Tag Archives: John Mathews

The Napoleon Bonaparte Broward House at Pilot Town by Fort George Island

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

In its century and a half, the Napoleon Bonaparte Broward house has been empty more than lived in. It hoists its widow’s walk from the roof at Fort George Island. Built by a New York dentist in the 1870s, now the hq of the Timucuan Parks Foundation, the house will forever be associated with Broward, the Duval County sheriff, Jax city councilman, state representative and Florida governor who smuggled guns to Cuba and wanted to drain the Everglades and start racial apartheid.

The Klan in Jax Politics, Story no. 6

Click below for the sixth story in a series of seven about the KKK in Jacksonville. On June 13th, come to Coniferous Cafe in downtown Jax at 7 pm, to hear Tim Gilmore’s talk “The Klan in Jax: Its Repugnant Rise and Hysterical Collapse.

Confederate generals like Nathan Bedford Forrest formed the KKK in Tennessee in the wake of the Civil War in 1866. A prominent Jacksonville attorney and Klansman had dubbed himself Nathan II in 1950.

Jacksonville would name another prominent bridge after Governor Fuller Warren, former Jacksonville City Councilman and Klansman. In 1949, Warren called the Klan “covered cowards and sheeted jerks,” but only after Jax Klansman and Baptist preacher A.C. Shuler outed Warren in a sermon as a Kluxer.