Florida:

U.S. Territory and State

1821-1861

Part Three

St. Marks Lighthouse c.1893

The St. Marks Lighthouse

Something very beneficial to both of the port towns on the St. Marks River was the construction of the St. Marks lighthouse. Winslow Lewis, the “lighthouse builder” for the United States government, began construction of the lighthouse on an island near the Spanish Hole in 1829. Unfortunately for posterity, the limestone blocks used in the towers construction were taken from the ruins of the old fort in St. Marks as it was gradually dismantled for new construction projects. The government rejected the first lighthouse, as it was not built well enough, and in 1831 Calvin Kowlton reconstructed it. But unfortunately it was built to close to the sea and erosion soon took effect. Some said the candle powered light of the lighthouse was inadequate, but it did make it much easier for navigators to find the narrow St. Marks channel.

Daniel Ladd

The two towns on the St. Marks River were thriving in the early 1830s. In 1833, the young Daniel Ladd, nephew of the Hamlins, came to Magnolia and began an apprenticeship at his uncle’s commission house. It is not known how much cotton came from which town, but in that same year, 9,600 bales were shipped out via the St. Marks River, and in 1834, the number jumped to 18,000. By this time, Magnolia and St. Marks were connected to Tallahassee by old wagon roads, as well as roads traveling eastward towards Jefferson County and heading west into the interior and the Sopchoppy River on the western side of present-day Wakulla County. Rather than taking that road, which was a two day adventure, the few people living near the Sopchoppy and Ochlocknee Rivers could take a ferry to St. Marks or Magnolia, in order to visit one of the general stores.

The Tallahassee-to-St. Marks Railroad

Magnolia experienced some good times, but that would soon come to an end when Richard Keith Call and the Tallahassee Railroad Company partnered with the town of St. Marks and charted a railroad from Tallahassee to there in 1834, bypassing Magnolia. Richard Keith Call, veteran, attorney, planter, and politician, had an interest in the early village of St. Marks, and wrote a letter to the General Land Office years earlier in favor of the little town. Call wrote that he wished to officially lay out the town of St. Marks, and that a makeshift town was already developing into a promising export/import village. The General Land Office responded by informing Call that a town could not be officially laid out without the authority of Congress. Nevertheless, he ordered the Surveyor General of Florida, Robert Butler, to survey the town with Call’s help, and in 1833 the Florida Legislature chartered the town of St. Marks.[1]  It was around this time that the town of St. Marks moved from the muddy land around the old fort to where it is currently located.

Tallahassee-area planters had a problem with transporting their crops to St. Marks for export, so in the early months of 1831, a group of men held a meeting at the Planters Hotel in Tallahassee to discuss the possibility of constructing a railroad from Tallahassee to St. Marks. A couple charters were drafted to start a railroad company, in which Call had no part in at the time. On February 10, 1834, the Florida Legislative Council chartered the third attempt to create the Tallahassee Rail Road Company. The company was headed by seven board members, who then elected Call as their president.

In December of 1834, the Tallahassee Rail Road Company petitioned Congress for a land grant, specifically a grant of right-of-way six hundred feet wide, through public lands from Tallahassee to St. Marks. They also requested one hundred acres in the town St. Marks to construct a terminus and other facilities pertaining to the importing and exporting business. They did not receive exactly what they asked for, but in 1835 Congress granted the Tallahassee Rail Road Company a sixty foot wide right-of-way and ten acres for them to build their terminus. A huge victory for St. Marks over Magnolia, and one that would ensure St. Mark’s permanent existence. Under the direction of the Gray brothers, John D. and William, notable rail road builders, construction began in January of 1835. For the payment of $107,000, the Gray brothers were to cut the right-of-way, construct the rail road, build the terminus in St. Marks, and provide two passenger cars as well as twenty freight cars.[2]

The vast majority of the labor was provided by enslaved African-Americans, who felled the trees and laid the track. Five-by-nine inch wooden rails were laid on eight-by-ten inch crossties. Strips of iron, two and a half inches wide and a half an inch thick, were laid on top of the rails. This daunting task was completed by November of 1837. The Tallahassee to St. Mark’s railroad was one of the first railways to open in Florida, second only to the St. Joseph Railroad which opened in 1836. Even though the railroad was complete, the Tallahassee Rail Road Company and Richard Keith Call was not happy with it at first. Within the first month of the railroad’s operation, the Tallahassee Rail Road Company sued the Gray brothers for $50,000 in damages. They were charged with building the very worst railroad in the United States, but the charges were dropped a few months later. While Call was president of the rail road company, the train ran on horse or mule power and long caravans of wagons delivered their freight at Tallahassee for the long haul by rail to St. Marks.[3] In December of 1837, the Tallahassee Rail Road Company purchased a steam engine, but it broke down soon after. Call wrote that “we have taken the Locomotives off our Road, and intended on never to use them again. We find horse power superior.”[4]

Old Magnolia cemetery

            A month after the completion of the railroad, the US government moved the US customhouse from Magnolia to St. Marks, another victory for St. Marks, and another defeat for Magnolia. When the customhouse moved, the cotton industry followed. By 1841, Magnolia was hanging on by a thread, until a yellow fever epidemic hit the town, and put the final nail in Magnolia’s coffin. The Hamlin brothers continued their operations in Magnolia until 1842, when they moved to the new town of Port Leon, about three and a half miles south of St. Marks on the eastern river bank. Today, all that remains of the extinct town on the banks of the St. Marks River are a few headstones from the old Magnolia cemetery.

A New Railroad Town on the St. Marks – Port Leon

In 1838, many of the residents of the failing town of Magnolia helped establish a new town called Port Leon to rival St. Marks. Located about eight miles downriver from Magnolia, this new town was considerably closer to the Spanish Hole, making it much more accessible to large, ocean-going vessels. In the abandoned town of Magnolia “good houses were sold for a song, some to be carried to St. Marks, some scattered in the country and some to Tallahassee.”[5] Richard Keith Call and the Tallahassee Railroad Company took an interest to Port Leon, and decided to make the new town the trading center of Middle Florida and Southern Georgia by extending their railroad across the river to the new town by building a bridge across the St. Marks River, which effectively shut off trade to Magnolia.[6]

Railroad bridge to Port Leon

Port Leon was officially established in 1838, and the town began to advertise lots for sale. An advertisement in the Pensacola Gazette, dated December 21, 1839, stated, “On Monday, January 13, 1840, will be offered for sale, at auction, a part of the lots in Port Leon. This town is situated on Apalachie Bay, about three miles by the river below St. Marks. It is most handsomely located in the most elevated site on the bay, and with the exception of the ground near the bay, is beyond the influence of the highest tides…Port Leon being the nearest shipping point to the Suwanee and its tributaries and all the adjacent country as far east as the Sente Fe…of the country lying north, east, and west of Tallahassee, which is entirely dependent on this port for an outlet, it is unnecessary to say anything in commendation as it is known to be the latest and most productive body of good land in Florida, and already occupied by a wealthy and enterprising population.”

Some visitors to Port Leon claimed that this was not true, that the town was in a low lying area. Some also felt that the citizens of Port Leon were nasty, mean folk and the town was in need of both a church and a jail. A traveler to Port Leon wrote, “The people – Oh My! ...Law and Justice are not in their vocabularies. I was asked to drink about 500 times and when I refused they would turn around and look as though they were shot. One man told me that I was the only person in Port Leon but what would (not) drink and that he had heard of Temperance folk and he wanted to see how they looked, so he begged the liberty of starring me in the face for one half of an hour.”[7]

The Hamlins, along with their nephew Daniel Ladd, now in his twenties, moved to Port Leon in 1840, and opened a commission house, and with a partner, opened a general store called Hamlin & Snell. Another businessman to move to Port Leon was James Ormond, who had just returned from service in the Second Seminole War, and his partner William McNaught, whom had a business at St. Marks before it closed. Ormond wrote in his memoir, “…about the end of that year (1839) at old St. Marks, I fell in with a Mr. William McNaught, who had been in a commission business but a few months before, lost his partner,…and was much in need of another, so he and I struck up a trade to go into business together at Port Leon, then just being built.”[8] Nathaniel Hamlin became the town’s Postmaster in 1842. Ladd became a cotton trader after he bought a lot in Port Leon for $210. Turing their backs on St. Marks, Call and the Tallahassee Railroad Company shut down their terminus there, and moved it across the river to Port Leon. St. Marks protested the closer, of course. A hotel was built shortly after the town was founded called the Port Leon City Hotel and the town became a successful port, but Port Leon never did become the residential/resort town that Richard Keith Call and the railroad company envisioned, however.

A yellow fever epidemic struck Port Leon in 1841, which took many lives, but the town continued on. By the mid-1840s, Port Leon was a prosperous port town, and because of this the U.S. Customs House, first in Magnolia, then in St. Marks, was moved to there. Even though the Tallahassee-St. Marks was a primitive mule-drawn railroad, the shipping business was booming in Port Leon. The town received a brief economic boost when the U.S. Army built Fort Stansbury near present-day Woodville, during the Second Seminole War. In Port Leon, Daniel Ladd began to make a good name for himself as a merchant and business leader, and in February of 1840, Territorial Governor Robert R. Reid appointed Ladd to be the auctioneer of Leon County (present-day Wakulla County was still part of Leon County at this time). At 26 years old, Daniel Ladd was doing well for himself in Port Leon, and as the town prospered, so did he. Ladd had established a general store and a commission house in the port town, and with that prospered for the next two years. He even purchased an eighty acre farm in soon-to-be Wakulla County, becoming one of the county’s largest land owners.

           

The Creation of Wakulla County

     

    On March 11, 1843, the twenty-first session of the Legislative Council of the Territory of Florida approved “An act to organize the County of Wakulla.” Section 1 of the act stated “that the district of country included within the following boundaries, to wit: - Beginning at the Gulf, thence north on the range line between range two and three, until it intersects the north boundary of section twenty-four, township two, range two, south and east: thence due west on that line, until it strikes that Oklockonee River; thence down the river, until it strikes the Gulf; and thence, along the line of the Gulf, to the point of commencement (including islands), shall constitute a county, to be called Wakulla.” Section 9 of the act states that three elected commissioners were to find a suitable place for a county seat, but, as Section 10 states, in the meantime, Port Leon will house the public offices. Unbeknownst to the Legislative Council, or anybody else for that matter, Port Leon’s time was ticking away.

Sources used:

Doherty, H. S. (1961). Richard Kieth Call: Southern Unionist. Gainesville: University of Florida Press.

Kilgore, J. (19--). Old St. Marks in Florida: An Historical Work.

Shofner, J. H. (1978). Daniel Ladd: Merchant Prince of Frontier Florida. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida.

Roberts, R. (2005). From Boom to Bust: Ghost Towns of Selected Florida Gulf Coast Communites. Tallahassee: Florida State University, Master Thesis.

Strickland, Alice. (1963, January). James Ormond Merchant and Soldier. Florida Historical Quarterly, Vol.XLI, No.3, pp. 209-222.

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[1] Doherty, p.87

[2] Ibid. p.89

[3] Kilgore, p.24

[4] Doherty, p.89

[5] Shofner, p.15

[6] Roberts, p.26

[7] Ibid, p.26-27

[8] Strickland, p.217