Tag Archives: Duval County

New Story: Baldwin: Everybody’s Restaurant

Click below for this week’s story, or navigate the city through the direction buttons at the top of the page:

The restaurant’s “been here forever,” they say, Minnie Bennett-Lynn “renamed it from Sunshine” and “wasn’t messin’ around.” Mr. Thigpen “supplied fresh horses for the stage and for its passengers he supplied food and shelter.” The town called Thigpen city fathers renamed for Dr. A.S. Baldwin. The fried okra’s better’n the fried squash.

New Story: Jacksonville Beach: New Trinity, Killing the Devil, and the Murder of Vera Gould

Click below for the full story:

After the three young people stabbed K.’s grandmother to death in her Jacksonville Beach home, newspapers quoted them calling her “Satan,” themselves “the New Trinity” and Lex Hester, one of the most prominent men in Jacksonville’s political history, “the Antichrist.”

 

 

Part One of a New Series: What Ever Happened to Beverly June?

Click below for the full story:

Every day, he replayed the Wednesday he’d come home from work at 6 pm—February 24, 1960—to find his wife gone, the baby crying alone in her crib.

Neighbors said the stranger had been parking a blue 1958 Ford across the street from the Cochrans’ for three weeks and reading a newspaper for hours at a time.

New Story: Death and Life of a Spanish American War Fort

Click below for the full story:

The guns never fired. Behind concrete parapets, the two eight foot long, 16-ton “rifles” peered over the bluff, waiting for the Spanish ships to take the St. Johns River into Jacksonville.

saw1

Perhaps the spirits they believed haunted these grounds and witnessed walking up from munitions tunnels were the ghosts of their virginities.

saw9