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    Volusia County's West Side: Steamboats & Sandhills
    Volusia County's West Side: Steamboats & Sandhills
    Volusia County's West Side: Steamboats & Sandhills
    Ebook193 pages1 hour

    Volusia County's West Side: Steamboats & Sandhills

    By Ronald W. Williamson, Bill Dreggors and Irene Dreggors

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    About this ebook

    This collection of popular Sense of Place columns by Daytona Beach News-Journal award-winning writer Ronald Williamson chronicles the sleepy streams, poignant passages and timeless traditions of the hilly western side of Volusia County a place quite different from the hustle and bustle of the Daytona Beach area. Majestic St. Johns River steamboats replace speeding racecars, and subdued s ances at an old spiritualist camp replace brash biker bashes and spring break revelry. From slavery and segregation to Madame Clarissa Zaraza and mayhaw jelly from swampy creeks, these stories are a moving account from a master storyteller.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe History Press
    Release dateSep 22, 2008
    ISBN9781625848840
    Volusia County's West Side: Steamboats & Sandhills
    Author

    Ronald W. Williamson

    Ronald Williamson lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains in 1972 when he married a DeLand native whose family traced its roots in Volusia County to 1803. He fell under the spell of the St. Johns River country and began writing stories about this place that fascinated natives and transplanted residents alike. A natural storyteller, his knowledge is gleaned through more than three decades of local reporting about news, personalities and history for the Daytona Beach News-Journal. He has won numerous writing awards on a regional, state and national level.

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      Book preview

      Volusia County's West Side - Ronald W. Williamson

      2006

      INTRODUCTION

      Finding stories isn’t hard. Unbroken streams of stories about people and places and things, of events past and present and future, swirl endlessly around us.

      The hard part for me is finding a story that can be told within the constraints of a daily newspaper. It has to be a story worth telling and one that someone might want to read. It has to have enough facts to be sensible and informative. It has to be the right length, and it has to be told before the deadline.

      Many fascinating stories fall short of one or more basic requirements.

      So this is, by definition, a collection of arbitrary little stories that happened to meet the requirements, mostly about the west side of Volusia County, where I live. Except for relatively minor changes, they are as they appeared over a period of years in the Daytona Beach News-Journal.

      They’re not comprehensive. Not nearly. They’re mere random postcards that offer a quick glimpse at some aspect of a building, stream, life or event, while disregarding many great chunks of the whole.

      A weekly column is a great motivator. Deadlines loom and pass, and are replaced by another and another, always, always, always—like waves slapping a shore. Stories are never perfectly told. They’re often hurried efforts, written with frequent glances at the clock in the back of the newsroom. I always know they can be better, if only I had a little more time to research or write.

      But the deadline always wins.

      So, for better or for worse, there’s no order to these stories. Some serious and important subjects of this place are totally ignored. Others get too much attention. Each story is not necessarily the best story that could be told, or the most interesting, or greatest, or perhaps not even the story that should have been told. They’re merely the stories that were possible to tell at a given time, in a given place.

      And, I hope, stories worth the telling.

      Part I

      SHADOWS OF THE PAST

      BLIND SARAH

      The paper is yellowed and the edges frayed. I turn the pages tenderly, slowly, scanning penned words and dates, taking great care not to harm the thin, sewn book.

      Bound in leather, the volume is a relic of the earliest days of Volusia County, kept in the courthouse archives in DeLand.

      Nearly 150 years of deterioration has made its delicate pages thin and brittle. Some are browned and blotched by dampness and carelessness. They bear circular marks of cups or glasses of liquid sipped by sloppy nineteenth-century scriveners. Clerks and copyists used many hues of ink that have bled through the paper, mixing with faded words on the opposite side.

      Deciphering some mottled pages is impossible.

      The documents aren’t that interesting, anyway. I find myself merely glancing at pages, scanning words and numbers and signatures in the dry and tedious government contracts, petitions, election results and tax collections.

      Then I stop.

      My attention is riveted to pages of names. They’re written in dark, rusty ink by a practiced hand. I begin to read. It’s an 1855 inventory by appraiser Elijah Watson of the property of Thomas Starke, a prominent planter along the St. Johns River who lived near today’s DeLeon Springs.

      Watson appraised everything—quilts, spittoons, clocks, a harness, tools, lamps, bedsteads. Each item was given a monetary value: a mahogany dining table, $25.00; cane bottom chairs, $0.25; a backgammon board, $0.10; candles, $0.06; a carriage, $25.00; a wagon, $50.00; cattle were worth $5.00 a head; oxen $15.00; and various horses at $100.00. A black mule named Zack was valued at $125.00.

      Old county ledgers line the shelves at the clerk of the circuit court’s record center in DeLand. Photo by Chad Pilster, courtesy of the News-Journal.

      Then there were the slaves, spread across three pages. Watson appraised more than one hundred individuals, writing each person’s given name. There were no last names, no description, no indication of skill or experience, appearance or age.

      Just a name and a value. Like the mules.

      The lack of detail invites imagination. All that’s known of these faceless humans is their name and value, written in this stained book. It may be the only proof they ever existed. Yet they lived real lives, played out in the place we live today.

      Reading names aloud to myself, I try to envision the individual.

      Was Anna tall? Did Rachel have long hair, or cropped? Was Daniel a kind man? Were Henry’s hands malformed, or well shaped? Did Stella wear bracelets? Was Paris handsome and Venus beautiful? What did Dinah wear? Did she have children? What was the sound of her laugh?

      Did she laugh?

      There are no answers. Nothing is known, not even the site of the slave quarters where they lived. It hasn’t been found and studied like others, but historians tell us slave communities were rich with music, storytelling, worship, healing and relationships.

      Slave names are common in the oldest tax and probate records of Volusia County. Photo by author.

      No one knows what life was like for Rachel or for Paris. All that remains are the names in this book, and their cash value.

      I think of the appraiser walking among the group, eyeing them, feeling them, setting a value. The most valuable of Starke’s slaves were five or six men worth $1,000 each. Daniel was one. Henry was another.

      The most valued women were worth $800. Anna was worth $800. Aisly and Stella, too. Were they strong? Smart? Skilled? Fertile? Rachel was worth only $700; Dinah, $300; and Tinda, $100, less than a mule. Watson priced Aisly’s infant at $100 and Julia’s at $50.

      What, I wonder, makes a fifty-dollar difference in babies?

      I linger over one name—Blind Sarah. The value of Blind Sarah is entered with three zeros. Scribbled after her name is a single word: worthless.

      Worthless? I mouth the word. My head shakes slowly. I cannot fathom the world of Blind Sarah. I cannot fathom a world where a human can be without worth.

      There are no tax records for 1855, but Volusia County tax records of 1860 show 117 taxpayers, including 39 who paid taxes on 272 slaves. Most owners had only one, but Jacob Brock owned 11, John Sheldon 3, Henry Clifton 4 and H.E. Osteen 2. They paid county and state taxes on the human property—one-sixth of 1 percent of the value, or $1.67 a year for Henry or Daniel.

      Owning a human is a concept so far removed from my experience that my thoughts stumble when I try to imagine it. I cannot. But the resonant sound of syllables from long-silent names lends authenticity to the vanished truths of these discolored pages.

      Time passes slowly as I read the names aloud. I am somehow compelled to read each one and not skip any name of this group of humans who slipped through the cracks of history so long ago. This may be the first time their names have been spoken for generations.

      Does it stir Stella’s spirit?

      Alone in a room of humming humidifiers, I am fulfilling some strange obligation. I feel nearer the past, and more aware of the present.

      Descendants of slaveholders named in this old book still live here. Their family names have been preserved through generations. Descendants of the slaves surely live here, too, though it’s nearly impossible to know. Blind Sarah’s family history wasn’t written. No one knows what became of Blind Sarah.

      The legacy of slavery in America has been studied and described by many great minds, scholars and writers. I can’t begin to add to their insights, but I know the realities suggested in this old text haven’t fully disappeared.

      Slavery’s footprints still mark the place we live, trailing through these sand hills along the St. Johns River.

      My feelings bear witness to those footprints.

      Published June 12, 2004.

      STEAMBOAT GRAVES

      Beneath a bridge streaming with ceaseless, snarling interstate traffic, and below the still water, silt and sand of a Lake Monroe bayou lie bits and pieces of the scattered remains of two nineteenth-century steamboats.

      Their journeys to this place began a thousand miles away and a thousand miles apart and were filled with thousands of crooked bends in rivers and creeks, inlets and bays. Both vessels helped enrich businessmen, but when they were worn out, they were stripped and the hulks abandoned to a grave on the muddy banks of DeBary Creek.

      Graves are about all that’s left of St. Johns River steamboats.

      It’s remarkable that, after a century of looming so large in this area’s life and economy, so little is left of the huge, raucous vessels that owned the river between the 1830s and 1930s. Even the memories of steamboats are slipping away.

      Somehow, it seems there would be more.

      You would think so, but darn—there isn’t, said Edward A. Mueller, Jacksonville. He has lived in Florida half a century, written many books on steamboats and probably knows more about St. Johns River steamers than any person on Earth.

      About all that’s left are rotting pilings and submerged piers all along the river. There are many of them, all kinds, but that’s about all that’s left.

      Even those nondescript remnants have to be searched out. There’s no map and no guidebook, not even to the few fragments of steamboats displayed in area museums, parks and historic sites.

      The busiest steamboat dock in Volusia County was in Enterprise. Straight rows of submerged, rotten stubs of pilings are still there, marching into the lake.

      Four steamboats are docked in front of the Brock House at Enterprise about 1886—the Fannie Dugan, the City of Jacksonville, the Chattahoochee and an unknown smaller boat. Some scholars say the third steamer is the Queen of the St. Johns. Courtesy of the West Volusia Historical Society.

      They mark the

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