PINE CASTLE: Home for the Holidays Part 2: FLORENCE

 

PINE CASTLE

Home for the Holidays

Celebrating America’s Paradise 

Part 2: Florence (Clark) MILTON 

Looking west from Cypress Grove Park to the Milton Homestead

During the summer of 1876, Pine Castle’s very own Will Wallace Harney wrote the following: “The benefit to a pioneer settlement by the presence of an active Christian lady, keenly alive to the moral and religious destitution around her has never been better illustrated than by the generous energy of Mrs. MILTON, a settler among us.”

Lake JESSAMINE became the location of the first Christmas service held in a church building south of downtown Orlando. The year was 1876, and the Christmas service was made possible by the untiring efforts of the devout Christian lady Harney wrote of earlier that year. Mrs. Milton was the Christian lady’s name, and the church building campaign she began was to raise funds to construct a church on the north shore of their Lake HOGAN property.

“Lake HOGAN,” wrote correspondent Harney in March of 1876, “is a half a mile from me and about six feet above Lake CONWAY and has nearly as large a basin. If it was emptied into Lake Conway without an outlet provided, it would ruin much of the Conway land.” There is no Lake Hogan today, but the number of similar sized lakes to that of Conway, within a half mile of the Harney homestead, can be counted on one finger.

Lake HOGAN of March 1876 had been renamed Lake JESSAMINE by year’s end, when the first Christmas Service was celebrated December 25, 1876.

 

Location 2 on the map above was the Milton Homestead. The X indicates the land donated for the first church located south of Orlando, Florida. (For #1, see prior post for the Anno homestead)

Two of Harney’s published 1876 articles in the Cincinnati Commercial unwittingly chronicled the name change of Pine Castle’s second largest body of water. That April, Harney wrote: “The settlements on Lake Conway and Lake Hogan have received a considerable accession from Kentucky this year.”

Thanks in large part to the excellent family research of Kelly Parks it is possible to shed light on the lake’s first name. Hogan is a surname in both ancestries of Orlando’s celebrated Patrick and Jernigan families, Mary Ann HOGAN had married Aaron Jernigan.

The signature of famed Orlando pioneer William A. Patrick was witnessed in 1882 by “A. Hogan”, and until Patrick sold his 80 acres parcel in the mid-1870s, he had owned land bordering the east shore of Lake Hogan. In fact, the property owned by Harney and Patrick provided a land bridge between Lakes Conway and Hogan (aka Jessamine) for southbound hunters, explorers and trekkers on their way to and from the remote regions of Lake Tohopekaliga and the Everglades.

 Lake Jessamine is one of 303 central Florida lakes found in my 'ORLANDO LAKES: Homesteaders & Namesakes', an encyclopedia of 19th century waterways and the pioneers who settled on these lakeshores.

Published articles in the North, authored by Will Harney and other brave souls living in the wilderness of Orange County, attracted northerners to buy Citrus-Belt land to either settle on or invest in. Among these early settlers were new “Kentucky” arrivals Harney had written about, Blue Grass "snowbirds" that included William & wife Florence (Clark) Milton. Retired Historian and UCF Professor Paul W. Wehr, one of the best authorities on Pine Castle history as far as this author is concerned, also described Florence A. Milton as an “active Christian lady”.

Author and UCF retired History Professor Paul W. Wehr, with yours truly, at my Beyond Gatlin book presentation at a Pine Castle Historical Society Quarterly Meeting 

Florence began raising funds to build a Presbyterian church, but after falling short of her goal among the locals, said Harney, she “applied to her old home, the Blue Grass region of Kentucky. The old First church in Lexington gave $30, and Mr. Young of Nicholasville in Jessamine, out of a minister’s scanty salary, gave $20.” The second contributor is worth repeating: “Mr. Young of Nicholasville, Jessamine” County, Kentucky. Nicholasville in Jessamine County was also the birthplace of John H. Harney, the father of Pine Castle’s Will Wallace Harney.

Writing again of the little Pine Castle church, Harney, in a December 23, 1876 newspaper article, wrote: “Mr. Crutchfield, a carpenter, built our church on Lake Jessamine.” Between March and December 1876, the large lake one half-mile from Harney’s homestead changed from Hogan to Jessamine, and that December, church goers in and around Pine Castle gathered for a Christmas service at that new little Presbyterian church - built on land donated by Florence Milton, land that was “200 yards from the margin of Lake Jessamine”. The church was capable of holding, it was said, 100 comfortably and 150 with crowding.

William A. Milton & M. Florence Clark had married October 13, 1869 at a Presbyterian Church in Henderson County, Kentucky. They were Lake Jessamine snowbirds for a time, but settled full time at Louisville, Kentucky. She was born at Washington, DC in 1848, where her father, a Kentucky native, worked as a law clerk. Mrs. Florence (Clark) Milton died at Louisville in 1906, and was buried in the very cemetery where Will Wallace Harney laid to rest his father in 1868. 

Thank you Rudi of Goodreads for the 4 Star Rating of Beyond Gatlin: A History of South Orange County, Florida. Your rating is sincerely appreciated. Rick Cronin

GIVE A GIFT OF HISTORY THIS HOLIDAY SEASON

Next Friday we introduce an 89 year young lady who was interviewed at her Georgia business while still gainfully employed. A former Pine Castle resident, she told the interviewer that her husband – “a spoiled scion”, had died when their son was 12 years old, leaving her “with a frozen orange grove, no money, and a growing son”. Minnie’s story is next when my special Pine Castle: Home for the Holidays blog series continues next Friday.