Tag Archives: T. Frederick Davis

The Urban Legend(s) of “Barefoot Bill”

Posted on March 9, 2023 | Leave a comment

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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.

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Tagged "high murder rate in the South, A.J. Hedrick, Barefoot Bill, blackface, Calvin Oak, Daddy Mention, Daddy Mention Polk County, G.T. Gato, John Henry, John N.C. Stockton, Jose Huau, Judge W.H. Baker, murder rate Jacksonville, Old Folks at Home, Stagga Lee, Stagger Lee, Stagolee, Stephen Foster, Stetson Kennedy, T. Frederick Davis, Vaudeville, W.H. Baker, Way Down Upon the Swanee River, Zora Neale Hurston

Hunter’s Mill and the Cursed Waterfront

Posted on February 17, 2023 | Leave a comment

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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.

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Tagged Alexander and Hardie, Commodore Point, Dexter Hunter, Elder Eugene Lindsley, Eppinger and Russell, Four Seasons Jacksonville, Green Cove Springs and Melrose Railroad, H.D. Holland, Henry Clark, Hogans Creek, Hunter's Mill, Hunter's Saw Mill, John O’Neill (or O’Neil), Richard Montgomery, Seminole Club Jacksonville, Shad Kahn, Sheriff H.D. Holland, Springfield Advent Christian Church, St. Johns River Shipbuilding Company, T. Frederick Davis, T.V. Cashen, The Pond Jacksonville, Western Railway Company of Florida, Yellow Fever, Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1888

The Bodies Left Behind in Billy Goat Hill

Posted on January 8, 2021 | Leave a comment

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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.

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Tagged A.M. Reed, Billy Goat Hill, Cathedral District Jacksonville, Charles Willey, downtown Jacksonville, Florida history, History of Jacksonville, Jacksonville history, Old City Cemetery, Parks at the Cathedral, Paul Krutco, St. John's Episcopal, T. Frederick Davis, Tim Gilmore

New Story: The Whipping Post

Posted on August 3, 2019 | Leave a comment

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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.

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Tagged Allman Brothers Band, frederick douglass, Gregg Allman, Jennifer Grey, matthew brady, T. Frederick Davis, Thomas Frederick Davis, Tim Gilmore, whipping post

Big Jim, Mouthpiece of the City’s Wild Soul

Posted on January 19, 2019 | 1 comment

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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.

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Tagged Americanitis Elixir, Big Jim, Big Jim steam whistle. Americanitis, Florida State Board of Health, Jacksonville Electric Authority, Jacksonville Waterworks, James Patterson, jaxpsychogeo, JEA, John Einig, Kiley Secrest, Lou Winnard, Patsy Bryant, S.B. Hubbard, Sandy Strickland, Sarah Clarke Stuart, Springfield Jacksonville, St. James Hotel, T. Frederick Davis, Tim Gilmore, Waterworks Building

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

Posted on May 26, 2018 | 1 comment

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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.

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Tagged Andrew Carnegie, Bedell, Bedell Law Firm, Charles Pillans, Chester Bedell, Colored Reading Room, DeVault, Dittmar, Elizabeth Long, Florida Historical Quarterly, George Bedell, George Utley, Haydon Burns, Henry John Klutho, Horatio Bisbee, Jacksonville Free Public Library, jaxpyschogeo, Jim Crooks, Lynn Skapyak Harlin, Pillans & Coxe P.A., Rocco Morabito, T. Frederick Davis, Taylor Hardwick, The Mad Atlas of Virginia King, Tim Gilmore, Virginia King