Mr. Flagler’s St. Augustine

1. Dr. Anderson of St. Augustine, 1839–1880

1 1 ∑ Dr. Anderson of St. Augustine, 1839–1880 If there is one sin I detest it is meanness. —Andrew Anderson to his mother, December 28, 1863 The antique village of St. Augustine, Florida, was the birthplace of Andrew Anderson . Returning there after spending the Civil War years in his father’s former home, New York City, he found circumstances much changed. He entered Florida by way of Jacksonville, the river-crossing town that had fairly prospered before the war. Now it lay half in ruins, having been deliberately burned alternatelybySecessionistsandUnionarmyforcesasthetownchangedhandsseveral times during the fighting. From there he took a steamer up the broad, placid St. Johns River to Picolata, the remote riverbank landing where the Spanish had once maintained a small blockhouse. Second Lieutenant W.T.Sherman had oncebeenbrieflystationedtherein1840,duringwhatwasthencalledtheFlorida War, now designated the Second Seminole War. The rustic stagecoach carrying passengers from Picolata to St. Augustine passed through an open landscape of wiregrass flatlands under a canopy of ancient longleaf pines where as a boy, not so many years earlier, Anderson had explored on his pony. At the San Sebastian River on the outskirts of St. Augustine the stage rolled onto a flatboat that served as a ferry to reach the east bank. A bridge had stood there before the war, but it had fallen casualty to the skirmishing. From that point on Anderson was home: the King Street causeway, lined with coquina stone seawalls on either side, carried him quickly across the San Sebastian salt marshes. These mud flats, scattered with patches of marsh grass, had served as the town’s first line of defense in olden days, for their deep, sucking clay mud could not be crossed on foot by any living thing heavier than a marsh hen. Once over this barrier Anderson reached the front gate of his home, Markland.1 2 · Mr. Flagler’s St. Augustine In contrast to the devastation Anderson had witnessed along his journey south, Markland looked more prosperous than he remembered it. The live oak trees planted along King Street by his mother years earlier had grown to overarch the sandy roadway. The orange grove, which in his boyhood had consisted of disease-stunted trees, had leafed into a green forest, abundant with golden orbs—both ornamental and, more important, profitable when shipped in wintertime to shivering Yankees up North. Four years before his birth, the Great Freeze of 1835 had blasted the trees down to their roots, and just as they started to recover, the orange coccus, a scale insect that sucked the life from citrus trees, withered the struggling shoots. But in recent years something marvelous had happened; some disease or predator bug had eradicated the coccus, and the trees erupted in celebration. In the midst of the grove stood Markland House, a modest enough dwelling of two stories, with tall verandas all around, but imposing in its garden setting. Like so many of the older Spanish buildings in town—and Spain’s fortress, the castillo—it was constructed of local coquina stone, the shells of tiny beach mollusks compacted by time into a soft limestone. Anderson’s mother, Clarissa Fairbanks Anderson, welcomed her only child home with great joy. All his years away had been a torment to her, and she had expressed her concern, as mothers do, with a stream of letters admonishing him about his studies, his pipe smoking, his possible drinking of wine, his attendance at what she imagined must be rowdy parties, and his gradual escape from the restraints under which he had been raised. In her letters Mrs. Anderson expressed special concern for the state of Andrew’s immortal soul, for despite her repeated pleas, he had refused to stand up and profess his faith in Jesus as his savior. But now he was safely at home again, and Andrew could resume life with his doting mother. During his years away his mother had presided over the grove, supported by a small corps of servants, some of whom had been family slaves before the war. Clarissa Fairbanks had come to St. Augustine from Boston in 1837 to care for the children of the first Dr. Andrew Anderson, whose wife Mary had recently succumbed to tuberculosis. Like so many newcomers to St. Augustine, the Andersons had arrived from New York City in 1828 because of Mary’s invalidism, with the hope that mild winters and bracing salt air would work as a curative. Sometimes it did, and sometimes it did not. Mary’s...