Mr. Flagler’s St. Augustine

2. Visions of the Ancient City, 1869–1880

10 2 ∑ Visions of the Ancient City, 1869–1880 America is now wholly given over to . . . scribbling women. —Nathaniel Hawthorne to his publisher, 1855 St. Augustine’s first big promoter with dreams of an extravagant future for Florida arrived in town in 1869. He was John F.Whitney, and he represented the prototype of the modern Florida land developer. Born a grandson of the famous Eli Whitney, the younger Whitney became an acquaintance of Abraham Lincoln, William Cullen Bryant, and P.T.Barnum. He started newspapers in Boston and New York City, and when he came to the old city he founded the St. Augustine Press. Whitney distributed copies of his newspaper around the country to publicize his adopted hometown and published the booklet A Brief Account of St. Augustine and Its Environs, in which he declared that St. Augustine made an ideal place to settle year-round. His son-in-law W.W.Palmer became Dr. Anderson’s partner in the St. Augustine Hotel. Whitney himself invested in a large tract of land on the west bank of the San Sebastian that he named Ravenswood, where with P.T.Barnum flair he named a freshwater seep Ponce de Leon Spring. The road to the spring became a favorite route for winter visitors out for leisurely carriage rides in the countryside.1 By the 1870s Whitney was not the only one advancing St. Augustine’s claim to the country’s attention. Harriet Beecher Stowe paid a visit and rhapsodized about the land of June in winter. The Georgia poet Sidney Lanier commended the town’s languid atmosphere as ideal for passing the time in repose. (Boss Tweed of the Tammany Hall Democratic Party machine passed through town incognitoin1869inhisflighttoCubatoavoidprosecutionforcorruptioninNew York City, but he had no intention of letting anyone know where he was.) The Visions of the Ancient City, 1869–1880 · 11 two most influential writers in defining the image of St. Augustine were a pair of remarkable women who captured its essence as America’s unique Ancient City and suspended that image forever in amber in the American mind. The first was Constance Fenimore Woolson, grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper. She came to St. Augustine with her widowed mother and spent several wintersduringthe1870s.ShepennedalongstoryforHarper’sMagazine,employing her considerable talents as a writer and her vivid imagination as a novelist to draw her readers into the exotic atmosphere of the old Spanish town, redolent both of moss-covered decay and the pungent, sweet aroma of orange blossoms. The steel-plate engravings printed in Harper’s of narrow streets overarched with balconies etched an indelible image into the nation’s consciousness. “All those in search of health, all endowed with romance and imagination, all who could appreciate the rare charming haze of antiquity which hangs over the ancient little city,” she wrote, would fall in love with St. Augustine.2 Following her mother’s death in 1879, Woolson removed to Europe and spent the rest of her life there, wandering with the seasons from England to Germany toItaly.SheusedSt.Augustineasthesettingforher1886novel EastAngels.Woolson became a close friend of the novelist Henry James, and their relationship gave rise to speculation that they might also be lovers. In 1894, depressed and delirious with fever, she either fell or jumped to her death from an apartment window in Venice. Shortly before her death Woolson had written that she hoped to return to Florida, buy a plot of land, plant orange trees, and live out the rest of her life quietly.3 During her lifetime Woolson earned well-deserved fame as a creative talent, but the other woman who shaped the image of St. Augustine lived her life in an anonymity of her own making. “Sylvia Sunshine” hid her identity behind a pretty pseudonym when she published Petals Plucked from Sunny Climes in 1880. The only two clues to her identity embedded in the text were the fact that Southern Methodist Publishing of Nashville brought out her book and her revelation that her journey to Florida began from Atlanta. Hence she might have been a southern woman. Other than that, the only suggestion of her identity was her obvious talent as a writer, as evidenced by the sprightly journalistic prose of Petals. In 1888 she turned up in St. Augustine again, once more in the guise of Sylvia Sunshine, to write about the opening of Henry Flagler’s Hotel Ponce de Leon for North Carolina’s Charlotte Chronicle.4 More than any other guidebook or contemporary description...