Top posts of 2010 January 1, 2011

It’s been a slow year here at Beyond Tourism. It’s New Year’s day and I just wanted to look back at some of the more popular posts here on the blog.

The Top 5 posts of all Time

1. Deadly Storms: Two hurricanes that changed Florida history (A blogchain post)

2. Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine

3. Before Walmart there was Webb’s City Drug Store

4. John Caesar: Florida Maroon of the Second Seminole War

5. John Horse: Florida Maroon of the Second Seminole War

 

Top 5 Posts of 2010

1. Before Walmart there was Webb’s City Drug Store

2. John Caesar: Florida Maroon of the Second Seminole War

3. John Horse: Florida Maroon of the Second Seminole War

4. Wanted Wednesdays: Unsolved Homicides

5. The Celestial Railroad of Jupiter and Lake Worth

 

Enjoy reading and let me know what you want more of dear readers.

The Beatles visit Key West October 22, 2010

The Beatles at the Key Wester Motel

September 10, 1964 was an exciting day for Beatles fans in Key West. It was on this day that the Fab Four flew in from Montreal to take a rest stop.  They were originally supposed to stop in Jacksonville  but according to The Beatles Ultimate Experience due to Hurricane Dora off of the northeast coast of Florida the flight was detoured to Key West until Hurricane Dora passed.

At this time the South was still segregated and this included Florida. The Beatles refused to play the Gator Bowl if the audience was segregated on race. It was promised that the audience would be desegregated and the performance remained on the books. Their hotel in Jacksonville was another matter though. It seems that desegregating the hotel while The Beatles were present could not be worked out. It was rumored that this is the real reason their rest stop was moved to Key West.

While in Key West reporter Jean Morris was able to interview them. After some questions about Rolling Stones and who was married and who was single the subject came around to eating.

JEAN: “Do you always eat on the run like this?”

RINGO: “No, we sit down like this.”

(laughter)

JEAN: “No, I mean, with all these people don’t you get indigestion?”

RINGO: “Well, we usually eat in the room, but seeing the hotel’s got no room for us, we have to eat here, you see.”

JOHN: “That was unfortunate, that.”

RINGO: “Unfortunate.”

John and Ringo are referring to their canceled rooms in Jacksonville. Where in an earlier interview when asked

The Key Wester Motel

directly about it tried to not make a big deal about it by saying they had no control of booking rooms or the cancellation of them. Jean Morris does not ask them to elaborate.

The Key Wester Motel was demolished in 1999 and was replaced by the Hyatt Windward Pointe. The Hyatt Windward Pointe Hotel,  according to the Beatles Bible , an open-air structure named the Beatles Hut commemorates the place where the group stayed. While there they jammed with rhythm and blues singer Clarence “Frogman” Henry,  The Bill Black Combo, and  The Exciters, who are from New Orleans  and local musician Coffee Butler.

While their concert at the Gator Bowl was canceled due to Hurricane Dora the game was still played. It was Florida State v. Oklahoma. The final score was Florida State 36 Oklahoma 19. The details of the game can be found here and here.

Friday Finds January 29, 2010

I’m starting a new feature for this blog, Friday Finds, articles around the net and blogosphere that are about Florida History. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did.

1. A History Lesson for Hudson– This blog post written by Chuck Hallenbeck isn’t really about Florida at all. For those interested he does give some background on Colonel William Jenkins Worth who brought the Second Seminole War to an end.

2.Orlando beyond Mickey Mouse–  Vivienne Mackie on her blog writes about the Orange County Regional History Center. It shows there is more to Orlando besides Disney World.

3.At the old-timey Bradley’s Country Store, the grits are fresh and Florida’s history keeps turning– This is an article in the St. Petersburg Times written by staff writer Jeff Klickenberg. It is about Frank Bradley who lives in Moccasin Gap and at 84 at the time the article was written last year, he still grinds his own grits and makes his own sausage. There is also a 2:23 minute video.

4. Miami to Havana Overnight Cruise in 1929– Read a copy of a cruise brochure that would take you on an overnight cruise from Miami to Havana in 1929. Before Castro took over and Cuban cigars weren’t illegal. Havana was considered the Paris of the West.

5. Healthy Climes and Killer Swamps– Read original letters and pamphlets from settlers starting from when Florida was a territory through the Civil War and into the 1880’s. Click on the letter to read it word for word. Re-typed below the original document for easier reading.  It’s 3 pages.

6. Tracking the paths: A look at all of the major hurricanes (category 3 and higher) that have passed through Florida since 1851– From the South Florida Sun-Sentinel a history of Hurricanes containing 9 links including hurricane photos and the top 30 deadliest hurricanes and top 30 costliest hurricanes.

Enjoy!

Today in Florida History September 16 September 16, 2009

Finally getting back into posting now with things beginning to calm down. I thought I would start things off with a Today in Florida History. It is taken from The Florida Historical Society. There is also a link to the site in my Links to the Past list.

1565: From the account of Pedro Menendez’s expedition to Florida in 1565 by Francisco Lopez de Mendoza Grajales, the chaplain to the expedition.  This account is taken from Charles E. Bennett, Laudonniere and Fort Caroline:  History and Documents (Gainesville:  University of Florida Press, 1964).  [We will continue with portions of this account in the coming days and will simply cite it as Laudonniere and Fort Caroline.  In today’s account, Father Mendoza recounts the beginning of Menendez’s expedition against the French at Fort Caroline.–moderator]

“Sunday, September 16, he [Menendez] departed with 500 men with many arquebuses and pikes, each one of the soldiers carrying a twelve pound sack of bread on his shoulders and a bottle of wine for the road.  They took two Indian chiefs who were great enemies of the French, so that they might show the way.  According to the practice of those Indians and by the signs they made, we understood that it was five leagues to the fort of the enemies, but one the road it appeared to be more than fifteen and a very bad road in the very hot sun.  But all have traveled it, according to the letter we received from the General [Menendez] today, the 19th of said month.”

1853: House Speaker A. K. Allison proclaimed himself Acting Governor of Florida when the governor, Thomas Brown, and the Senate President, R. J. Floyd, were both out of the state.  Allison served until October 3 when James E. Broome was regularly inaugurated as governor.

1863: The U.S.S. San Jacinto, under the command of Lieutenant Commander Ralph Chandler, seized the Confederate blockade-runner, Lizzie Davis, off the west coast of Florida.  She had been bound from Havana to Mobile with a cargo that included quantities of lead.

1864: An expedition from the U.S.S. Ariel, with Acting Master Russell in command, captured over 4,000 pounds of cotton in the vicinity of Tampa Bay.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) is the author of "Their Eyes were Watching God"

1928: The Belle Glade and Palm Beaches area was devastated by a hurricane. This was the culmination of the Great Lake Okeechobee Hurricane struck Florida as a Category 4 storm, with winds pushing lake waters to a storm surge of more than 15 feet.  The area surrounding the lake’s south end, occupied primarily by migrant agricultural workers, flooded.  The Red Cross’s death toll count reached 1,836, but additional bodies and skeletons were discovered after the end of the Red Cross count.  In response to this disaster, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built dikes around the lake to prevent a recurrence.  Florida author Zora Neale Hurston recorded the impact on this hurricane on migrants in her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God.  (See September 6, Today in Florida History)

1968: The first classes convened at Warner Southern College in Lake Wales.  The college was founded by the Southeastern Association of the Church of God.

Deadly Storms: Two hurricanes that changed Florida history (A blogchain post) June 28, 2009

This post is for the June blogchain through Absolutewrite. It doesn’t have a theme which makes it a little easier for me since this blog is specific to Florida. The topic started out with Global Warming and moseyed through personal responsibility and corporate waste. Forbidden Snowflake then wrote about national disaster for her country Switzerland and would the EU help if their economy collapsed. So I thought talking about hurricanes that affected Florida would be great because nothing effects a state like a national disaster.

Great Miami Hurricane 1926: During the Roaring 20’s in the United States Florida was having a land boom. People were buying lots of land sight unseen. If you’ve ever heard the phrase, “Yeah, and I have some land in Florida I want to sell you.” This is the time period it comes from because it was unbelievable. If you ever tour the everglades you might still come across a sign that might look likes the one to the right.

” Edit Resource for “Photographs depicting Seminole Indians with dugout canoes, 1920-1928 (bulk 1920) [electronic resource] “”]Land in Miami and all over Southern Florida was being bought up. Every bubble bursts and the land boom ended in 1925 and came to a complete standstill September 18th, 1926 with the arrival of a category 4 hurricane whose eye was directly over Miami. This hurricane caused $90 billion dollars in damaged if it had hit Miami today. 800 people went missing along with 373 deaths and 6,381 injuries. It proved to non-Floridians who were the ones most likely dead, missing, and injured that Florida was a dangerous place to live. Since most of these folks left shelter when the eye took half an hour to pass over Miami leaving many to believe that the storm was over. Their unfamiliarity with hurricanes was the death blow of Florida’s land boom. The Great Depression was soon to follow but most of Florida was already there in 1929.

This storm does not have a name because hurricanes and tropical storms were not given names until 1953 and they were all female until 1979 when the National Weather Service began alternating between male and female names.

Florida Keys Labor Day Hurricane 1935: On September 2, 1935 a category 5 hurricane ripped through the keys leaving 408 dead and $6 million in damages. Flagler’s Miami/Key West line of the railroad was so damaged that it was sold to the state. Most of the deaths from this unnamed hurricane were World War I veterans.

Built the Miami/Key West line of the railroad that later became known as Flagler's Folly.

They were part of the Bonus Army that first visited the White House when Hoover was in office to demand the bonus they were to recieve in 1945 early. They were chased away from the White House but later brought their greivances to FDR. He enlisted them in the WPA and gave them work building a bridge from the mainland to the keys to replace the ferry service that was in current use.

Due to red tape, confusion, and a lack of communication the evacuation of the veterans by the train was delayed and overturned by a tidal wave during the hurricane. The World War I veterans who were only given temporary shelters that could not withstand a hurricane were lost. As you cross the 7-mile bridge, also called the overseas highway, you can still see what remains of Flagler’s Folly.

Two bridges on the w:Overseas Highway within the Florida Keys. The bridge on the left is the modern highway bridge, while the bridge on the right is the original bridge built by the Florida East Coast Railway, retrofitted to automobile traffic after 1935, and later closed.

The other participants in this blogchain are:

Razib Ahmed: http://hobbyeconomist.blogspot.com/ — Hobby Economist
Fokker Aeroplanbau: http://rightfarright.blogspot.com/ — I’m Always Right, Far Right
Bettielee: http://farseeingfairytales.blogspot.com/ —- Far Seeing Fairy Tales
Bsolah: http://www.benjaminsolah.com/blog —- Benjamin Solah, Marxist Horror Writer
Forbidden Snowflake: http://www.alleslinks.com/ —— Delirious
Rosemerry: https://beyondtourism.wordpress.com/ — Beyond Tourism: Florida’s Yesteryear
Dnic: http://four-lettered-words.blogspot.com/ ———- Four-Lettered Words
Lady Cat: http://www.randomwriterlythoughts.blogspot.com/ — Random Writerly Thoughts
Tika: http://tikanewman.blogspot.com/ ———- Tika Newman
Bill Ward: http://www.billwardwriter.com/ — BillWardWriter.com
dancingandflying: http://madeofcarbon.blogspot.com/ —- Made of Carbon

Please visit their blogs and leave a comment.