by jon bosworth jaxvillain@yahoo.com
William Hart awoke to Isaiah, his 15 year-old son, excitedly shouting that they were going to Florida. The Hart family had planned a trip to visit Isaiah’s sister Rebecca on her and her husband’s land on the St. Johns River in Florida from their farm in St. Mary’s Georgia. The reason for the trip was just a long-time, no-see affair. The last time William Hart had seen his daughter was during their last visit in 1801 when William was shot trying to save the king of Spain’s horses from American raiders disguised as Seminole Indians.
Since his last visit to Florida, 11 years earlier, he and his son-in-law, John Roberts, who owned the most profitable sawmill in the Spanish colony of Florida, had often discussed the economic benefit of Florida becoming a free state in America. Although American taxes had recently increased, and many Americans were grumbling about the fact, their taxes on industry were still far less than Spain’s. For John Roberts that was the crux of the debate. As long as Florida was a Spanish colony, American buyers had to pay import tariffs on anything they bought from him, which meant his price was at least the same, and often higher, than the price of his competitors. In addition to all this, Spain was no longer protecting them against “Indian attacks.”
Due to this unfortunate circumstance and the mounting pressure of nationalism in America, William began to feel that it was necessary for America to fulfill its destiny of complete control over North America. This initiated a national sense of opposition to Canada, which was still loyal to Britain, and Florida, which was still a Spanish province.
In America a new judicial system had been implemented and president Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the young nation, had just been sworn into office. William had heard that Seminole Indians were threatening his daughter’s success in Florida and that Governor Quesada refused to defend the business.
At the same time an American general, Andrew Jackson, was gaining notoriety for keeping the Native Americans from attacking and killing American farmers that were trying to cultivate their own land. Between Seminole attacks on American settlements and the Spanish refusal to take any action, William found himself siding with the patriots that spoke out against Spain having a colony in North America. These feelings, alongside actual travesties, finally drove Rebecca, William’s daughter, to his side in St. Mary’s Georgia.
William, who was so distraught over this development, called on some friends he knew in St. Mary’s to go to the St. John’s River and defend John and Rebecca’s sawmill. After getting several Northeast Floridians involved, this group called themselves the St. John’s Militia. This time William, with his sons Isaiah and Daniel, were all privates in this renegade military force, and they were determined to follow through with Colonel Samuel Hammond’s original plan of getting Americans to take over Florida so that the government wouldn’t have to pay to buy the state, thus increasing taxes even more.
Isaac Hendricks allowed the St. John’s Militia to stay on his property, largely because William had given him the property to begin with, and they fought off Seminole attacks on Americans in the St. John’s River area, insuring the stability of the sawmill Rebecca and John had spent so much time building and developing. While they were there defending their family’s “property” against intruders, they met other American settlers such as John McQueen, William Jones, Phillip Dell, John Jones, Robert Hutchinson, and George Atkinson. These American settlers saw their situation as being very similar to the pioneers that were heading out west, only they were protecting what they had already known, not conquering new lands.
It was during this time that William first learned that Robert Pritchard had recently disappeared and Purnal Taylor, a Spanish loyalist who had recently died, had been given Pritchard’s several acres in Cow Ford, and so they were passed on to Dona Maria Suarez, Taylor’s widow. She married a man named Hogan. In 1811, Americans under the thumb of Spanish rule revolted, bolstered by the power of a new world, and the Patriot Revolution of Florida began.
Jacksonville’s history is a dense and elusive topic, but more of it drifts into the ether everyday as our elders pass away and the buildings are torn down and the stories that hold our past disintegrate into the wet, Florida air. Much of Jacksonville’s history seems to float by unnoticed, but if you visit neighborhoods such as Riverside and Springfield, the history is somewhat tangible. What is even more frequently ignored, is the foundations of our fair city. Isaiah Hart, who surveyed the land at Cowford on the St. John’s River with a group of other local settlers, decided to make a city here. The only monument to his undertaking that enormous task is a bridge by the Jacksonville Municipal Stadium.
Gone is the monument that Isaiah erected where FCCJ’s downtown campus now stands. Most people don’t know that Isaiah Hart donated what is now Hemming Plaza to the people of Jacksonville and that his son Ossian finally officially sold the land to the city for ten dollars after the Civil War. Most people don’t know that this town’s founding family were Union sympathizers and had philosophically progressive ideas about racial equality for their time and place.
Isaiah Hart was directly influential on not only the physical location of Jacksonville, but the very heart of its people to this day. A well-meaning lot that is trying to find the moral high-road into progress. A stark contrast to the riff raff and miscreants that promoted a Civil War during his lifetime, Hart was a loving father, a wise leader, and a noble Southern gentleman when it would have been just as easy to skip all of those traits. Jacksonville was named after Andrew Jackson, as part of a political maneuver to become a national port while Jackson was campaigning for president. Unfortunately for them at the time, John Adams was elected instead. Too bad. I would have been proud to call Hart City my home.
In this issue we do our best to provide some morsels of historic facts about our Bold New City of the South (I hate the slogan “Where Florida Begins”) and incite you to look into our history for yourself. I’m not even originally from Jacksoville, but our history is compelling and fascinating and worth exploring. For factual information about the history of Jacksonville, go to the Jacksonville Historical Society’s website at jaxhistory.com and navigate through the stories and archival photographs that make up the dense history of the River City founded at Cow’s Ford, or even of the Timacuan settlement of Wakka Pilatka before that. If the soul of a town is found in it’s common areas, than the mind of a town is found in the memories that came before us and the generations of “Jacksonvillians” or “Cowfordians” or “Hart City Dwellers” that have brought us to this place in history.
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