An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century

8 Frank’s Journey

In 1896, Frank Stoneman was on a train bound from Jacksonville to Orlando. He had taken a lonely passage from the Northeast a week or two earlier after he was certain that Lillian ’s departure to Taunton with Marjory was permanent. With neither job nor family keeping him in Providence, he set out for new surroundings. Why he chose Florida is not altogether clear. Prone to developing pneumonia, he may have been following a doctor’s advice to seek a warmer climate, and having grown up on the frontier, his daughter explained, he had always felt the pull of an “unfinished place.” The Florida frontier was different from that he had known in the West. A landscape with no discernable roll, wetlands straddling the horizon ’s broadness, and weather that could be as serene as heaven and violent as Hades would remove him geographically and thus emotionally from his past. No doubt, too, Frank read some of the countless newspaper and magazine articles that depicted Florida as an agricultural promised land and resort empire. At the very moment he was contemplating his future, wealthy capitalists were building railroads and big hotels down both of Florida’s coasts, opening America’s tropics—though Frank’s Journey [ c h a p t e r e i g h t 8. frank’s journey [ 105 really subtropics—to visitors, settlers, and entrepreneurs. People, in other words, were going to Florida. And going to Orlando was a reasonable choice. Others before Stoneman had seen potential in Central Florida, and they were creating new opportunities for latecomers like himself. Lush and green and located at the edge of the watershed of the great Everglades system, Orlando was the largest city in the peninsula’s interior. A century before Walt Disney World, the bright placid beauty around a chain of lakes made Orlando, including the exotic-sounding cities of Altamonte Springs and Winter Park, a popular wintertime retreat. Henry Plant, a Connecticut Yankee turned Confederate tariff collector turned southern railroad magnate, completed a rail line from Jacksonville to Orlando in 1880 to service leisure travelers and the area’s expanding citrus industry, known for the temple orange. The Atlanta Constitution described Plant—with his steamer line, railroads, and eight new resort hotels—as the man who “revolutionized nature.” Nature was Florida’s business, and Plant and other capitalists soberly exploited it. Stoneman took a Plant steamer from New York to Jacksonville and then climbed aboard Plant’s South Florida Railroad to Orlando. At age forty, Stoneman was starting life over, in some ways an exciting prospect but one dampened by what he had to leave behind in the previous life. Sometime along the way, he decided that law would provide a suitable new profession. He settled temporarily outside of town and raised chickens as an income-generating sideline to preparing for the bar. After his admission, he moved to Orlando and hung out his shingle. He rented the room in which he lived from Martha Virginia Eppes Shine Greetham, a great-granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson who, with her late husband, Thomas Shine, had been a pioneer settler of Orlando. Also living with Greetham was her thirty-year-old daughter, Lillias Shine, and she and the new boarder caught each other’s eyes. But Stoneman was still legally married, and he and Shine did not act officially on their mutual attraction for seventeen years. The law profession was ultimately no better to Stoneman than real estate and oil had been. With his prospects for marriage on hold and 106 ] part one his legal practice foundering, he pursued an opportunity to go into the newspaper business. In 1900, he and an acquaintance named A. L. LaSalle , the printing department foreman at the weekly Orlando Sentinel, purchased a flatbed press from a defunct newspaper in Avon Park, a citrus community that had gone bust after the same 1894–95 freezes that did in Hamilton Disston’s St. Cloud sugar enterprise. After hauling the press to Orlando on an oxcart, the two prepared for several months to give the city its first daily newspaper. On January 1, 1896, they ran the inaugural issue of the Daily Herald. Central Florida’s economy continued to languish, however, while much was happening in the state’s southern parts, which had escaped the freezes. Miami, for one, was begot in their aftermath when Henry Flagler extended the southern reach of his Florida...