sure they
4oo A care he ht ,, 4c>),
SShe had a family of children. One child was born after he was killed,
so (End c2; begin dl)
K: Today is September 12, 1980, This is Dr. Harry Kersey, Florida Atlantic University.
Today, I am having my third interview with Mr. and Mrs. John Dubois of Jupiter. The
question I would like to throw out to start this third tape is just to have your
general comments concerning growth in this area, say since World War II. In our last
session we talked pretty much through the thirties and the war years. General commen-
tary, the people who moved in here since World War II, What is the nature of the
change here.
B: It certainly has changed, dear me. Well, we lived along very quietly until Mr. Charles
Martin bought the property on the north side of the inlet _' and he
bought it for $300,000 as I remember and from then on then he started Tequesta and
then Pratt Wickman moved in and that really,,.wef-on~ 4r- just built up and just
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B: recently it's building up so fast that
K: -a. ~2 the people who come in here now, do you feel that they really have an appre-
ciation for the history of the area?
B: Yes. Quite a few of them do. They get this, like ...___ Historical Society
here now and most of the people over in the inlet, Tri-inlet Apartments over here
belong to it, take a very active interest in it. I think people are interested, like
to find some roots where they can plant themselves.
K: Uh huh. After they've been here a while they really take an interest?
B: Oh, yes, yes,
K: What kinds of projects are they undertaking? I know the site of the old fort seems
to be of interest to the people here now, locating it,
B: Well, they haven't really located it and if they do locate it, it's going to be right
in the middle of somebody's front yard or development, I'm afraid. I don't think
there's much point,,much chance or really marking the spot anymore because the, the
first site of the fort was on Point and they moved it across the river
to what was later the Plantation on the old homestead and then,
of course, the Plantation has been sold and the buildings completely
all up and down and I think the young man, Kenneth Hughes, is doing quite a bit of
-Forl ,t4'4-h 1)' f c'- he
research on the old pert. tss/ found dragoons, belt buckles and, oh,
it's all kinds of things and :but they're right on somebody's property up there on the
front lawn, I believe, some man told me. So, I don't know whether they can find a
site that they can mark at all. Now Professor Peck, back in.-- I think it was 1844,
along in there -- he spoke of looking up the river. Of course there was no bridges
in the way then and he could look up the river and see the burned logs of the
stockades. Evidently, the first pert was built when Point was burned. Now
whether it was burned by General Jessup to keep the Indians from using it or whether
the Indians burned it to keep General Jessup from using it, I couldn't tell you, but
apparently the it was burned. Then it was moved over to the other side of the
river and there's never been a real fort built there. I think it was
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B: kind of tent place, you see.
K: Like a camp.
B: Like a camp and they moved it over there, they said, because the water was deeper there
and they had to be supplied by schooner and our schooners could get in and dock there
easier from the site.
K: Uh huh. I think it's interesting, they're just now getting down to the serious re-
search on the site. In other words, just trying to pin it down,
B: Well, you see, every other site in Jupiter has been marked, We have the lighthouse
marker, thanks to the early keepers, We had the Celestial Railroad marker and we
had the life-saving station marker. That's the site of Carlin Park, where Carlin Park
is now and the marker over by the.... Fanny Lou Fischer, bless her dear heart, was
a lady who was quite prominent in the DAR and EAC and she was the one who was instru-
mental in having most of these markers placed here in Jupiter and there is one over
near what is now the chamber of commerce and the park there and there's a marker there
for Fort Jupiter and the lighthouse. So we have, had markers for everything except
Fort Jupiter.
K: What about the one over here on the mound?
B: Yes, there's been a marker placed there, but that was placed by the county and the
historical society to mark the mound and of course the mound is now on the national
register, as is the lighthouse.
K: So I guess everything has been pretty well staked out and marked and surveyed and the
history done of it because to get on the national register you have to really document
that well.
B: Yes. Of course, we had to go in, when they put the lighthouse on, we had to document
the fact that General Lee designed it and when they put the marker up, I thought it
was interesting, we had Mrs. Salvatore Wood down here, who is General Lee's granddaught-
er.
K: Oh really?
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B: Yes. We got Hobe Sound.
K: John, when you were growing up in this area, did the kids around here have a sense that
these were historical places and sights?
J: I think so. I knew that I was living on the top of all those ancient Indian mounds.
We used to pick up artifacts and things along the water's edge, where the tide washed
them out.
K: How about in the school? Did the people around here make much of that? The teachers,
or were they just too busy with the three R's?
J: Well, now, the Loxahatchee Historical Society has a project that, to build a, a real
museum on Dubois Park. They have the old house on the hill, which they have restored
and we'd like to have a larger museum than would really be something for the young
school children to come and look at and for the older folks, too, and the historical
society has a small museum over at the foot of the lighthouse now, but it is very
small and it's so crowded with things, artifacts and papers and all kind of things
now that you can hardly get in and out of it and on top of that, you have to climb
up all those stairs to get up to it and it's a little hard for elderly people to get
+here +Iiher.
up there and see what the-evee-he which Is where it's in and the lighthouse, you
can't go up into the very top of it anymore. You can go into the base of it and look
at the pictures and things that they have on the walls in there, but if we could get
a museum that was a museum started here in Dubois Park, I think a lot of historical
things would be brought in by the the old timers that live around because they know
that if they give them to the society now, there wouldn't be any place to put them.
They'd just put them in storage and they might be lost or ruined some how and we're
trying to, the county's trying to find a way to get money from, help from the govern-
ment or from some large organization that wants to put in a something that would be
good for Jupiter. It would be a good place on account of this is the junction of the
roads coming in here -- the Indian Town road and the US 1 and A1A all together right
here-and if people travelling know about a museum, why they would stop and look at it.
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B: I think you asked about the school children and if I should mention that John and I
have had a slide show of the history from the shell mound right through to the
cracker and we have given that show -- well I know I counted one time 125 times --
for various, for various groups, but we've been over to the school quite a few times
and I know one time they brought In four fourth grades and I know I gave that talk
four times in a row. But anyway, the children show a great deal of interest and
seem to like it so....
K: We are getting ready to put together a six-week unit on how to do state and local
history for our school children down in the Boca area, particularly those who go
to the university lab school. We're trying to get the cooperation of.... We
do have the cooperation of several local historical societies including
so something of those type, I think, is very meaningful to kids if you bring it in
and get them interested with a slide show like yours but then follow it up with
letting actually get out and do. It really generates a lot of interest. I was
interested in what John said, that there were a lot of old timers around here. I
know nothing is probably as extensive as the collection like you have here, but
a lot of the families in the area still have old artifacts and collections they
That's excellent.
B: Well, I know Carlton White, who's Captain Carlin's grandson, his mother died and he got
up in her attic and he just found a treasure trove up there, but he is very reluctant
to part with any of that unless we have a museum to put it in. You see, his grand-
father was the one thatwas in charge of life-saving station the entire time it was in
operation down there. He, hehas things, I know.
K: Well, it takes special training to preserve these things and display them and of course,
all this needs a full-time curator to make it worthwhile.
B: Oh, well, the county has agreed to provide the curator if we have the museum, but it
would mean raising about $500,000 to get the museum and they haven't gotten anywhere
close to that yet. If they could get into one of these foundations, it might help.
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K: Who is spearheading this through the county? Is it one of the state historical
preservation districts or just....
B: No, I don't think so. I don't think we've gotten any of that.
the
K: Because we have, well, I guess at least two in this county that I know of 7one in
the Boca Raton area that the state legislature set up a historical preservation
district and one in the Palm Beach area.
B: Well, I, would that be the Palm Beach County Historical Commission? No.
K: No. This goes even beyond -- that is one of the problems that we have in the state
of Florida, as you probably well know, we have local historical societies, then
we have county historical commissions and then the state legislature set up a number
of districts -- I think there are thirteen of them now -- that are state entities,
like in Boca Raton, we have the Historic Boca Raton preservation board of commissioners
which are appointed by the governor at the behest of the legislature and they get
monies in another way, so we have, in some cases, three and four layers of historical
bureaucracy to deal with and down in Broward county, I know that I spend half of my
time trying to separate who's in the Broward County Historical Commission from who's
on the Historic Broward County Preservation Board. We get so much overlapping-.'<'
3: Yeah.
K: ...that sometimes it makes it difficult. That's why I was wondering which group might
be spearheading the drive.
B: Well, so far, I think it's just the Loxahatchee Historical Society and their own group
that's working on it and Adam is president of the Palm Beach County,
Jupiter's Loxahatchee Historical Society. And I think that if they ask the Palm Beach
County Historical Society to cooperate, I'm sure they would.
K: Right. Raising money is a problem for all small local groups trying to get their
musuems started and I know around the state, there are many, many places where the
same thing. They would like to get a museum going or they have houses to preserve.
B: They don't realize, though, that Palm Beach county history begins right here, It
does.
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K: Sure.
B: What was here in 1853 and 1860? in 18--, late 1870's there were two
settlers down on Lake Worth.
K: This is because, it's at the northern end of the county.
B: Well, it's, it was really because of the junction of the Indian River coming down
and the inlet and the Loxahatchee, of course. They all kind of came together right
there by the lighthouse. Across from the lighthouse. And then they had that
Indian River steamboat line and the first people who came down here, travellers, came
down by steamboat and, of course, were transferred first by hack and later by the
Celestial Railroad to Lake Worth. But even a lot of the older families in this county
like, you take the Spencers, Pierces and a number of those people, began as assistant
keepers over at that lighthouse, I got a few chances to look around over at the top
of the lighthouse and they eventually took up homesteads and became::the pioneer resi-
dents in the county.
J: We, I can't remember names and all that, but we had the head man down from Tallahassee
and asked him for money and he went into it pretty thoroughly and he turned it down
because he said there were too many little old museums around now ead- that the state
had to support and they were all more or less alike and all that, but I think we still
have a chance to talk to him once more and try to show him that we got something other
than just grandma's feather bed and all that kind of stuff, We want to go into
something more like the Loxahatchee River and all the history that goes along with
that.
B: The stinking bureaucracy, we ran right into it because the state owns the state park,
Park, and I think it was their idea that we should have the museum up
there. We have a museum. Well, that would not be a Palm Beach county museum; it
would be a Martin county museum and I think we all want one here in Palm Beach county.
K: Well, I think you've probably run into the bureaucratic mind-set out of Tallahassee.
They'd like to have everything centered up there and the Florida, and the Florida
State Museum in Gainesville.
PBC 7 dC1)
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J: There's wheels within wheels within wheels with this,- musuem.
(Laughter)
B: And they've actually said that they wanted, they were all set to have the musuem
right up there in Park, you know. We kind of backed of from that because
we felt it was....
K: Yeah, well, yeah. This is a big question. Where was the original Dade county line,
the north end. Is it right where the Palm Beach county line is now or did they go
up into Martin?
B: It went up to St. Lucie.
K: Yeah. Martin county was originally part of Dade county,
B: Oh, yes. Martin county wasn't formed until 1925; Palm Beach county, 1901 and no,
it
K: So it did go all the way up to the St. Lucie county line.
A: Uh huh.
B: Uh huh.
K: There are, yeah, all sorts of jurisdictional problems involved then, mostly.
A: Bessie, you've not mentioned that this was the birthplace of Palm Beach county
right here. Was this the original county seat?
K: No.
B: No. Miami was the county seat.
A: No, I mean for Palm Beach county.
B: No, Jupiter was never county seat. West Palm, Palm Beach was the county seat.
K: Yeah.
A: From the beginning.
K: From 1909.
B: Yeah, yeah.
K: Juno had been, at one time, Dade county.
B: From 1899 or 1889 -- no, 1899, Juno was county seat. For ten years.
K: And that, that was the only time even in this area that I know there could be people
in Tallahassee who know all about local historical groups and they're wanting to do
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K: things together, but I think they're missing the point -- that everyone can't trip
to Tallahassee to see their mammath collection and everyone can't get to Gainesville
to see the Florida State Museum and their are regional areas that have specific things
that they can show and develop very well. Thereweretwo questions I wanted to ask'
and last time we talked I forgot about them. You just triggered it again. What is the
origin of the Loxahathee, the name?
B: That's very easy. It's ocha, the Seminole name for turtle and Jatchee for -rver.
It was iochahatchee and on the General Jessup's letters to Washington while he was
stationed here at Fort Jupiter, he always had on the tocha-hatchee and the story was
that there was a man painting the name on a, on a boat and he couldn't spell Locha,
so he just made it Loxa.
K: Uh hyh, Yeah, that's the one in the Seminole or the Mikasuki language. The turtle's
_och_, which I am sure is not moved to Lcha.
B: Locha.
K: It's actually yocht. But this, movement is always interesting from what a non-native
speaker of any language hears and then turns it in and I'm sure that's exactly where
Jessup came. But I just wondered if y~at t ever heard it any different from Loxa-
hatchee since the two of you have been around.
B: Oh, no.
K: It's always been pronounced Loxahatchee, nothing close to Locha or Vocha?
B: But there's, I have copies General Jessup's letter. Fanny Lou Fischer gave me quite
a few copies of his letters that he wrote while he was here in Jupiter and they're
are ca.
K: And that's about one step removed from the Indian och., And they really pronounce it
in and that's a very difficult sound to make because of the way they make their "1"
sounds in the
A: Did that maybe spring from the fact that this was a heavy turtle country at one time?
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B: Well, you go up that Loxahatchee when we were younger -- why, I don't know how it
is right now; I haven't been up in a while -- but, you'd see the turtles sunning
themselves along the river there on the banks on the bogs.
A: L; t+I- s.
fC------
K: They had an interesting special on Channel 5 oe' recently on the river. Did you
see that?
A: Yeah.
K: Did you see that?
B: Dick Roberts sent me a copy of the notes on the thing. I've been working on the
story, a history of the Loxahatchee. I hope to publish it in a little booklet like
I did with the other ones. But unfortunately, now that I can't see I'm having
difficulty. I have a friend who types some of it up, but I still have some information
I want to get on to her on that I haven't been able to get down
yet. But some of it's written -- the story of the traveller and the story
K: were you referring? John, you were the one that found his body,
weren't you?
B: Trapper? Yeah.
K: What is your interpretation of what happened or have you formed one?
B: Well, Trapper could be darned unpleasant to people if they bothered him and he was
undoubtably sedated and he'd been to the doctor and he was lying there in his new
hammock in his (hikee there and someone very easily could have come up and picked up
his shotgun and shot him, but I've heard quite a bit of discussion and lot's/lpeople,
knowing Trapper and how well he was acquainted with guns and so on said/he would have
never shot himself in the chest if he had taken his own life and the deputy at the
inquest tried to illustrate to us how it was done and it was so awkward that I can't
imagine Trapper doing such a thing, I think if he really wanted to commit suicide, he
would have shot himself in the head.
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J: If he was that sick and everything a lying there in his hammock, he would hardly
ha 'be able to get up there and stand on one foot and shoot himself and it looked to
me like he just fell outIthe hammock onto the ground underneath it and there was
some cable close by where he had his shotgun so it could be that somebody came up
there and he was asleep or so they could have picked up the gun and poked it in his
ribs and pulled the trigger and he would have just rolled over and fell because he
was, you know how a hammock is tricky, he was lying on his stomach with his face in
the dirt....
A: Uh huh.
B: And of course he had all these chickens and they'd scratched all around the place,
so there was no way you could see any tracks or anything like that.
J: Yeah, they were eating at the maggots.
B: Oh! John!
A: Where did they find the gun? The shotgun?
B: By his side.
J: It was there in the sand.
A: Right along side of him?
J: Well, not far from him.
A: I was wondering if there would be any possibility that he might have fallen from the
hammock and on the gun and fired in the process, accidentally.
J: Well, to get the muzzle in the gun up against his rib cage and all that, if he was
laying there in his hammock and the cable over here, he'd have to come so that when
he picked it up the barrel was pointing the other way towards his feet. It wouldn't
have been pointing towards his head.
K: As far as who might have done this, that's still just a....
B: Well, I'll tell you, it wasn't long before there was a whole bunch of young fellows
up there vandalizing his place and the story was that he had $3,000 worth of furs
there and they got stolen and they just went through that place like a hurricane.
PBC 7 d1)
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J: He had quite a few guns that were valuable, too.
B: One of the young fellows came up one day and he was about, he was willing to give
the things he'd taken. He said he was just reserving them and he was willing to
give the things he'd taken to park with their, to use them in their
display and the thing that I thought that he that I really thought would be wonder-
ful to have for them was that MP band that he used to wear when he there.
Well, you see he was a military policeman in emergencies during, WWII, he was sent
over there and that.... Then he had quite a few things there and I understood
he was going to give them to them, but he never did. They agreed that they would
accept them and not ask any questions if he would give it to them, but I don't
think he ever gave it to him. Maybe he thoughtsomebody would pay him for them;
I don't know what his idea was. He brought them up and showed them to us and
I didn't know whether he hoped we would buy them from him or what
K: The other thing I wanted to ask you was about the authors when they came down to
work on Jonathan Dickinson's journal.
B: Oh, Dr. and Mrs. Andrews came down here in 1934 and he was a Professor Emeritus of
Yale University and she and her sister had the Walker School for Girls. She took
years ago. But they were friends of Dr. St. John who was headmaster
at the Choate school in Wallington, Connecticut and Dr. St. John and Mrs. St. John
had come down here and we had a restaurant at the time. They lived in the little
house on the hill and they went up there and had rooms because there was nothing
open in Hope Sound but people doing some building up there and they came to stay,
so we became acquainted with the St. Johns and they were very lovely people and
they in turn, sent Dr. Andrews to us. Well, Dr. and Mrs. Andrews, after they
arrived, why, Mr. and Mrs. Habern came up to see them and Ray Habern had
been one of Dr. Andrews' students at Yale and so they brought up this little old
copy of the Dickinson journal and showed it to Dr. Andrews and he became immensely
interested right away, especially when he realized that he was living right on the
spot where Dickinson fell captive. So, he decided that he would edit the book and
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B: so he spent the next seven years and he worked at that and his notes, I think,
were in the original copies every copy, every edition of
the Dickinson journal and he professed to read it every person in thepartyand
he said the one that ended up that he found the most of, was able to find out
the most about was this one crewman of the named Solomon
Crescent. Solomon Crescent was outstanding, because of all the group, he was the
only one that spoke Spanish and by speaking Spanish the Indians recognized the
Spanish words and they were able to maintain the pretense of being Spanish and
I gather that he was able to find some of the descendents of Solomon Crescent
in his search. At any rate, he investigated and he has, these are
all in his notes, first copy and he stayed here for seven years and they were
just wonderful people and they had such wonderful people come to see them,
Zacherelli and Morrison.
K: Did they stay here the year round or did they....
B: No, no, they just stayed. They'd bring a maid and chauffeur and we really had a
conference.
K: For seven years?
B: They were very kind to our children .Every year his
birthday was the same. It was on Washington's birthday and we'd have a party and
nobody was invited but the children and
K: So the first edition of that probably was what '41, 1941?
B: '45.
K: Did it come out that late?
B: Yes. Dr. Andrews died before the book was published and Mrs. Andrews went ahead and
published it. Mrs. Andrews was very ill at one time when they were here and
_____ said at that time Of I'm going to have to go. You
better begin those plans if you can manage without me, because he couldn't manage
without here and that's when he turned around and he died first. Their son was,
their son-in-law, their daughter, married John Harlack,-ct-aw-Supreme, wes_
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o +he
B: /\Supreme Court. When he was here he listed. ..
3 one /^ S- kor, -I a
K: Remember you told me yu-wateA edto-havpJ pr-obab4-y have it on the tapethat
Samuel Morrison_ W4 FF you rS,
B: I have some of his books out there.
K: Does he come here often or does he....
B: Oh, no. I think he just come visits and then George Dade, the
also came down. Now he came several times, He we-s
and Mrs. Andre s told me that he was the only member of the Dade family that
he 0 y 1"VeIt IJ-)'" i-.
sort of p4ey -t* like hbes-__
(Laughter)
K: Where did the Andrews live?
B: They, they leased the house on the hill from John's mother and they did that place
over completely. John went out and found some nice smooth rock for their fire
places and they built fire places upstairs and downstairs and they refurnished the
house. They did it over completely and they stayed there for seven years. I
guess they would have stayed there longer, but you see, World War II came on and
we were blacked out. Gasoline was so scarce. Food was scarce. Everything. So
we closed the restaurant in '42 and they never came again, though we kept in touch
with them for years and years and Dr. Andrews son still came by to see us this
last winter. Well, he's come several times. But one time, I asked him how his
;mother was doing. I asked him. He says, "Well, she got a little repetetive,
but otherwise she was doing...."
K:/\Repetetive. What a pleasant way to put it.
B: Well, I catch myself just a little repetetive.
K: Was that the first time that the house had been leased out, John, to the Andrews
or had it been a family home up until that time?
J: No. We had, after mother, father died, why, mother moved down to West Palm Beach
to take care of her father and left the old house up here and Bessie and I tried
to keep it rented to different people and sometimes we had people upstairs and
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J: another party downstairs like that and there was quite a list of people that stayed there.
I can't remember them all.
B: Sims had an apartment there for quite a while, _Sims.
lived up there for a little while and we had quite a, quite a few
different people.
J: The people that owned it there at last sold it to the county. They were renters up there.
Vickers.
K: When did they buy the house? When did the Vickers....
B: I can't remember what year that was, John, I can't for the.life of me. It was shortly
after Suzy was married and that was about 1946, '47
K: I was just trying to get an idea on how long the house was in the family, you know,
owned by the family.
J: Well, after I got married and went away from there, why, mother didn't stay very much
longer.
B: April of '25 and mother had, the last time she had us all together up
there was at Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving dinner. Shortly after that she left. So it
was 1925 she left the house and it was 1946 or '07 that the Vickers must have bought it.
K: And they kept it until they sold it to the county. Well, that's interesting.
Now the house in its restored state -- is it just empty now or does it have a caretaker?
B: Well, the caretaker for the park -- Vernon Hunt -- lives in part of the house and it was
very viciously vandalized just before they restored it.
and then the historical society restored the place
and they have the downstairs bedroom, the living room and the dining room and the Hunts
still have the kitchen. That was the rooms that are available for the
public to see.
K: Uh huh. That's open right now.
B: Well, it's open on Sunday afternoon.
K: But open to the public all the time. B: Yes, uh huh.
K: When you say you got married and left home, you mean when you built your cottage down
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K: literally moved far away.
B: No just down fte here.
K: Yeah, good. Yeah, I've been interested in where the Andrews had stayed and the different
people who have visited and used the house. You never thought about living in the house
yourselves, though?
B: No. At one time John and I hoped to buy it but and so the Vickers
K: Uh huh. That is interesting. Well, I guess the last thing I would ask you -- this is
sort of an open-ended question. You mentioned you .are working on your history of the
Loxahatchee and all the families of -- what are you looking forward to doing here in the
immediate future in terms of your own interesting history. John's sort of indicated he's
interested in pursuing the idea of the museum
B: We'd both like to see the museum while we're still around to see it. We don't know how
that's going to work out.
J: Well, we have a lot of stuff that should go in the museum if they had one there that was
safe to leave it there, and all that.
B: Well, there is -- there are so many eras of history that could be beautifully portrayed in
a museum. You have your Indian mounds. You have your Dickinson story. You have your
Battle of the Loxahatchee, _of _Creek. You have the
building of the lighthouse and you have your life-saving station crew and the things they
did and we have, we have so much4of different eras that could be separately portrayed in
a beautiful manner, I would think, but it would take space to do it
But....
A: Seem to be a lot of history of a short period of time, relatively speaking.
J: Well, it started out....
B: We've saved all we could, but now we've run out of space. We crammed everything into
one of the cottages and then Zeke wanted to have a place to live, so he took everything
out of the cottage and crammed it into a couple of more places and things are gradually
just getting lost. I don't/whether we'll have.... If we have a hurricane, we won't have
anything left!
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