Part 10: Aaron
vs the ABBEVILLE Consort:
Pin the Tail
on the Donkey comes to mind when I think about how a location for the town of
Orlando appears to have been made by the 1850s “planners” of Orange County.
The long donkey’s
“tail” in this case was the 28 mile long Fort Mellon to Fort Gatlin Road. Note I used
the word “planners” rather than “settlers,” an important distinction. The 19th century organizers
of central Florida – perhaps while blindfolded – pinned their 1857 county seat at
an unremarkable location on a sand rutted military
trail 28 miles in length. There was NO lake for drinking water, NO waterway or railway for transportation to
and from the county seat, and yet for some unknown reason the site selected for Orlando seemed acceptable to all involved.
Settlers versus
planners of a place called Orlando were indeed two entirely distinct families. “Settlers”
at the time were mainly the Jernigan’s, the bravest of brave pioneers who in
the early 1840s had followed Aaron Jernigan to Mosquito County. The Jernigan-Patrick
families arrived in central Florida when there was nothing in the form of
civilization. Nothing!
Those representing the region when Jernigan arrived were residents of areas far to the north of Fort Gatlin, areas that are today Seminole and Volusia Counties.
Those representing the region when Jernigan arrived were residents of areas far to the north of Fort Gatlin, areas that are today Seminole and Volusia Counties.
Aaron Jernigan (1813-1891) Photo
courtesy of Ross Adam Wood, Sr.
Aaron
Jernigan represented a dozen or so homesteaders spread across ten square miles surrounding
present day Orlando. Not a one however, not even Aaron, homesteaded ON the
trail itself.
The “planners”
were folks I call the “Abbeville Consortium”, natives of historic Abbeville,
South Carolina. Many of the planners working to establish the town of Orlando never
even settled in the area. But of those who did come to central Florida, the
first, James & Isaphoenia Speer, arrived in 1854, a decade after
the Jernigan clan had built homes and cleared palmettos for their ‘home
garden.’ Aaron Jernigan even established a Jernigan post office - four years
before the Speer family arrived.
Although the
original settlers were mainly cattlemen, Aaron Jernigan had not only
homesteaded 160 acres prior to the “planners” arriving, he had established himself
as a land speculator on the old forts trail as well. He had opened a store at Henry
A. Crane’s lakeside town of Mellonville on Lake Monroe, and he acquired 160 lakefront
acres on Lake Lucerne, near Orlando, but before there was an Orlando. Aaron
bought 80 acres on Lake Conway at Fort Gatlin, and lakefront land far south of
the old fort, on Lake Tohopekaliga. Aaron Jernigan even owned his own island - Jernigan
Island in Lake Toho.
Aaron
Jernigan had a plan in the mid-1850s for central Florida, a wilderness of fewer
than 200 residents – a quarter of whom were his relatives. But in 1854, as the
Speer’s first followed the old forts trail south to Jernigan’s neighborhood, one
wonders what his plan was, and how that first meeting between the Jernigan’s
and Speer’s worked out. Did James Speer inform Jernigan that they too had plans
for central Florida’s remote wilderness?
Judge James G. Speer (1820-1893)
Early Settlers of Orange County
Within two
years of the Speer’s arrival an election was called to determine a location for
a new Orange County Courthouse. Attorney James G. Speer (Part 6 of this series)
and wife Isaphoenia C. (Ellington) Speer (Part 7) represented the Abbeville
Consortium; as did Abbeville, South Carolina families John R. Worthington (Part
3); Thomas Harris, Jr. (Part 8); and William & Emily (Watson) Hull (Part 9).
Then too, from
far off Talladega, Alabama, the Caldwell family (Part 5), originally of
Abbeville, fulfilled their part of the town building plan hatched by the
family’s patriarch, William Harris Caldwell.
The
Abbeville Consortium’s plan worked – Orlando, Florida was established as the
Orange County seat of government and made official October 5, 1857 with
Benjamin F. Caldwell donating land for the site of a courthouse. But then, most
all those involved in Orlando’s origin had vanished from the town within a
decade. And by 1867, even Aaron Jernigan had departed the State of Florida. Most
all of Aaron’s family who stayed in Orange County chose to relocate further
south in the county.
Legacy
requires history to remember that which occurred, but a horrific Civil War,
four short years after Orlando’s founding, threatened to erase all memory of
the hopes and dreams of one proud Abbeville consortium. A family’s who heritage
dated to America’s unprecedented Revolution and beyond, had set out to establish
a family memorial to one of their own. But by 1867, Orange County residents
struggled to survive while still enduring a demeaning post-Civil War Military
Reconstruction Period.
A nearly
abandoned 1867 town of Orlando was literally on the verge of going the way of ghost
towns. A court decree had been issued in late 1866, an order Sheriff John Ivey
had no choice but to carry out. The Sheriff was ordered to sell at auction the
landholdings of Orlando’s Postmaster, John R. Worthington, a casualty of the
Civil War.
Sheriff John
Ivey held an auction January 7, 1867, selling all 113 acres surrounding four
acres where the village of Orlando had been founded in 1857, in one package. A
merchant from Palatka, Robert R. Reid III, the son of Florida Territorial
Governor Robert R. Reid II (1789-1841) submitted the low bid of $900.
A story
about a family founding a town in memory of an ancestor came so near its
conclusion until Reid came to town that day in January 1867. And although he
returned home to Palatka, the history of this place called Orlando survived
because that “family” was more determined than ever to make it so.
Next Friday, June 14, 2019: Robert
Raymond Reid III
“First Road to Orlando” is a history of the old
Fort Mellon to Fort Gatlin Road and of how a tiny village in the middle of a
remote wilderness became the Orange County seat of government.
This
Orlando Founding Families Series delves deeper into the courageous people who
found their way down a lonely dusty forts trail – and became the first families
to settle Orlando.
Central Florida History by Richard Lee Cronin
Visit my Amazon author page by clicking on the link below
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ReplyDeleteMy name is Veleta Stephens Groll of Texas. I am a descendant of Aaron Jernigan on my maternal side. Interesting article.
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