Tag Archives: Jacksonville Historical Society

Remembering O.Z. Tyler, Epic Poet on Willow Branch Canal

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A quarter century ago, the ancient epic poet, “the Colonel,” opened his Tudor style home on Willow Branch Canal to a poet in his 20s. Orville Zelotes Tyler, Jr. wanted to be to America, to the South, to Jacksonville what Homer was to Ancient Greece, and his subject was Osceola, the Seminole leader who’d resisted the U.S. Army and was only captured under truce. 

Terminal Hotel

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While I hate to add this endnote to a tragic story from a week ago, after just posting the celebratory story of Ethiopian Timkat in Jax, I must share how the stories of Jax writers Hamilton Jay and Sam Russ led to one more tragedy connected by an old Jax hotel. So here’s what happened at the Terminal Hotel in LaVilla in 1912 and the half century that followed. Thank you, Mitch Hemann of the Jacksonville Historical Society, for pushing this one forward.

Two Christmas Stories

Read one JaxPsychoGeo Christmas story, and get the other free.

Click below for the story of the James E. Merrill House.

And is the toy gun that lies on the child’s bed really Arthur’s? Was it too a Christmas present? And is it really Arthur’s bed? Did Arthur lie here looking through the window onto the sleeping-porch on the second-story back of the house in his last year, his eighth year, 1906?

And / Or … Click below… “Oh ho ho / Who wouldn’t go? / Up on the housetop, click, click, click, / Down through the chimney” to old St. Nick’s Lounge on Atlantic Boulevard?

“May we invite you to enjoy our hospitality?”