Stealth Journeys with the Steam Mapper

Chapter 66: More Land History of Florida

Stef's maternal grandmother Nora (Eleanor) had her own Florida Tales and could claim a much longer Florida ancestral history.   Eleanor's family included several clans of Florida pioneers who settled into Florida before it was even a U.S. territory.   Some of these families arrived from Georgia in the late 1820's.  They settled at Fort Brooke, Fort King, and Fort Dade, not necessarily the forts most associated with these names.   More than one Florida fort was named Dade, or Brooke, and Fort King.

Grandma Nora, named Eleanor for a "great times fifteen" grandmother Eleanor of Aquitaine married to King Henry II.  (Tammy later learned while watching Finding Your Roots, on PBS, that Michael Strahan and Gaby Hoffman are also descendants, proving that it is a small world.)   The Queen Eleanor's tenth child was King John from whom Nora descended along more than one lineage.  She liked to tell of the 1845 marriage of her great grandparents at Fort King (Ocala, Florida).  That couple, like many did much to settle central Florida and beyond, as crackers, and cattlemen, and grove owners, and businessmen, and teachers, and community leaders.  But Grandma Nora liked to begin with Ocala and end with Gainesville in telling her tales.

Ocala's name came from the name of a nearby Indian village, "Ocali", which means "water's edge", a village known to have had a visit from Hernando De Soto way back in 1539.   In 1825, an Indian trading post existed just a couple miles east of the town site.  In 1827, the post was occupied with U.S. troops and named Fort King. During the Seminole War, the fort was headquarters for Central Florida.

One prominent forefather first homesteaded near Fort Dade, having come from his family's Georgia plantation near the Little Ogeechee River and the twelve- mile canal leading to the Savanah River which transported their cotton and rice harvests.   In the 1850s, he would become part of the Florida Mounted Cavalry and serve in the Third Seminole War.   He came to Florida because he had heard that wild cattle roamed as thick as trees.  He found the skirmishes with Seminoles too unsettling and settled for a while up at Fort King, where he married his sixteen- year- old neighbor, and later brought her back to his homestead in Pasco County where they raised up a huge family of enterprising, hardworking sons and daughters who did their family proud.

Stef later learned that planters and farmers came from Georgia and the "Carolinas" because their crop production was starting to fail and no amount of hard work and slaves could do the work needed to improve the soil.  Their failure to practice crop rotation had brought down their empires, and moving on to fertile ground was the best recourse.   Stef found irony in learning that generations of planters were responsible for their own decline in wealth already becoming evident before the Civil War.

Another brother also came south to Florida to seek his fortune.   The family plantation would one day be burned down as General Sherman's troops marched to the sea.   These sons supported the Confederacy as suppliers of cattle, and as middle-aged men they chose to stay on their farms and raise food and children.  Stef was proud to say that the family tree had soldiers fighting on both sides of the War Between the States, as well as fighting in the War of 1812, the Revolutionary War, and the French and Indian War.

Their descendants would also fight in the many wars with U.S. involvement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  The ancestors fought alongside General George Washington and were even part of his Masonic Lodge.  The patriotism and courage of the ancestral clan sounded as impressive as the contributions to ocean exploration of Robert Fulton, Ned Land, and Sir Steven Payne.

These early Florida pioneers raised their own cotton and wool for carding, spinning and weaving.   They made their own soaps and candles and ropes.    They had plenty of livestock and cultivated citrus groves and gardens, and built schoolhouses and churches and served public office and taught school in their spare time.

Grandma Nora met Ed Land in Gainesville, while he was a veterinary student, and she was working in student services.   Their life-long marriage produced two daughters, Lili and Tammy.

Grandma Nora would give a little laugh when she recounted the family history of the family tree. She'd say, "I'll bet they are spinning in their graves at the thought that a grandson fell in love and married my mother, "Miss Julia Jackson", whose own mother, "Bessie", a granddaughter of slaves, (Tammy learned that many slaves lived in Alachua and Marion Counties) had given birth to "Miss Julia", rearing a child everyone could see was a much lighter version of herself. "Grandma Bessie" never revealed just who fathered my mother, and the boy never asked.   They were so in love.  It was the Great Depression and finding a mate willing to struggle through a tough time of farming was a blessing.   But I can tell you Stef that your Grandma Nora is one quarter black, and in these times, sensible people have no problem with that."

And that was her story and she was sticking to it, right up until the day she died, in her sleep, at the ripe old age of ninety-eight, in 2014.  She attributed her longevity to her father's side, since their history of long lives goes all the way up to Eleanor of Aquitaine, who lived into her eighties and for whom she was named.

Nora had loved the book written by Cid Ricketts Sumner back in 1948.   It was the novel  Tammy out of Time, which inspired the movie starring Debbie Reynolds.  Lili and Tammy were named for Grandma Nora's two favorite movies and their theme songs, and the children remember their mother singing the songs when they were little.  She sang these songs all of her life.   Even as dementia set in around her 94th birthday, Grandma Nora could be heard humming and singing:  "I hear the cottonwoods whispering above . . . Tammy's in love."   "A song of love is a sad, sad song, don't ask me how I know. . ."

Tammy told Stef that Grandma Nora campaigned hard to have her firstborn grandchild named Leslie. "Could be for either one of my two favorite actors:  Leslie Nielsen (The bachelor in Tammy and the Bachelor) or Leslie Caron (who played the title role in Lili  )", she said.  "Aunt Lili named her twins Debbie and Leslie and that settled that.   Otherwise you could have been named Leslie", Mom told Stef.   Much better to be named after the Steam Mapper and not some Hollywood star.  Close call.