 wanted to come to Florida and help resettle and rebuild this once magical land of sunshine and flowers, oranges, indigo, sugar cane and rice – once the land of vast plantations and great living
Mathias Day was a man of imagination. He sought new ventures. He wanted to do something big. He wanted to come to Florida and help resettle and help rebuild this once magic land of sunshine and flowers, oranges, indigo, sugar cane and rice – once the land of vast plantations and great living.
“He knew Florida’s story. How colonies and great plantings had risen and then decayed under the rule of Spain and Britain and the War for Independence. How they had grown great again after the U.S. flag was unfurled over Florida in 1821, then again had been ruined by the Seminole Indian War of 1835 and the great freeze that year. How, after that, the War of Secession had repeated the devastation of earlier times.
“Mathias Day knew Florida was starting all over again, and he wanted to start all over again with it.
“So, in 1870, he came to Jacksonville. There he met Dr. John M. Hawks, founder of Hawks Park, which is now Edgewater. Hawks easily persuaded Day to come down the coast with him on the schooner ‘Rover,’ a six-ton vessel captained by Simmons Bennett.
“Day and two companions spent several days looking around the Halifax Country, cruising up and down both sides of the river. In his diary, Day noted there were ‘10 million fleas to the square yard.’ He took a before-breakfast dip in the ocean and shouted upon the waves, ‘Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll.’
“Then he came upon the little Tomoka settlement and saw what he wanted – an old sugar and orange plantation now abandoned and covered with second growth timber. This was the Spanish Crown’s royal grant to Samuel Williams in 1790. Williams had settled it in 1800, developed it by 1812 with slave labor, dug canals and built a manor house on the river near where Loomis Avenue is now.”
“The land – 3,000 acres – descended to his son, Samuel Hill Williams, who, in 1835, hid behind a palmetto tree and watched the Seminoles destroy his home and the plantation, then at night swam the river and escaped to St. Augustine.
For more information on Mrs. Tomblin’s books or to have her speak at your next meeting, contact her at www.MarianSTomblin.com or at (386) 615-0493.
Copies of Mrs. Tomblin’s books and others of local interest can be purchased at The Book Store and So Much More!, 410 S. Nova Road, Ormond Beach; (386) 615-8320.