Tag Archives: T. Frederick Davis

The Urban Legend(s) of “Barefoot Bill”

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“Barefoot Bill” seemed to be everywhere in Jacksonville at once, a phantom menace, a “burglar bugaboo,” pilfering bedrooms of prominent citizens as they ate dinner downstairs. Whether or not he ever existed, Bill made headlines from the 19-aughts to the 1930s and as far away as South Carolina. Maybe he’s out there still.

Hunter’s Mill and the Cursed Waterfront

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The East Jacksonville waterfront lies vacant where Shad Kahn talks of building a Four Seasons Hotel. Long ago, before workers built 82 ships here in World War II, Hunter’s Mill and the waterfront sawmills were violent places, full of arson, murder and suicide.

The Bodies Left Behind in Billy Goat Hill

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A hundred years after the bodies were moved, workers digging immediately north of St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral found skeletons. Four decades later, other workers found skulls. Is anybody still down there? These are the kinds of things that can happen when you work in older parts of a city, he said.

New Story: The Whipping Post

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Sometimes Gregg Allman felt like he’d been tied, in 1969, to the whipping post. Thomas Frederick Davis, in 1925, author of the History of Jacksonville, Florida, said the whole idea of a whipping post was fiction. In 1911, he praised it.

Big Jim, Mouthpiece of the City’s Wild Soul

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Rexall Drugs sold the Americanitis Elixir to salve the nerves of anxious city dwellers suffering from noises like Big Jim. The State Board of Health condemned the old steam whistle, said it brought strong, rugged men to the breaking point. 

John Einig, the same inventor who built Jacksonville’s first automobile, had designed Big Jim. The whistle sounded the end of world wars, the dawn of electric lighting, the Great Fire of 1901, and the death of its inventor. The 140 year old whistle still sounds four times a day over Springfield and Downtown.

The Jacksonville Free Public Library–Whose Heads These Are I Think I Know

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Shakespeare and Herodotus look out across downtown from the tops of these columns. Whose heads would I stake here?

In a special election, Jacksonville nearly rejected Andrew Carnegie’s magnanimous donation for a new library.

I’d still like to find Elizabeth Long. I wonder if she’d touch me the way she touched the armless Hermes.