LIFE ALONG THE NEWPORT ROAD: CHAPTER 3

Written by Elizabeth F. Smith and originally published by the Magnolia Monthly Press in 1972

By ELIZABETH SMITH

Chapter Three

In 1850 when a plank road was built from Newport northward to Chaires in Leon County as competition to the Tallahassee Railroad hauling cotton down to St. Marks, there were two hotels in Newport, both of them located near a sulphur springs. The Washington Hotel may have been on the east bank of the St. Marks River in Newport, for there was a puny springs near the wooden bridge where there is now a roadside park. The other one was two miles further north on the west bank and is still there. The large frame building located on the springs was the Newport Springs Hotel. If the springs in Newport weren’t sufficient for people benefitting from the waters, the proprietor offered to take them up to the bigger one by horse and carriage.
The proprietor of the Washington Hotel in Newport was Alonzo B. Noyes in 1853, a Massachusetts Yankee who was as much a go-getter as Daniel Ladd, but not nearly as successful. Noyes had married a Canadian girl and had come down to Florida before 1835, for his five children had all been born in Florida. Since his parents, Thomas and Mary B. Noyes, also lived with him, he had nine people to feed, and his outlay necessitated some business sense on his part. Beside running the hotel he was also the customs’ house officer and he had a busy time going up and down the river to tend all his investments. For a long time the customs house had been at the lighthouse, then at St. Marks, even though Noyes lived at Newport. Noyes was an inveterate letter writer to the federal government, and among the many projects for his fertile mind was the building of a marine hospital in St. Marks for sailors coming off the ships with yellow fever. He first suggested the hospital in 1853 after Newport and St. Marks had suffered their worst epidemic and were panicky for fear their trade would fall off with the cotton planters. One source said 160 people died that year in the two towns and the bodies were buried in the Newport and St. Marks graveyards at nighttime to keep the panic from spreading. But the wheels of bureaucracy ground slowly until 1857 when the army engineers under a young officer used limestone blocks out of the old Spanish fort, San Marcos de Apalache, to build a foundation adjacent to the ruins and in a swampy spot that was not calculated to help the victims of the fever. Though the people at that time didn’t know yellow fever was caused by mosquitoes, they did think it came from the musky swamp odors, or miasmas, and a higher place would have been wiser. The federal government paid a doctor at Newport to tend any sailors who came in sick, but in 1861 when the blockade pinched off trade, the hospital was closed. It is not known that the Confederate government ever used the hospital, though they were desperate for beds and space. It is possible that they were afraid it was too close to the enemy prowling in ships offshore, and they did not want Yankees coming in and murdering the sick and injured in their beds.
While this was going on Noyes was also importing ice in partnership with Daniel Ladd. There was also a man named Noyes who captained the ship in which the ice was hauled, no doubt a relative in those days of rampant nepotism, since it would have been impossible for Alonzo to do that too. The ad he and Daniel had in the WAKULLA TIMES for June 23, 1858, said, ‘KEEP COOL -Ice for all by the Express Line. The Brig GENERAL BAILEY, Noyes master, 15 days from New York, has just arrived with 350 tons more of this luxury, which will be dispensed to all who desire it, by sending their orders to the Ice Houses at St. Marks and New Port, in such quantities as desired at 2c per pound for lots of 100 pounds or more (where cutting is not necessary): under 100 pounds, 3c. Houses open from daylight to 8 a.m., and from 6 to 7 p.m.  Those buying to sell again furnished on liberal terms.” At the end of the ad was this rejoinder, “No credit given – melts too fast to credit.” The two partners preferred to take the cash and let the credit go.
Noyes was on the Board of Trustees for a school in Newport the same year, and also ran the hotel for railroad workers that stood n St. Marks. Two interesting things occurred to Noyes during the Civil War. When the South seceded from the Union, Noyes went over to the Confederacy and kept up his custom’s collection but his letters to Confederate Secretary of The Treasury Memminger always listed more expenses than income because of the federal blockade, and when the war was over, Noyes promptly switched back again to the Union and kept his job. His authority extended all the way down to Tampa Bay, since he was the chief collector on the upper Gulf Coast, and his two deputies were stationed at Cedar Key and Anclote Key. Noyes even suggested having a deputy at Anclote Key after the war started, thought the blockade left very little to collect. Memminger wrote and asked what reasons Noyes had to suggest his extra expense
Though Noyes had plenty of other problems, the on which seems to have caused him the most trouble was 76 tons of steel rails brought in for the Pensacola and Georgia Railroad which was to complete the line to Quincy from Tallahassee. The company did not have the money at the time to pay the $56.60 duty and Noyes kept it interned in his warehouse in St. Marks. One night in April of 1861 a group of men from the company broke into the building and carried off the rails. Noyes wrote post haste to Memminger who replied that the duty still had to be paid and cited the law covering it. The exigencies of war had prompted the desperate act, but here is no evidence that the duty was ever paid. Strangely enough, in spite of the need for railroads in carrying on the war against the North, steel trackage had a high duty of 25%, while such trivial vanities as women’s hats had only 5%.
Two miles north of Newport was the other hotel at Newport Springs, an elaborate and ornate frame building for planters and their families to visit, usually in the fall when fresh oysters were brought in for their meals. In the early 1850’s the family of Susan Bradford came, for in her diary in 1855 she tells of the deaths from yellow fever in her family and her mother’s desire to receive some benefit from the healing sulphur water. The family lives at PINE HILL, a plantation north of Tallahassee on the Centerville Road, and when talk of secession had begun not long after the plank road was built, many of the northern machinists and sawmillers who had worked for her father, Edward Bradford, had returned to the north. Susan again returned to the springs when her father in 1863 went down to the coast to make salt for preserving meat, and Susan bathed at the springs and ate some fresh fall peaches.
From Newport Springs it was only two-thirds of a mile to Magnolia. Here a dirt road veered off to the right to enter the town, but by 1850 it was only a ghost town with a few buildings and a rotting stockade to remind people of its importance only 20 years before the plank road was built. To look at the palmetto scrub and briar among the pinewoods today, no one would ever know a town had existed at Magnolia. Though the M. M. has written much about the town in earlier issues, further research has turned up new information about the town. Bertram Greene in his book ANTEBELLUM TALLAHASSEE mentions that the four Hamlin brothers who founded Magnolia were in Tallahassee in 1825 looking for government land to buy on a stream from which cotton could be shipped out to the gulf and around the Florida peninsula to northern ports. In H. Franklin Andrews’ book, THE HAMLIN FAMILY, the brothers had come down to New Orleans in 1816 with their father from Augusta, Maine by ship. The father had sold his iron ware in New Orleans and gone back north but the brothers, three in their twenties and two in their teens, had gone up to Liberty County, Miss. and bought government land along the Mississippi River which they sold in lots to new settlers while shipping cotton down to New Orleans. Nothing is known about this period in the brothers lives except that John and Nathaniel Hamlin married two girls, probably related named Amanda and Amelia Robinson, and Theophilus Hamlin Jr., the youngest boy, died in his teens. Lizzie Brown of Tallahassee mentions the Hamlin’s being in Tallahassee in 1825. Her father later became Governor Thomas Brown.
Greene mentions that the first bridge ever to span the short St. Marks River was built a little north of Magnolia to connect with a road going to Monticello in Jefferson County. The road was mentioned as being planned in an issue of the MAGNOLIA ADVERTISER which was published from late in 1828 to early in 1830. With a road thus going to Monticello thru an area of swamp known as the Pinhooks, another branch veering northwestward to Tallahassee and still another going north to Chaires, Magnolia was the fulcrum for a lot of cotton.
The town was founded in 1827 and lots sold briskly for 6 or 7 years. The road to Chaires became known as the Magnolia Road. In 1829 a shipload of important men from Augusta came down to visit Magnolia and at least one stayed for a year, but the others returned North. Yet another stayed for good. That was Joseph Ladd, brother-in-law of the four Hamlin brothers who had married their sister, Sarah. That same year the youngest of the brothers, Weld, died and was buried at Magnolia.
A new, unpublished manuscript, DANIEL LADD, MERCHANT PRINCE OF THE FLORIDA FRONTIER, written by Dr. Jerrell Shofner of Tallahassee, seems to have done more to throw light on the Hamlin’s and the Ladd’s than any book yet written. It is the first mention so far made outside of official records, that Joseph Ladd’s wife and nearly all of his ten children, came to Florida. Like Theophilus Hamlin, Joseph also had five sons and five daughters. The importance of these two families on the American frontier is such that they are mentioned extensively not only in antebellum newspapers but in such periodicals as NILE’S REGISTER and DEBOW’S REVIEW. Never had members of two families traveled so much under such hazardous conditions, going back and forth by boat the 1600 miles between Magnolia and Augusta as if they were snow geese making the seasonal trek, their activities and their advertisements covering the papers from Pensacola to New York to Augusta where the KENNEBEC JOURNAL, begun by Luther Severance, who married the Hamlin’s sister, Ann, started the paper in 1824. It is still being published.
Apparently Joseph sent for his family after he had time to get established in Magnolia, and they came down in 1833. During this time Magnolia had acquired a hotel and a bank, the Merchants and Planters Bank of Magnolia that printed its own bills which are still being turned up in odd places, such as the state of Washington.
Magnolia had its best years between 1830 and 1833. In 1834 when a group of Tallahassee businessmen decided to build a mule tram to St. Marks, the sale of lots in Magnolia began to decline. In 1835 the Hamlin brothers were having financial troubles and George Hamlin, the second oldest of the brothers and the only unmarried one, fought a duel with a man named Alexander Campbell because the latter had informed their creditors that the brothers’ business was failing. George killed Campbell in a pistol fight at Mannington on the Georgia line north of Chaires, Joseph Ladd bought out his brothers-in- law and saved them from bankruptcy, and two months later died of yellow fever. The next year the Tallahassee mule tram to St. Marks was completed and the people of Magnolia slowly began to move away.
Only Shofner’s manuscript seems to tell the real reason why Magnolia declined. The Forbes purchase during the second Spanish period in Florida (1783 – 1821) had been invalidated by the U. S. Supreme Court and the townspeople thought their lot purchases had been illegal. Many left, some even tearing down their houses and moving them off the land. It was probably during this time that Sarah Hamlin Ladd and several of her children returned to Augusta because one of them, Franklin, became a portrait painter in Maine and it was his home where all the relatives visited when they came up from Florida. Joseph E. Ladd also went back to Maine and was a druggist in the capital, but apparently came back to Florida in the early 1850’s, for he too is buried in the old Magnolia cemetery. He died in 1853. His stone, like that of Joseph Ladd, his father, and Weld Hamlin, his uncle, are still standing in the briar along the St. Marks River to show that a town of Magnolia had really existed. All three of these men are listed on a commemorative tombstone that stands in the Winthrop St. Cemetery in Augusta, surrounded by family members and their graves. The Winthrop St. Cemetery is well tended. The Magnolia Cemetery has nearly disappeared.
Another man who owned a lot of property I Magnolia was Benjamin Byrd who had settled with his family north of Chaires in the Miccosukee area after coming down from North Carolina in the middle of the 1820’s. Other members of the family who came down to Wakulla County included A. W. C. Byrd who probably had more slaves than any other man in the county, and Olivia Byrd, who had a plantation near Sopchoppy in the 1850’s. Most of this family is buried in the Byrd-Parrish Cemetery near Miccosukee.
Dr. James Bryant of Tallahassee tells much about the Byrd’s in his book INDIAN SPRINGS, published in October of 1971 and reviewed in the February M. M. Benjamin Byrd’s father-in-law, Arthur Burney, was born in North Carolina in 1773, moved with his wife Sarah down to Twiggs County, GA in 1805, and arrived in Leon County in 1826. They had nine children, a common amount for those days. They worshipped at the church on Joseph White’s Casa Bianca Plantation in Jefferson County before the Indian Springs Baptist Church was founded in 1829 near Miccosukee. In 1828 Arthur bought a town lot in Magnolia for shipping out his cotton, though still living at his Miccosukee plantation. The next year his daughter Mary married Benjamin at a ceremony in Magnolia performed by Justice of the Peace Ed Seixas.
Benjamin Byrd was born in North Carolina in 1798 and bought a lot from the Hamlin’s in 1829, a year after his father-in-law bought one lot. Then, in 1835 when the Hamlin’s were having so much trouble with their creditors, he bought 681 acres at Magnolia, undaunted by the problems over the Forbes Purchase which had other neighbors leaving the town. He became a town councilman and a Justice of the Peace. His son, Nathan, was born at Magnolia in 1838.
Meanwhile the Second Seminole War had begun, and the Indians were harassing the people of the town. Cattle were stolen and in 1840 an unfriendly Seminole who had gotten inside the town stockade, killed a man with his hatchet. About the time this occurred, two forts were built near Magnolia. Ft. Stansberry was built around a log house abandoned by a settler, a wood stockade built on a rectangle, and another was erected slightly north of Magnolia near the bridge to the Pinhook Road and known as Ft. Lawton. A road went westward from Ft. Lawton to Ft. Stansberry near Wakulla Springs, and then the road went on to Fishers Mill and from there to Ft. Braden on the Leon County line to the northwest.
At the same time the Tallahassee Railroad built a bridge across the St. Marks River and put its terminal at the town of Port Leon three miles nearer to the open bay. The town of Port Leon was on land now part of the St. Marks Wildlife Refuge. The bridge stopped all traffic coming up the river except for that brought in by barges. (Shofner mentions the obstruction at the Devil’s Elbow near the fort, a narrow channel that made it hard for ships drawing more than 8 feet to come up the river even when there were no bridges to stop them.)
By this tie Daniel Ladd, Joseph’s son, had learned all there was to know about cotton factoring from his uncles John and Nathaniel, and bought a waterfront lot in Port Leon where he built a warehouse higher off the ground than anyone else. His Uncle John also bought a lot in Port Leon and probably a few other men from Magnolia, but the others seemed to have drifted up the Magnolia road and settled to plant cotton instead of exporting it.
Benjamin Byrd abandoned the store ha had in Magnolia. In 1841 a new yellow fever epidemic raged in the Territory, in 1842 the Indian troubles died down and Fts. Stansberry and Lawton were abandoned. In 1843 a fire destroyed much of the city of Tallahassee and a hurricane four months later wiped out Port Leon. In 1845 Florida changed from a territory to a state and William Mosely, a Miccosukee planter became the state’s first governor and he named Benjamin Byrd, his old neighbor on the Magnolia Road, his first State Treasurer. But life was not happy for Byrd. In 1848 his wife, Mary Burney Byrd, died in Tallahassee, and his son Nathan, born in Magnolia died in Quincy in 1854 where he was attending the Quincy Academy. In 1859 his daughter Mary Eliza died in Cuthbert, GA while attending the Female Academy there. Life along the Newport Road was, for the people who lived there, a lot of deaths.

(To be continued)

The Wakulla County Historical Society Museum is located in the Old Jail at 24 High Drive in Crawfordville. Our extensive library of civil war books and records is available for review in the Betty Green reading room.