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SAMUEL PROCTOR ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM at
the University of Florida
St. Lucie Tape #8A
Bill Jorgensen
January 19, 1967
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The first thing this evening I want to take advantage of this opportunity
to present two daughters of our speaker. I want Mrs. Dorothy Jones and
Mrs. JoAnn to stand and be recognized. I'll have to admut
that I thought I knew Bill and his family, but he's got these two
daughters and raised them and they got married and I didn't even know
it. Our speaker this evening is very unusual in very many ways. The
most unusual thing about him is that he's an office holder that you can't
call a politician. He was smart enough most, much smarter than I was
to know when to quit running. He says the County Commissioner __ for
fourteen and a half years and when the time come up to be re-elected
he was smart enough to do what I wasn't smart enough to do. And that's
why I think he is a good and a good office holder. I have known him,
just like the rest, that's the ones I pick that I've known a long time
and I know more on them than they know on me so they can't talk about
me. I am proud to introduce to you William Jorgensen, White City.
and he'll tell you what the rest of it is.
B.J. Thank you, Talkd like I'd have been beat if I'd have
run again, but I don't agree with you on that. I've ha3 so much build
up here I'm afraid I may dissappoint you. I
want to give you a little arithmetic problem to start on so if you get
bored with what I say you can work on this problem. Way back in the old
days of White City we had, White City was a Danish colony. We had a
Dane who had a very fine cow which he said was seven quarter Jersey. The
best I could ever figure on it was two hind quarters and and the four
front quarters and would six quarters. Now you be working that while
I tell you the rest about white City. The organization of White City
St. Lucie Tape #8
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and that's what I'm going to talk about mostly, became about because of
the Dane who lives over in central Florida which was established long
before the east coast and populated long before the east coast. He was
writing very fine stories in the newspaper that all the Danes in the
United States read called the Danish Pioreer. I guess it's still published.
And he was writing such articles in this paper that the Danish
people of the Midwest organized and decided to start a colony in Florida.
Well at the same time the Flagler Dinner Room received enormous land
grants,branches to establish colonies in Florida. So they cooperat:,ed
with the Danish people in the westband they went to far with the organization
that they sent three men, six men as scouts to florida from the Midwest.
The railroad was only as far as Titusville, so they came down Titusville
by steamboat to Jensen Beach Florida. At Jensen Beach these six men, and
I'll give you the names of them. Of the six men I was only able to get
the names of four. I spoke to this society several years ago and before
I spoke I went around to all the old original settlers that were living
at that and four names was all I could get: Leo Peal, William Carlson,
he's the man I was named for, Andy Hanson and a Mr. Bottleton were
the men that got to Jensen and wrote, rented rowboats at Jensen and I
guess they mist have had camping equipment because they rode up the
river from Jensen up the St. Lucie River past what is now Stuart up the
north fork of the St. Lucie River, stopping along the way to explore and
looking for :a sight to found a colony. Well it must have taken them
two days at least. Anyway, when they got to the south outskirts of what
is now White City, or the place known to almost everyone as the old
homesite. William Calson says "This is as far as I
go. Let's settle here." So the rest of them agreed and that's how
St. Lucie Tape #8
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White City started. Now this group of the Midwest Danes, a lot of
them have been to Chicago to the World's Fair and there was a portion of
that World's Fair that was called White City. They were very much
impressed by this so they decided to name the new colony, townWhite
City. They went along so far in their planning in the north. It was
very complete. They had, were sure they had an artisanin every trade.
They had bricklayers. They had druggists. They had bakers,
and bricklayers. Of all things they actually tried brick making with
our clay, but the old bird was way too much for them to cope
with and the clay didn't make good bricks but they tried -it. One thing
that's always amazed me. They planned this town to have five thousand
people and they brought along a streetcar motorman because they figured
on having streetcars. Most of you know the, you know this man I know I'v e
seen a lot of the old white city folks here, Andrew Christianson who was
the postmaster at one time at White City. And he was the motorman for
the streetcar. The limits of White City in the old days are not what they
are today. I may have never considered the limits. In the south they
went to just about where River Park line is today. The last place down
there, known for many years as the old Charlie Edwards Road, it's still
there. But the last man to live on that area at that time, the name was
Lang. The north limits were a little north of what is now Edwards Road,
there were two pine trees. There was nothing but a dirt road. There wasn't
even a straight road as quick as it could be because they sought the
highest ground and they dug palms and they ddged heaVy/palmettoes and stuff
so they'd quit their growing. They were known as the gates in White City.
Considerably west of present day Sunrise Boulevard and they came into
Fort Pierce out west of the oh, probably Eighteenth and Twentieth Street.
St. Lucie Tape #8
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That was the main road from White City. Now the very first road
before there were any bridges was way out east of even U.S. 1 that
we go on today they had to ford all of the creeks, Flat Creek and
were impossible for the horse and wagon in those days
and they forded those streams. The west boundary line was about one mile
west of the St. Lucie River and White City was considered to go to the
Indian River on the east and the station at White City, in the old days
was called White City. There's a little story it was changed later.
I know here knows about it. I don't know how many of you know
about it. It was changed several years later to Carson. People wonder
how that happened. Well, Mr. Carr lived up the river and his house
is still there and Bill Robinson lived right at the corner of what's
tbday Midway and Indian River Drive.'y the way he was the cussingest
man. He never hit St. Lucie County. He couldn't talk without cussing.
While I'm about it I'll tell you one little story about him. Our
pineapples as they grew older gradually degenerated and became very
small in size and they used to ship to find out Commission
men throughout the north. One of the Commission wrote Robinson a letter
complaining about the size of the pineapple. He wrote them back a
letter and said, "Hell, we raise, we plant pineapples. We don't ."
When White City started they had a great influx of people and there
wasn't anything in White City except a little saw mill and maybe one or
two people working. The saw mill was directly north of Midway just
as close to the river as it could get. It didn't last very long. Evidently
what lumber they cut they were shipping out down the river to points
up and down the east coast because there was no one out there. So one
of the first things they did after the new colony of White City was
St. Lucie Tape #8
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organized was to build an immigrant house. They called it an
immigrant house. That was a house where when you came in,,families
began to come in, It belonged to the railroad company, the
It was staying there free for a very limited time until you could
at least get a kitchen built in your permanent house. The administrator
of White City, I got the names of these. I went before I spoke the other
time. I went out and saw the Mrs. Schultz. I mention that because
she's one of the originals. I saw Mrs. Carl __. She's dead.
Her name's Christianson. I think she spoke here one time and I saw
my mother. She was one of the originals and I got an awful lot of
information from the man I used to work for when I was a boy named
Hans Knutson, Uncle Hans Knutson. He was one of the very first
settlers. And then the Danish people had a custom of having what they
call surprise parties. They observed Danish customs. And every Sunday
they had a party. And it's funny. They never brought pie. It was always
cake and coffee. And at these parties, and they had one every Sunday
whoever had a birthday nearest that Sunday was a honoree. And I heard
many,, many of the stories of the old colony because I was born in 1896
in White City, the first boy. I wasn't the first child first boy.
Annie Carlson was the first child born in the Danish Colony. So these
administrators, they told me I there was Mr. Myers. Lt.
Boll. I don'tdwhether a Lt. in the Danish service or a Lieutenent in
the United States. I found-out who the surveyor was by looking at
an old That was Christienson, most people call it, but the
DAnish call it Christiaanson because that has an I-A-N- in it. And then
there was a Mr. Austin, D.E. Austin, and there'd be plenty of you here
who know him. He remained land agent for White City for a great many
St. Lucie Tape #8
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years and well I guess up until 1917 or 1918. There was man named
Ricks, who was also an agent, an administrator. He didn't last very
long though. He drowned with a boy named Walter Peterson. Fell in
the St. Lucie River just to the left, west of the bridge, present
bridge. And when he fell overboard to rescue a boy named Walter Peterson,
he hit his head on a submerged pile and evidently was enough to knock
him out for he drowned. Now out of these administrators one of them was
a crook. He must have been a politician, huh? Anyway, he absconded with
everyone' money, and he took the company money and he took the settlers'
money. So that brought on quite a problem, but the Flagler interests, they
were good. They really did what they could to promote Whtte City. They
made this good, not returning the money, but they gave the people food
and straightened out deeds, and anything that was wrong, why, they
straightened it out. Because that fella left an awful mess. They allowed,
the Flaglers had a commissary to begin with where you could buy your
groceries but when they, when this guy absconded with the money they
allowed each married couple five dollars a month to live on and a
bachelor got three. I thought that was pretty good -----------------
the man sits right here and the guy that works in pineapples in 1917
Indian River living for a dollar and a half a week we could live high.
So I asked my mother how in the world they could live on that. She said
that they got along fine. People it didn't take long before they had
a garden and the gardens weren't all full of bugs and have to be sprayed
everyday. Everything grew nice. Since the got lower it
got affected by the nematodes and it became hard to raise anything
anymore and of course you know that the gardens all were, how the bugs
were and she said there was plenty of game and the fish were very plentiful.
She said that salt por k was five cents a pound or five pounds for a
St. Lucie Tape #8
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quarter which would be five cents a pound. The coffee, and
I know there are plenty of you here know about old green coffee,
the kind you roasted yourself and ground up, five cents a pound. And
everything else was of course probably cheap. One of the big problems
when they started White City was clearing the land. That was something
you had to do by hand with a grubbing hoe and an axe and shovel and
plowing. But the plowing was something that you couldn't do by hand so
to begin with there was one old man that had one mule and he broke what
land he could with a little single one horse plow, but the Flaglers
came to the rescue again. They sent somewhere in the north and brought
down two teams of mule and two wagonsand plows, and what they call a
You'll never see one today. And there wasn't much of a
I can tell you that. Fdr the colonists, the first team of
mules, or the one team of mules went to Jim Nelson. Some of you may know
Victoria That was her father and he was the farmer for the
east side of the river. The other team of mules, my dad got one. We
lived on a place about a mile west of the St. Lucie River on Midway. My
dad got one mule and a man named Carl Stein got the other, but they lived
side by side. Both mules were need to break land and that was a tough job
with a team of mules, when they were available. The team of mules came
into Fort Pierce way late at night and '-r. Nelson and Mr. Stein had to
meet the train and they had to assemble the wagons, hitch up the mules,
and by that time it was nearly midnight. And on the same train that the
mules came in on, Mrs. Carl came in. Now that was a long
time ago, before 1893. Well of course Fort Pierce wasn't anything and
she didn't know where to go but she saw these two men and mules and she went
up to them and they offered, they knew her father and offered her a ride
to White City but that was before the bridge or ferry were put in across
St. Lucie Tape #8
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the St. Lucie River, so she was still stuck with the problem but these
two men with her brought her out a neighbor who lived nearby who owned
a rowboat. He rowed her about a half a mile up the river to the
place which went to the river but once she got there she still
had to walk a quarter of a mile'to her house, and way after midnight she
and she surely did surprise me. One thing that always
intrigued me and I got this information from Mrs. Louise Schultz, and
maybe some of you know her, she's still living in White City, There were
no roads to White City, well, the railroad hadn't of course, come to
White City yet when White City started, and there were no raods out to
what is now, well, what used to be the White City station. That was a
busy place at one time during the pineapple season and fruit season. It
took agents to handle the business there. Today I don'-+thin the trains
even stop. But the train service was available to White City,
They had two steamboats that operated on the St. Lucie River from about
Sewall's Point up to White City and the landing was right close to what
is now the bridge across the river at Midway. The name of the steamboat
was Verillion and the captains name was Hale and the engineers name was
Harry Schultz. Well, if there's anyone here from Jensen they will know
Harry Schultz because he finally went down there. The other steamers name
was Della. The captain was Mattson and the engineer was Lawrence Christianson
who later married and just north of the present bridge
ferry had not operated, of course, just pulled
across -by ropes. The ropes about a thousand feet north of the bridge
and it landed on a low level on the east side. Wouldn't do any good in
the rainy season. Then as soon as they could they built a bridge across
St. Lucie TApe #8
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the river, volunteer, and in the meantime, Henry Larson, who lived
on the west side of the river, saw mill_
and a man named Campbell had one out on the highway. The one that
originated in White City went out of business so Larson cut the lumber
for the bridge. And at that:time he wouldfind,it hard to find lumber
for a hundred dollars a thousand and the volunteer labor got the piling
but then came this problem .of driving the piling with no machinery of
any kind so they made a hand operated winch and Mr. Larson, who was an old
country blacksmith, very ingenious, he could do anything, he fixed some
sort of a tripping attachment up at the top of the hois tthat when you
pull the black, that was a big pine block, .- to the top as a releasing
rope and the block would drop free. I don't know how it worked because
I wasn't even born, but men used to talk about it a lot. They built that
bridge but it was only a single lane bridge. So if you were coming from
the wed: and someone was coming from the east, whoever got on there first
had the right-of-way and the other fellow had to wait. The bridge was built
at the level the present bridge ----------- probably not
six inches difference. But in those days it was a big difference. The
east side of the bank was a lot higher than the west so on the west side
of the river they had to build a sort of a ramp like approach and the
planks and it would get slippery and the horses didn't like
it. They had an awful time sometimes getting them over. It was easier
to build like that than it was to fill. Now the old roads, you're familiar
with Midway and White City to get to the west side in the old days you
had to go north way over then across the swamp and the
creek which is about ten feet wide but it was the highest of the low
ground they could find. Later on they remedied this and put the road
St. Lucie Tape #8
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to the south side of the main bridge, right on the river bank. The river
was awful crooked and it didn't work. It today that was all straightened
out by canals but the old river went around the edge of White City Park.
There was, now it's filled up. You wouldn't even know that
the river was there, hardly. There was a lagoon came off that and it was
so muddy that if yon sink a piling in it it would just drop out of
sight so they, because of the other road that's across the river, being
so low the county had organized, and was St. Lucie County by that time, that
happened they built a bridge over the little lagoon that you crossed
Midway across the bridge on the left you see two sets of piling and
maybe wonder why. Well the first set we wiggled down because the mud
was so soft. It dropped out of sight almost and they thought that they
could wiggle them down enough that they, could establish a bridge. They did
all right, but as the heavier loads of wood and stuff went over, the bridge
became so uneven that you couldn't hardly drive over and it was possibly
unsafe. Well then the county was new and there was no machinery available
so they took a new, made a new pile driver, hand operated winch and put
in more stable piling and had a good bridge and then you could cross the
the lowland on the west side of the river at all but just the
short periods in the highest flood season. But before that there was
weeks, three and four months at a time when you couldn't get across the river
unless you swam or took a boat because of the high water, the
high water. There was a man named Mel Hanson one of the scouts that
came down and a fellow named Sam Samson took a boat at the White City
River bridge .They went out Midway until about what is now U.S. 1 just
before you come to College Park. There's a little ridge in there. They
took this boat and went right in, down Midway, U.S.1 and turned north
St. Lucie Tape #8
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just a little ways and skirted that little ridge, came back on Midway
and rode, paddle the boat all the way to Savannah. People today have no
idea how high the water got. Now when I was a boy, this commissary that
the Flaglers started finally turned into a store, was first and
then _Many a time, and the other old timers out there too
tied their boat to a porch and even then sometimes the water would be
so high that they'd have to pack stuff up on the counter because it
was all over the floor. I've take a boat from what's now the St. Lucie
River Bridge from White City on Midway all the way up to what we knew
in the old days as second branch of Flat Creek. Right up Sunrise Boulevard
and you wouldn't believe it today but that was the condition before they
had drainage. One day I was up there and I Mrs. Platt's,, you see
Norman and Phillip, Mrs. Platt's was the mother. On her way I think
she went to Michigan. My mother used to bake bread for the boys and I
loved to take it out to them. This time I had to take it out in a boat
and as I was crossing Flat Creek right up Sunrise Boulevard, now, I met
Eric Gustavuson, used to be City Manager and he's over six feet tall. He
was wading across Flat Creek. The on Flat Creek was up to water
this deep and he says,"I'll give you a dollar if you'll take me to my
daddy's house," which was the landing sight where the people of White
City, scouts in White City stop. Of course, I'd have taken him for
nothing but paid for a quarter but a dollar and I only
had to take him to the White City store. His father was up there for
groceries. The White City Bridge; after it was established, was quite
an important bridge. Now to the west of us we had Ocheechobee which was
Tanti in the old days and Bassinger and Fort Drum, and south you had
everything from Jupiter south and the only way you could get to
those places was to come over the White City Bridge because I mean
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before now they had bridges at Stuart. This was the very early days and when
at Fort Pierce was a port and Florida had a lot of forts there were a lot
of military routes, army roads they called them, army trails, and there
was one west of White City, from Fort Pierce to White City and Fort Pierce
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