(by Gene Barber with much appreciation to Alton Mote et al for the use of their histories and for conversations regarding the subject)

Some historians have fancied Mayport�s beginning as 1562, but whether the community has existed without interruption since then is moot. Historians tell us the Spanish force under Pedro Menendez saw to it that there was an interruption of habitation when he destroyed the French settlement of Fort Caroline. Some have seen Mayport on maps of the 1600�s and 1700�s, but we fear they might have mistaken the River May�s designation as Mayport Village. One writer, Mr. Wanton Webb, much nearer the events than we, offered the information that Mayport was established in 1830 by river pilots and fishermen.

Through wholesale slaughter and destruction and vicissitudes to fill a scholarly tome, the community we know as Mayport has been here under several guises and names for over four centuries.

The historian of Mayport - Helen Cooper Floyd - begins her booklet �Mayport Remembered, People & Places� with the sentence �Before there was Mayport, there was Mayport Mills, and before Mayport Mills, there was Hazard.� Histories also inform us that the Naval Base and Fleet Landing neighborhood was the site of an old extensive Spanish plantation named Naranjal. And earlier than that, there were forts reaching back to Fort Caroline of 1562.

One would presume that anyone who has read American history is acquainted with the story of the first documented European settlement on the North American continent - and the story of Mayport cannot be separated from that momentous event - but that event is so fraught with romantic novel material that I just cannot begin this presentation without it.

I flatter my self to believe that all intelligent residents of Florida are conversant with the state�s history and are aware there was a Florida before Disney World. Florida�s history is a story of this nations� first frontier and of this nation�s outpost for its latest frontier - a story drenched in enough blood and gore to satisfy even the most jaded tastes of our young movie-going citizens.

What we now call Mayport has been the site of human habitation for millennia. Proto Indians of this area fished, hunted, gathered, and did all those things that early peoples, as a rule, did, and they evidently developed into a linguistic group known as the Timaqua.

From skimpy, and not always reliable, accounts we can guess the Timaqua were a tall handsome people who were into body piercing and tattooing and anthropophagy (I threw that last word in figuring the more squeamish among our audience would accept that more readily than �cannibalism�). The Timaqua were accommodating to their guests and took to killing their neighbors as much for sport as for self-preservation. Incestuous marriages among the upper classes were common. Anthropologists tell us there were cultural affinities between them and some peoples of Central America and the Caribbean.

Some of that doesn�t sound a whole lot different from some elements of our society today.

The Timaqua traded with their neighbors and linguistic kin and, via them, to points farther south and west and made the mistake of adorning them selves with some of the trade goods - namely gold, silver, and turquoise - when entertaining the strange ones who came from over the eastern horizon in funny looking very large canoes.

It was in May four hundred forty-one years ago that the first known European viewed the broad river on which we are situated and dubbed it the River May (the Timaqua knew it as Welaka - the Chain of Lakes). Jean Ribault and his two shiploads of French Protestants did not tarry at the River May but, after erecting a stone monument on the south side of the stream, sailed farther up the coast to found the ill-fated first Fort Caroline on the shore of the present South Carolina.

That stone pillar, by the way, stood quite close to where we meet tonight; the replica, for convenience purposes, is now located farther upriver.

Christian forbearance has not always been among the most admirable traits of many Christians, and in France of that day there was internecine struggles between Catholics and Protestants. That was a factor in some French Huguenots� wish to take up residence in the New World, ergo the aforementioned Ribault and his two shiploads of Protestant pioneers on the north Florida coast.

A couple of years after Ribault�s initial visit the religious wars in France abated sufficiently to permit another group of French Protestants to try a hand at colonizing in the New World, this time in Florida (be advised the Spanish considered all the North American continent that they were aware of, or thought they were aware of, as being their territory of Florida).

Under the leadership of Renee Laudonniere, the French selected a high spot on the south side of the St. Johns River to construct a second Fort Caroline. This site, not far from the present Village of Mayport, has long since been washed away into the Atlantic Ocean. From the descriptions, especially those of the artist Le Moyne, we can safely assume the modern replicas of the fort and Ribault�s stone pillar are fairly close ones of the original. It seems that most of the earliest European colonists carefully avoided physical labor and were unable to see food even when it was dangled or splashing about before their very eyes. They wrote of the richness of the land they settled, but they are always recorded in the histories as starving and having to be rescued by Indians or other colonists/explorers. It was no different for the Fort Caroline French. By the summer of 1565 they were desperate to return to the troubles they knew rather than remain with those they knew not of.

As they readied to set sail for home, hope came from across the ocean. Capt. Ribault came from France with seven shiploads of supplies to sustain the little colony - food, livestock, tools, and even�women. They decided to stick it out a while longer.

Spain, feeling the majority of the Americas was her gift from God by way of a papal decree, was quite jealous of her possessions, even one as unproductive as Florida was promising to be, and was determined that the French threat must be addressed.

The man chosen for the task of uprooting the tiny French colony was Pedro Mendendez, a gentleman widely known for his piety�his piety equaled only by his cruel expediency. He founded St. Augustine and set about to �unfound�, so to speak, Fort Caroline. He marched his men from St. Augustine through a late summer hurricane to the French settlement and ordered that all but a handful of women, children, elderly, and cripples be slain. Could we magically take our selves back to that time, we would hear the sounds of the slaughter from where we sit.

A small boggy pond alongside the present Fort Caroline Road commemorates the gruesome event; we know it as Spanish Pond.

Don Menendez found Capt. Ribault and his companions shipwrecked south of Saint Augustine and summarily had them put to death as heretics. The French avenged their compatriots by killing several Spaniards as, and I quote, ��liars, thieves, and murderers.�

At this time, three Spanish forts were erected at and near the present Mayport Village - San Mateo on the site of the destroyed Fort Caroline and two at the mouth of the St. Johns. From one - �St. John of the Portal (or river entrance)� - we believe the river eventually received its present name.

We will now fast forward to the twenty years control of Florida by the British - 1763 to 1783.

Spain had done little to utilize Florida�s natural resources. The land had no native gold, and a land with no native gold was considered real estate baggage. She considered Florida was best used as a base to protect the rich shipments from New Spain. The British, however, more prudently encouraged planters and animal husbandry on the upper east coast and along the St. Johns River.

When Spain turned Florida over to the British, Spanish vaqueros had to abandon most of their cattle that had roamed the Diego Plains - we know that area today as the Guano River, Palm Valley, and Ponte Vedra. The new landowners were quick to avail themselves of the wandering stock to begin a renewed cattle-raising industry, most of which in this immediate area was on the islands just across the St. Johns from the present Mayport.

There were two main cattle crossings on the lower river - the present Jacksonville (called in those days �the Cow Ford� or, in archaic English �Cow�fort�) and one approximately where the Jean Ribault ferries our motorized vehicles across today.

For several years the Georgians and Carolinians, known as �Crackers� had been raiding Indian cattle and slaves�but mostly inland. With the onset of the War for American Independence, the loyalist and conscript evaders crowded into southeast Georgia and into the northeast of the loyal British colony of Florida. There, they constantly rustled cattle and stole slaves.

This is an opportune time to address the word �Cracker�, for the old time Florida Cracker�s blood runs through much of modern Mayport citizenry. For most of is history the word �cracker� has been used as a derogatory appellation among English speaking people. As events and people came and went it was applied to various groups and always to the unsophisticated and boisterous�the equivalent of today�s �good ol� boys.� English writers mentioned cracks and crackers over four hundred years ago. In the mid 18th century when poorer classes of white Georgians and Carolinians stole across the Florida border and spirited away cattle, horses, and slaves from the Spanish and Indians, it was said the Spanish spat out an epithet that sounded much like �Quaqueros.� During the American Revolution, when loyal or conscription dodging families fled to Florida, the British born citizens of the colony referred to the greatly resented newcomers as �Crackers��and British Florida Governor James Grant, a Scotsman and veteran of the French and Indian Wars of a generation earlier, called them, ��those damned Crackers.� As is the wont of so many amateur historians of our day, a story just had to be invented to give an origin to an unusual label from the past. In the case of a theory becoming a fact and a perpetuated myth, those well meaning but benighted souls decided that Georgians driving their cattle down into Florida while cracking their cow whips gave rise to the term �Cracker.� But be advised�Crackers were Crackers in Great Britain at least a couple hundred years before the common use of the cow whip by Crackers in America.

Another fast forward: this time to the beginning of the twentieth century. An activity that involved my own cattle raising family then was to annually drive their stock from far inland to Mayport and Pablo Creek (now the inland waterway) for grazing on the salt rich spartina marshes. After a few weeks, the return drive was made before the cattle suffered what was called �the salt sickness.� My grandfather Barber often spoke of encountering panthers in the marsh side hammocks and of listening to the unfamiliar dialect of the Mayport fishermen.

Half way through the British occupation of Florida there occurred an event that was to have a major impact on the community of Mayport. A self styled British philanthropist - Dr. Andrew Turnbull - sailed the Mediterranean coast and gathered what he referred to as the �wretched underprivileged� of Turkey, Greece, Italy, France, Spain, and to a lesser degree, North Africa, but more particularly the Balearic Isles. The majority of his beneficiaries came from the Island of Minorca, and when the boat loads of immigrants set sail, they set sail from Minorca. Hence, regardless of their ancestral Old World homes, all were labeled Minorcans, and all were indentured to Dr. Turnbull for a long time.

In honor of his Turkish wife�s home, Dr. Turnbull named his plantation/colony �New Smyrna.�

In Florida, conditions for the Minorcans were harsh, promises of equipment and supplies by Turnbull were not kept, and taskmasters over the colonists were cruel. En masse the Minorcans left New Smyrna and trekked to St. Augustine where they were afforded a welcome (perhaps due to a feeling of ethnic kinship). After a generation or two, several families drifted away from St. Augustine to other sections of Florida.

Some went to the bayous of West Florida, some went to the wilderness of the Ten Thousand Islands of the southwest coast, some headquartered themselves in the Keys, some migrated to Amelia Island, some settled along the St. Johns south of the present Jacksonville and near the mouth of the river, but none returned to New Smyrna - the scene of their tragic introduction to Florida.

Those who stopped near the mouth of the St. Johns imprinted their culture and surnames forever on what we know as Mayport Village.

Florida has been called the 14th and loyal colony. There was little Revolutionary action in the colony except for a skirmish in the present neighboring Nassau County, a Georgian force penetrating as far south as Sawpit Bluff a few miles west of Mayport, and a hastily constructed British fort on the site of the long gone Fort Caroline.

A major effect of the Revolution on Florida was to bring in Tories from the rebelling colonies. The Revolution also brought many and sundry colorful characters including the infamous Daniel McGirt who was said to have operated with his band of international renegades on both shores of the St. Johns.

Another major result of the Revolution was that the 1783 treaty at the end of hostilities returned Florida to Spain.

The new nation of the United States began working almost immediately to bring Florida into its fold. To that end, colonists like John Houston McIntosh across the St. Johns from the present Mayport agitated for a Republic of East Florida with the intention of turning the new little nation over to the bigger nation to its north. The Republic was indeed created, was short lived, and was in plain view of Mayport from across the river.

During the weak Spanish control of Florida, there was a new influx of international rogues making their headquarters on the islands north of the river and on the south bank in the vicinity of Mayport. They were Mexican freebooters, British and French pirates, Scots soldiers of fortune, and opportunists of every ilk.

During the War of 1812, known in Florida as the Florida War or Patriots War, the Spanish fort of San Mateo on the site of the old Fort Caroline and British Revolutionary fort was revitalized. That war in Florida can best be described as a desultory fracas in which anyone could jump in whenever one wished and was permitted to switch sides as often as one wished.

One historian said that a Spanish sawpit mill near the present Mayport was destroyed by a Georgia Militia unit.

Spain finally gave up and ceded Florida to the United States. The transfer of Florida from Spain to the United States in 1820 made little impact in northeast Florida. Most of the few Spaniards living there left, but the void was not greatly felt. Many Americans had already settled in on both sides of the river, and their allegiance was toward the new owner of the land.

A memorable citizen of northeast Florida and particularly of Ft. George Island from 1813 to 1839 was the Scotsman Zephaniah Kingsley. He was highly regarded by the United States but not by his religious neighbors (most thought of him as an apostle of the devil). Among the busiest of slave traders, he and his Ft. George Island plantation supplied human chattel for much of the slave holding states and to the islands of the Caribbean.

Mayport was not without its share of troubles during the sad Second Seminole War. There were, in the early years of the conflict, raids in the area by wandering bands of related Creek tribes, and some of those raids laid waste to farms and slew entire families.

The river pilots of Hazard, as Mayport was known then, petitioned President William Henry Harrison in 1841 to grant them the Government Custom House for the area. They rightly advised His Excellency that Jacksonville, the holder of the Custom House at that time, could not check the smuggling of goods to both the white citizens of the territory and to the belligerent Seminoles.

As soon as Florida was a territory of the United States, her natural resources were up for grabs, especially her timber. Sawpit mills near the mouth of the St. Johns received logs from up river and turned them into lumber for ocean going vessels. In 1850 Jacksonville received a steam powered circular sawmill (much more efficient than the old manually operated sawpit mills), and for a while, the Mayport area lost some of its lumber business up river. By the on start of the War Between the States, the lumber mill had returned, and for several years the community was known as Mayport Mills.

The forts near the mouth of the river were briefly manned by the Confederates at the beginning of the War but soon abandoned in the face of superior numbers in blue. There was some sniping from guerillas in gray during the Union occupation of the area, and there was some reported violence during Reconstruction.

Mayport saw no major belligerent action, but her lumber mills were torched, and it was reported that most of the fishing piers were razed and used for target practice by Union soldiers and gunboats.

The scars of war, physical and emotional, were still to be seen when the first of many Northern visitors arrived in the vicinity of Mayport and Atlantic Beach. The locals referred to their arrival as �the Second Yankee Invasion�, but they were not averse to making money off the boatloads of Northerners debarking on the Mayport docks�a practice, throughout Florida, not uncommon to this day.

Before there was a Palm Beach and Miami (by the way, you can always tell a native Floridian from an import by the way he pronounces �My am� ah� rather than �My am� ee), Jacksonville, Fernandina, and St. Augustine were the playgrounds of the idle rich and were the miracle Edens for Northern consumptives.

Hotels went up along the strand in Atlantic Beach, hotels that hosted the famous - the crown prince of Great Britain, former president Ulysses S. Grant, and Baron DeBarry of Mumm�s Champagne fame.

Baron DeBarry of Belgium spent a few nights in Atlantic Beach before taking a steamer up the St. Johns into what was then considered the tropical wilderness of Volusia and Lake Monroe.

The most noted, and perhaps the earliest, of the area�s hostels was the Atlantic Hotel, built in 1874. It was described by one patron as having wide halls, high walls, airy rooms, a dining room with sumptuously laden tables, and a resident artist.

The Chicago team of Coloney and Talbott, the developers of Jacksonville�s prestigious Edgewood community (and, incidentally, of my little home town Macclenny), stopped over in Atlantic Beach before beginning their platting out work in Jacksonville. An enterprising group developed Burnside Beach (supposedly the namesake of a wrecked ship off shore) at the mouth of the river (now on naval property) and laid tracks for a little railroad to the area. Then the seaside communities of Seminole and Manhattan Beaches were established just south of Burnside.

I remember Seminole Beach from my youth.

The train to the seashore communities that were replaced by the navy base carried the locals� nickname of �Jump, Man, and Push.� Passengers were often enlisted to help push the engine through the white shifting sand of the dunes.

For reasons yet to be discovered, Atlantic Beach resorts were very popular with the English upper crust. Some of their all night revelry scandalized the locals, but the locals still were not opposed to making bucks off the well-heeled hotel guests. They took them fishing, hunting, and sightseeing, and often staged a gator wrasslin� match for the gaping tourists.

Then, enter Mrs. Elizabeth Worthington Philip J. P. Stark who found, in her words, ��this unique and fascinating little town on a horseback ride in February, 1914.�

The little village of Mayport was changed forever when that strong-willed English lady on horseback happened on the scene.

Mrs. Stark was said to have been born before her time. A Women�s Liberation activist, a youthful globe trotter without chaperone, an art student of James Whistler, and a conversation partner of European royalty, she entered the Mayport scene like a benevolent and genteel gale of very fresh air.

According to her memoirs, Mrs. Stark, then Miss Worthington, left from her home in New York State in the late summer of 1913 in a horse drawn caravan and headed for Florida. She recorded her impressions of the several country-sides she passed through and of the many people she encountered. She arrived in Jacksonville and searched the area for a good place to raise horses and grow figs. She claimed to have liked every place she saw in Jacksonville except the hotels. She said ��they all seemed filled with people with white or gray hair which seemed odd and rather spooky.�

Boy, she should see Florida now!

A local realtor whisked Miss Worthington off to Atlantic Beach in a Packard touring car, and she fell in love with the area. She bought two ocean front lots, each only 25 feet wide, and a corner lot on 10th Street.

Realizing her wish for raising horses could not be realized on such small bits of real estate, she rode her horse Bud around the neighborhood and chanced to meet a little boy on a tall white horse. He guided her to acreage that took her heart. The next day she rode horseback to Jacksonville and bought the land - all 375 acres of it.

Handling the purchase from the owner Chase Ship Chandlers of Jacksonville was the firm of Harwick and Jennings. Messrs. Harwick and Jennings and their wives remained close friends of Mrs. Stark for 25 years.

Always one ready to bask in another�s glory, I will add here that Mr. Charles Harwick was my relative.

After moving in, Miss Worthington wired her intended - Jack Stark - to come immediately. They wed in Waycross, Georgia, and set in to creating their paradise home - Wonderwood.

Mrs. Stark was among those enlightened Florida transplants who would not waste valuable time denigrating the locals but rather found and praised their positive traits, entered into cooperative ventures with them, and offered - nay, forced - her good services to assist them in areas in which she believed they were wanting.

She organized a Girl Scout troop and taught them to be vigilant during World War I, because she was certain the many unnaturalized Germans living in the Beaches area were surely signaling sensitive information to submarines. As it turned out, the perceptive lady knew whereof she spoke; some of the German nationals of that war (and, incidentally, of the next world war also) did prove to be spies.

Mrs. Stark�s first clash with the United States government came in 1925 when she learned that the bay on her property was to be filled in. She left for Washington and went to the top of the United States Engineers chain of command. She returned home with a promise of an unspoiled but improved bay, secure ownership of the bay, and the right to name it �Ribault Bay.�

The federal government began eyeing Wonderwood and surrounding territory in the late 1930�s for the purpose of establishing a naval base there. In 1940 Mrs. Stark and all property owners about her were summoned to court in Jacksonville where they would discuss, rather one sided it might be added, the sale of their property to the Navy. She was indignant that the Navy�s offer was far below her appraised value. Adding to the insult, she returned home one evening to find her home filled with camping marines and the house ransacked. Later she was ushered out of her house and off Wonderwood property and ordered never to set foot on the land again.

She and her husband rebuilt an even finer home on twenty-five acres the Navy had permitted them to keep. They were not permitted to remain there for long; once more they were evicted.

Once more they rebuilt, this time in East Mayport. Her husband died, and she remained in a small wooded area - another Wonderwood - for several years. Elizabeth Philip Stark was buried in an unmarked grave in the old East Mayport Cemetery.

Although rudely treated by the Navy, Mrs. Stark was not the type of lady to let something like a mere United States military force intimidate her. The Navy took her beloved Wonderwood but not her spirit�and she remained a loyal subject of her adopted country in spite of all her misfortunes.

Ancient forests, both fine and humble residences, the Catholic Church, the site of the Ribault monument, and the very old Mayport cemetery were bulldozed for the construction of the base. Only the lighthouse was spared, although it had been on the list to be demolished. Families with several Mayport-born generations behind them were forced to move.

It is to the credit of those Mayport citizens of sixty-three years ago that no bitterness was harbored; they were good citizens who knew that under the circumstances of war sacrifice was unavoidable and necessary.

I admit to a tad of resentment my self that I can no longer touch the lighthouse and to skip along the south jetties (actually, today, I can�t skip anywhere), but I know, as did those Mayport folk of many years back, that we sometimes have to give up a few little personal pleasures for the good of us all. The Mayport Naval Base is here to stay�and that gives us comfort.

Epilogue
Mayport Naval Station was commissioned in December of 1942. At this writing it is the third largest fleet concentration in the United States. Its harbor can accommodate 34 ships, and its 8,000 foot runway handles any aircraft of any size and type. The facility covers more than 3,400 acres. Mrs. Stark�s grave is now marked.

One leisurely morning last week, I picked up a sister newssheet from the center of the state and discovered that it runs a gripe column in which its readers are permitted to vent their frustrations about the way life doesn�t go the way they wish. The divers plaints ranged from traffic on I-4 to the manner of modern products packaging.

One evidently young contributor gave us old folks a good raking over, and I got the impression �old� meant from the 40�s up. He or she said that old people should stay off the highway at all times, that they should do their shopping through the week and leave the stores free for youthful shoppers who worked for a living during the week and had only weekends for their buying, and questioned why old people had the gall to live off the earnings of the young. I got the impression the griper also wondered why old people had the audacity to stay alive and take up space.

I had to agree with the young griper about us old folks staying off the highways, even though those highways were constructed (and continually re-constructed) with money from us old folks and the old folks before us (not to mention it was old folks who were responsible for getting our vehicles off dirt rutted roads and onto paved thoroughfares�come to think of it�it was also old folks who invented those road machines youth is so in love with). It would suit this writer well if he never had to share the roads with those youthful drivers who seem to have decided that theirs are the only vehicles on the road.

Many of our youthful and youthful-thinking drivers like to brag about their driving dexterity. Got news, youthful drivers: if some of us old folks didn�t have control of our vehicles and had learned how to dodge your careless road habits, there would be lots more wrecks than there are.

By the way, has drivers� ed stopped teaching that the headlights of the vehicle being passed should appear in the passer�s rear view mirror before the passer moves over in front of the passee? If it�s taught, then youthful minds seem to forget faster than us old folks.

Re/ the days we old folks do our shopping: I�m certain more of us old folks would be happy to shop through the week, and we might do so as soon as the medical people, with whom we tend to spend a lot of time, decide to work on weekends and leave our weekdays free.

As for us old folks living off the earnings of the young�where has that young person been for the past couple of generations (unborn for one, I�m sure)? It looks like it�s the other way around these days. Old folks had to work long and hard for earnings much lower than those of today, but it has become a way of life for youth, whose earnings are ridiculously greater than the generations before him/her, to frequently go to Mom and Pop to bail him/her out of financial troubles.

Of course, old folks have unlimited amounts of money because they don�t have the great financial responsibilities of today�s youth. We old folks just don�t understand the necessity of designer labels, gym memberships, eating out at trendy restaurants, vacations in the Caribbean, having the �in� address, paying big bucks for landscaping maintenance, and going to the club every weekend (�club� meaning what we old folks knew as �juke joints�).

There, this old folk feels better after a little griping, and that�s one thing we old folks are better at than youth.