Tag Archives: St. Johns Bluff

The Story of Lone Star Stables, and the Legendary Claris Jaques

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:

Claris Jaques was a legend in the landscape. Even people who didn’t know her knew “the woman on horseback.” Her daughter, Joan Vinson, who’d ridden bareback behind her mother since before she could walk, came to know horses best when her parents got her Lightning, and when she witnessed “the Great Stallion Fight.” She buried a horseshoe at her mother’s headstone.

Exploring the Mysteries of Cosmo and Gullah Geechee North Florida

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:

Nobody knows how Cosmo got its name. White folks live here, they just don’t know they live in Cosmo. Forged from Emancipation, this historic community of former slaves spoke its own dialects more African than African American. Oh but the buckruh knew how to get their land. Now but vestiges of Cosmo remain.

Willie Browne on the Lost Communities of Fulton and Lone Star

January 1967, Old Willie Browne, who will soon donate his hundreds of acres of forest and bluff to conservation, discusses lost communities with Father Frank Dearing. You’ll find the two stories below:

1) Here’s the lost town of Fulton, Willie’s friend Captain Hole, stories of moonshiners and buried treasure, the digging up of Fulton Cemetery.

2) And here’s the lost black community of Lone Star, one of many in the Arlington area. Here, at least the cemetery remains. Its oldest occupant was born before Jacksonville.

N.B. Forrest High School and the Other Pandemic: Opioid Addiction

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:

There’s a desperate addiction problem in every corner of the American landscape. This story is personal. It looks back 30 years to high school, to friendship, to youth, to what strange turns time takes with our lives, to how addiction can turn someone into a completely different person.