Southern Prohibition: Race, Reform, and Public Life in Middle Florida, 1821-1920

Six. “Good order”: Local Option in Franklin County

6Good order” Local Option in Franklin County Throngs of townspeople lined the docks along Apalachicola’s Water Street. On a clear February afternoon in 1915, they awaited the landing of King Retsyo I, the ceremonial monarch and parade marshal for the city’s first annual Mardi Gras Carnival. To the crowd’s delight, the masked king disembarked from the steamboat City of Columbus ensconced in purple regalia. Promoting their emerging seafood and timber industries, Apalachicolans paid homage to the ceremonial king, whose name was oyster spelled backward. Retsyo greeted the crowd, entered his “Chariot of State,” and led his entourage through town. The procession passed several blocks of bunting- and palm-draped buildings and halted at the reviewing stand on the corner of Chestnut and Market streets. Awaiting Retsyo were the queen, her ladies in waiting, and Mayor S. E. Teague. Stepping forward, the mayor presented Retsyo the key to the city on a purple satin cushion. The king accepted the token of hospitality and addressed the crowd: “I see your unrivalled water-front lined with dry docks, ship yards and wharves . . . [and] factories for the manufacture of furniture, boxes, crates, and wooden-ware, for which limitless material lies tributary to your city.”1 Though he was hidden behind a mask, the crowd likely recognized Retsyo as local businessman “ 130 Chapter Six John H. Cook. “Girdled by a sea of plenty,” the royal continued in his promotion of the town, “Neptune, the salty king, spreads before her an empire’s ransom in pearly shell.”2 The festive opening of the Mardi Gras Carnival had been carefully choreographed and scripted by Apalachicola’s Chamber of Commerce. Local business leaders planned the three-day event, which actually fell on the weekend before Fat Tuesday, to showcase the area’s industry and to highlight possibilities for future growth. Once in motion, however, the carnival exposed deepening fault lines in the town, particularly over the liquor question. In 1915, Apalachicola’s Franklin County was one of the last wet holdouts in the state. Every other county in North Florida , with the exception of Escambia (Pensacola) and Duval ( Jacksonville ), had been dry for a decade.3 At the Mardi Gras Carnival the issue bubbled to the surface as the local Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the town’s saloon keepers vied for the community’s favor in competing parade floats. Within weeks of the Mardi Gras showdown , petitioners began gathering signatures for a referendum on the county’s liquor question. In a closely contested election two months later, voters mandated to close the saloons and join the prohibition cause.4 Franklin County’s more slowly developing temperance movement, inconsistent with temperance’s course in contiguous counties, reflected its anomalous background. Though usually considered part of the state’s plantation belt, the county’s economy had long depended on the shipment , not cultivation, of cotton. As Leon County remained predominantly agricultural in the early twentieth century, timber mills and seafood canneries became important industries in Franklin. The county was also characteristically “unsouthern” in its first century. Founded by northern merchants in the 1820s and 1830s, Apalachicola oriented itself as much to the Gulf and Atlantic as to the upriver hinterland of Alabama and Georgia.5 The town’s business elite throughout the nineteenth century — from antebellum cotton merchants to postwar mill owners — hailed from the Northeast. Yet in response to growing racial discord and unsettling change around the turn of the century, white Apalachicolans waxed nostalgic about a plantation past the port had never actually experienced. Propelled by a Lost Cause groundswell, prohibition became a popular reform with whites, who saw it as a means of controlling a growing black population, which jumped from 28 to 48 percent between 1860 and 1910. Even so, Franklin County’s local option “Good order” 131 campaign took a longer time to develop compared to the rest of Middle Florida and, as a result, had alternate consequences. During the 1830s and 1840s, when wealthy Virginians and Carolinians established cotton plantations in Leon County, enterprising New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians, and Connecticut Yankees built merchant houses in Apalachicola. In fact, the Apalachicola Land Company, the real estate firm that developed the town, maintained its offices on Wall Street in New York. Not only did the New York company attract northern investors and emigrants, the firm designed the town to resemble Manhattan. Evidently patterning their design after warehouses...