The Life of Henry Bradley Plant: Founder and President of the Plant System of Railroads and Steamships and Also of the Southern Express CompanySmyth, G. Hutchinson (George Hutchinson)
History
The Life of Henry Bradley Plant: Founder and President of the Plant System of Railroads and Steamships and Also of the Southern Express Company
Smyth, G. Hutchinson (George Hutchinson)
Plant family; Plant, Henry Bradley, 1819-1899
make the journey which is now a delightful trip of one day, for he left
New York on the Sabbath morning and the next Sabbath evening he arrived
at Jacksonville, which was a small village then with only one poor wharf
and not a vehicle of any kind to carry passengers or baggage. He
succeeded in getting some negro boys to carry his trunk to a poor hotel
where he remained only one day. Through some persuasion he found a man
to take him into his private house at Strawberry Mills, seven miles in
the country from Jacksonville, across the St. John’s River. Here Mrs.
Plant’s health greatly improved, her cough disappeared and she was so
much better that by the first of May, Mr. Plant was able to leave her
and return to New York. Early in July, Mrs. Plant came back to the city
apparently in good health. The following almost romantic story is told
in the New York _Times_ of their first experience in Florida.
“In the winter of 1853, a Northern man with an invalid wife brought her
down to Jacksonville to benefit her health. The present metropolis of
Florida was then a settlement of five or six houses, one of which was
called a hotel, but the hotel was so badly kept that the gentleman was
cautioned against going to it, and he found accommodations in a private
house. He had letters of introduction to a Florida settler, whose home
was six or eight miles out of Jacksonville, and as soon as he could
communicate with him through a stray traveller, the settler sent his
boat after the Northerner and took him to his house. The boat was an
immense ‘dug-out,’ made from a single mammoth log, manned by a crew of
uniformed blacks, who handled their oars in man-of-war style. At this
settler’s house a hospitable and comfortable stopping-place was found.
“In the course of the winter the lady’s health improved to such an
extent that her husband decided upon taking her to St. Augustine for a
pleasure trip. There was in the household a beautiful Indian girl, the
daughter of one of the Seminole chiefs, who afterward became the wife of
the settler I have mentioned, and she volunteered to accompany the lady
on what was then the long and difficult journey. The only road between
Jacksonville and St. Augustine was the old Spanish highway known as ‘the
king’s highroad,’ and this was so grown up with trees and bushes that it
was barely passable. But even this road lay five or six miles from the
settler’s house, and to reach it it was necessary to drive through the
trackless woods. The gentleman and his wife and the Indian girl set out
in a buggy, their host going before them on horseback to select the road
and blaze the trees between his place and the king’s highway, to enable
the strangers to find their way back.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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