Tag Archives: Willie Browne

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

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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.

The Story of Tree Hill

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This is the story of Tree Hill, of impounding the creeks for a mill pond 200 years ago; the famed herpetologist and the boa constrictor; the woman on horseback who knew all the land’s secrets; the strange translucent pyramid; of the annual butterfly festival, of a thousand native butterflies taking flight at once.

Recalling Book Burnings at Jacksonville University

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The 1970 Jacksonville University yearbook, the Riparian, was a collector’s item before the year was out. That fraternity members burned the book helped. So did the national news of JU’s president’s threatening to withhold the editor’s diploma. Half a century later, JU grads treasure it as an almost sacred object.

The Myth of Ancient Floridian Giants

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The fiction that the Timucua and other indigenous Florida peoples were seven to nine feet tall spread rapidly in the 1950s. My mother believed it, told me we were descended. Another fiction. Willie Browne and Father Dearing believed it. D.B. McKay — Tampa mayor, newspaper editor, and chief organizer of the White Municipal Party — believed nine foot tall ancient Floridians populated the Garden of Eden. So where did these ideas come from?

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.

New Story: Round Marsh (by the Willie Browne Trail)

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People have theorized Round Marsh the result of a meteor, others that it’s the remains of a British rice paddy and a 4,000 year old cypress pond. Willie Browne led friends on hikes around the pond and archaeologists have combed its shores. The World War II airplane and its pilot, meanwhile, are still in the marshes to the north. Willie Browne often said he could hear “the thunder of horsemen racing by in the distance,” when no one was there.

50 Years Ago, Willie Browne Died

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This week marks 50 years since Willie Browne died. The hermit was famous in his own time, but his gift of hundreds of acres to The Nature Conservancy has made him a kind of conservationist saint. If you visited his cabin in what’s now the Theodore Roosevelt Area of the Timucuan Preserve, he always knew when you’d stepped onto his land.