McCoys Creek: Bloody Baptism and Groundwork Resurrection

by Tim Gilmore, 3/1/2024

McCoys Creek cuts through both landscape and time. It’s flooded for thousands of years. These past two centuries, the city that’s risen around it has not been kind. Into McCoys, Jacksonville’s shot Minié balls, the blood and offal of chickens and cattle, incinerator ash and fertilizer and sewage. In response, McCoys brings forth alligators and corpses, grabs automobiles and train tracks. To wander beside the creek is to wander the history of its struggles with the city.

The waters have no name for themselves, not Francis Richard’s Creek in the 1700s, not Three Mile Run where the Confederate States of America perched a pestilence camp in the Civil War, not McCoys Creek as an 1832 city limit. The waters lie too immediate for language. They need no representation. The name’s our shorthand, not the creek’s.

Gatemouth at the St. Johns River, at the heart of the heart of the city, the creek opens now from decades the city submerged it, when Jax built Riverside Avenue and this whole concrete bank and that lovely Mid-Century Modern Florida Times-Union Building on top of it. But American newspapers sicken in the early 2000s, many die, and when the T-U, the oldest newspaper in Florida, withers to less than a 10^th of itself, the wrecking ball comes and takes the building, new apartments rise, and the City opens the mouth of the creek once more to daylight.

The creek’s mouth lies further north in the 1850s, waterfront not yet built forward, and Patient Zero lives in a wooden house on a bluff overhead at Bay and Broad Streets. The mouth, in these years, cannot be measured, as every day its width differs, dependent on rains and tides. When Nathan Vaught dies of Yellow Fever the summer of ’57, after intestinal bleeding and bleeding from every facial orifice and liver shutdown and jaundice, the McFall family next door follows, then the Currys on the bank of McCoys, then all 12 members of the Mott family. Every year the fever threatens.

And in March of 1864, the soldiers, in tatters, shoes falling to pieces, lie coughing in the rain and then smallpox comes, the Red Plague, the Speckled Monster, Confederate faces covered in ulcerous rashes, and Major General Patton Anderson of the CSA sanctions a quarantine camp, a makeshift “pest house,” housing the pestilence near the mouth of the creek.

Children, on into Reconstruction, fish McCoys Creek and Rochester House, that grand three-story inn with the mansard roof and two stories of porches near the river splintering into the creek, offers its 30 to 40 guests “facilities” for “fishing and boating.” It’s here in 1875 that Mary Todd Lincoln, the president’s widow, might be losing what’s left of her mind. She writes, “I am now looking down upon a yard with its roses, white lilacs and other flowers. (Although it is raining and we have had a good deal of rain in its soft, dreamy, light fashion.)” After the death of her husband and three of her four sons, she believes she has “no right to remain upon earth.” She’ll later say an Indian spirit takes bones from her face and wires from her eyes.

And is this the same city? For a city too winds through itself – a river, a creek, an alligator. Jax differs from itself between Downtown and Campbell Hill and Lackawanna as it does 2024 and 1933 and 1870. Underneath the ramps sending downtown streets up to bridges over river and railroad, desperate men sleep in tents in 2024, just as they did in that Confederate pest house. Cardboard structures skirt graffiti’d concrete flyovers and pylons march out through the creek. A single pair of pants, a shirt and a trash bag hang on a clothesline.

It’s the beginning of February 1895, and trains from the Savannah, Florida and Western Railway and the Florida Central and Indian River Railway and the Jacksonville, Tampa and Key West Railway first move through a temporary train station at Stewart and Bay Streets. Station construction straightens and alters the course of McCoys Creek three times, the final time in 1926, filling surrounding marsh drainage and making room for underground tunnels, now sealed over, and additional tracks, foundations for the first station and railroad tracks built on 2,300 pine pilings driven as deep as 70 feet underground.

Fertilizer and human decomposition infiltrate the floodplain. Swamplands spread along Bay Street from Myrtle Avenue to Cleveland Street, a small creek branch running through the swamp, and opposite the old mail order shed and waiting platform a trail crosses that branch from Bay Street to Brick Yard Branch, beside the old graveyard, where decomposed bodies first wash into the waters in summer floods. The towering, shambling E.O. Painter Fertilizer Plant, before insurance companies (illegally?) dismember its namesake, nitrogenizes creek waters like electric shocks.

Into the 21^st century erasure by new real estate development of the historic black neighborhood of Brooklyn, where in 1863, United States Colored Troops form a Black wall against the Confederate march eastward from victory at the Battle of Olustee toward a repeatedly burning Jacksonville, these streets for which ragtime blues legend Blind Blake names songs in the 1920s, McCoys Creek curls gray and milky.

A gorgeous live oak, seeded before Blind Blake, grows against broken chain-link fence and discarded car tires and toilets. Tires and tires, everywhere discarded car tires. The metal frame of a missing fence gate stands topped by a branch of that oak and makes a door.

Then “a negro driving a team of mules,” as The Florida Times-Union reports early that Friday, the 15^th of May, 1903, misjudges the water’s depth at Myrtle Avenue and Bay Street. Trickster waters rise up Myrtle and roads disappear in depths, floods having washed out the roads and the bridge on the creek. The unnamed driver swims to the bank. His mules drown in the storm surge.

Time and again, stories and photos appear in national newspapers, Associated Press in 1968, a man silhouetted sitting on top of his car, waters up to the top of the trunk and rearview mirrors.

Year after year, outrage, like that strange and strident editorial in The Daily Florida Sun, June 9, 1906: “We will, therefore, again call the attention of the City Health Officer of Jacksonville to the condition of McCoys Creek.” A Sun reporter has traveled the creek and reported its “filth and debris” to the “health officer,” who says “the railroads” have “stopped the waters of that creek to such an extent that the refuse thrown into it can find no escape.”

The Sun reports, all without naming names or dating days, “He did not hesitate to declare that if the railroads did not do something IMMEDIATELY he, the City Health Officer, would, by virtue of his authority as protector of the public health, TEAR UP THE TRACKS of the railroads leading across that creek and clean it out with his own force.” The Sun laments the threat still unfulfilled and calls for the health officer to act on his word forthwith.

“Mystery surrounds the finding of the dead body of William B. Wood,” says The Jacksonville Journal at the end of May 1913. Vanished from his home on the now lost Grape Street, his body surfaces at the now lost Estelle Street Bridge in Brooklyn at six in the morning. “When found, the pockets of the dead man were rifled,” says the Journal, “his purse was lying open on the bank of the creek, near his hat, and, although there were no bruises on his body that would point to an assault, it is possible that Wood was the victim of robbery and cold-blooded murder at the hands of highwaymen.”

Still, the Myrtle Avenue Subway, the dipping of the road beneath road and railroad, continues to flood, seven and a half inches of rain in 24 hours, stalling trains, washing out roads, sending boats along city streets, July 1, 1919, the worst flood in this city, which always floods and burns, since September 1894. Boats transfer passengers from downtown streetcars to dry land on Price Street and upland down Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn, “McCoys Creek being well over its banks.”

Dozens of houses huddled together along McCoys fill with water, their wooden frames standing in the widened creekways like strange unnatural trees. “The most serious conditions,” says The Lakeland Evening Telegram, “prevail in Brooklyn and Campbell’s Addition to LaVilla, McCoys Creek breaking over its banks and flooding the land to the southward. Many houses, mainly occupied by negroes, were abandoned in this section yesterday.” Beds and tables float free of houses. Sinewy old men and women walk the waters with grandchildren on their shoulders.

The body floats up from McCoys Creek on May 20, 1931, and in its pockets, police find a card that identifies him as H.R. Mathieas, 45 or 50 years old, of Pittsburgh. Another body floats along the creek on September 15, 1946. The family of Dovie Hawarah had reported her missing just yesterday. The final moments of the lives of bodies that float these waters disappear into the earth and time.

So the City builds, in 1954, a segregated school for Black children, Forest Park Elementary, replacing the smaller West Lewisville Elementary, not Jacksonville’s only Black school built on an ash dump, and the water tastes metallic and the winds across the baseball field smell like slaughter. Six decades later, the City finally cleans and reclaims the site for the conservative “anti-woke” Jacksonville Classical Academy, which omits Black literature and history and pulls tax dollars away from non-politically affiliated public schools.

The blood runs into the waters, near where Rural Home Plantation stood in the 1850s, from Draper’s Egg and Poultry Company’s processing plant, home of the “flavor-grown fryers,” and toxins and offal from Jones-Chambliss slaughterhouse and meatpacking plant, producing, by the early 1970s, 250,000 pounds of bacon a week – and those cattle shipped to Jones-Chambliss from Oklahoma and impounded for disease in Alabama in ’71, officials then say, are “only suffering from stress and abuse,” freed to proceed toward butchering – pours into the creek and the City’s own municipal waste incinerator sheds concentrated dioxins and lead and mercury. Before Governor Kirk disbands it in 1969, the State Board of Health calls McCoys Creek “so badly polluted that it is just a big open sewer.”

Here at King Street in 1994, an elderly man named John Green, waist high in floodwaters, black skin taut on tendons, wearing a short-sleeved flannel shirt and ballcap, hooks a tow strap and chain to the front of a Wells Fargo armored bank truck, wades the McCoys overflow, connects the strap and chain to the back of his pickup, then pulls the armored vehicle up King Street and free.

Three decades later, the King Street Bridge is gone, awaiting a new structure with pedestrian and bicycle lanes, McCoys Creek Boulevard is disappearing, the banks are rising into terraces to prevent flooding, the waters purl murky and milky but no longer red with blood, no longer stinking carcinogenic.

The old warehouse for W.J. Lohman Roofing Co. stands abandoned, but those peculiar hammered steel silhouettes still ride its roof. One shows a little boy and a little girl facing each other across a teeter-totter, the other some sinister cousin of the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz wearing a suit and fedora. Storms have blown him to a tilt and though he leans backward toward the children, he seems a creeper, a discarded Slenderman.

And always, of course, come the alligators, decade after decade making news. As though alligators in Florida are newsworthy. As though these waters and time itself don’t creep and slither this city. No wonder those old Jacksonville postcards are bordered with alligators ouroboric, swallowing their own tails.

The Associated Press tells it like a joke in 1960, the arrest of “an apparent straggler from Jacksonville’s Gator Bowl weekend,” half of Downtown a drunken college football bash, saying two patrolmen, J.A. Zipperer and G.H. Pierce “had to forcibly restrain him” and charged him with vagrancy. “Listed on the docket as Alley Gator, the three-foot reptile was spotted on the lam from McCoys Creek in the Riverside section. Police say he’ll be sent up the river to the city zoo.”

The alligator the Associated Press reports just before Halloween ’87 is much bigger and doesn’t get a nickname. It’s nine feet long and 250 pounds. Grace Walker, who’s seen this same alligator before, stops tending her garden, drops her hoe and heads back into her house. The 10 year old boys playing hide and seek, who later tell reporters they weren’t scared, scatter and run fast as they’ve ever run. The Fish and Wildlife Service sends its trappers, who hook the reptile, duct tape its jaws, bind its legs with rope and haul it away in a pickup truck toward certain death.

Today, Groundwork Jacksonville, nonprofit partner with the City, hopes to connect the creeks to the river along with 30 miles of trails and greenways through 14 historic neighborhoods by 2029. Already Phase One of the Emerald Trail has restructured the creek through old Black neighborhoods, raising the banks with terraced berms, permanently closed McCoys Creek Boulevard from Cherokee to Margaret Streets, and is rebuilding the King Street Bridge. Streets that once ran into flood zones will now end in landscaped cul-de-sacs like small parks with footbridges.

It’s the 1990s when city council members and consultants start talking about uniting urban waters into an “Emerald Necklace” and the 1999 Jacksonville Downtown Master Plan calls McCoys and Hogans Creeks “two beads.” Emeralds remain more marketable than ouroboric alligators.

In Hollybrook Park, still untouched by Groundwork, basketballs and plastic bottles and Styrofoam cups back up against the elderberries, already, at the start of March, turning purple black like the blood of Pyramus and Thisbe on umbels of blooms glowing lacelike white. Here lie tires and more tires, a castoff couch. Schoolkids walk home beside the creek through dense foliage beside a burnt house.

The Black kids of Mixon Town knew Lackawanna 60 years ago as Klantown and McDuff Avenue formed the border between them. Down here McCoys branches and splinters and fingers and drains a watershed of almost four square miles. Groundwork plans “to create,” here, “a natural meander within a more deeply excavated and fully vegetated wetland floodplain.” Old concrete footbridges with aluminum handrails cross splinters of McCoys toward Willowbranch Creek.

Two centuries is time enough to open up these waters, cleansed of blood and lead, no longer flooding redlined houses. I’ve wandered the waters from their mouth out to their extremities. I’ve counted the alligators, the bodies and the car tires. Tomorrow looks clean and bright and vibrant. Though I wade through Southern Gothic and Noir, I feel hopeful. Over Gilmore Street the nighthawks forage by moonlight, diving down on screaming cicadas in the patience of longleaf pines.