Tag Archives: USCT

New Story: Part One–River House Apartments/Riverside House/Rochester House

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Mary Todd Lincoln stayed in this Riverside house when it was located in Brooklyn and called Rochester House. After four months, she fled Jacksonville in the midst of a nervous breakdown. It’s one of the oldest houses in the neighborhood and the last of the hotels from the city’s Victorian tourist age. The nephew of a great Southern novelist has lived here for 40 years. Rachel remembers fondly her very own “River House ghost story.” Click below for part one of the story.

 

Walking the Vanished Old Panama Road

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The Old Panama Road disappeared beneath the Northside of the city 120 years ago. This story tracks it. It heads north from the murder of Marie Gato, past Club Steppin’ Out, through the diary of a black Civil War soldier reading Lord Byron, a Spanish American War camp teeming with Typhoid Fever and the burning of a sawmill the size of a small town. 

Black Masonic Temple

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What these walls have seen! Architects Mark and Sheftall began their own firm in 1912 and with a commission for the grandest building in black Jacksonville. The Black Masonic Temple formed the brick foundation of the black community.

Princess Laura Adorkor Kofi preached her “back to Africa” message here in the 1920s. Future Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Leander Shaw had his offices here in the 1960s. And the tunnels beneath Broad Street would offer protection if Florida’s massacres of black communities at Ocoee, Perry, and Rosewood should spread to Jacksonville.