Jax History CEO: We need a 21st-century approach to documenting Florida's biggest city
- T. Frederick Davis’s 1925 book, “History of Jacksonville, Florida and Vicinity, 1513 to 1924,” is outdated.
- More recent scholarship has explored specific aspects of Jacksonville's history, but a comprehensive overview is lacking.
- The Jacksonville History Center aims to publish a new, authoritative history of the city.
People interested in Jacksonville’s history often ask what one book they should read to learn about Florida’s largest city. The answer is easy — there is none. At the Jacksonville History Center, that deficiency is an embarrassment.
For most of the past 100 years, the answer to that question was different, and easy: Pick up a copy of “History of Jacksonville, Florida and Vicinity, 1513 to 1924" by T. Frederick Davis. Published in 1925 by the Florida Historical Society and printed by the Record Co. of St. Augustine, it stood for decades as the single authoritative account of Jacksonville.
For decades, disagreements about any fact concerning the people, places or events of this city’s past could be ended by declaring, “Look it up in Davis.”
Thomas Frederick Davis (1877-1946) was a native of Virginia who moved to Florida with his parents at the age of 9. After attending East Florida Seminary (now the University of Florida), he went to work for the U.S. Weather Bureau (now the National Weather Service) where he was employed at various weather stations, including the one in Jacksonville, until 1914.
Davis then entered the insurance business in Jacksonville, which apparently sustained his amateur passion for history. Both enterprises continued for the rest of his life.
Here is Davis’ account of how his book came to be: “The search through the highways and byways for local history was in the spare moments of the author stretching over a period of a score of years, a pastime ‘hobby’ with no thought of making money out of it.” He added that his purpose was to “present the facts, just as they were and just as they are.”
Confident that he had brought things up to date, he wrote, “The record closes as of December 31, 1924.”
In many respects Davis left an impressive and helpful record of Jacksonville’s first 102 years. Its value is even greater owing to the loss of certain public and private records during the Civil War and at the time of the 1901 Great Fire. The facts he recorded then relied heavily on contemporaneous newspaper accounts, which may certainly be trusted as to public events such as elections, dedications and openings.
On the other hand, Davis uncritically accepted the accounts of regional history that predate Jacksonville’s founding moment in 1822. He measures “the opening of the positive history of the white man in North America” from April 3, 1513, at a point along present day Ponte Vedra Beach where Juan Ponce de Leon is believed to have landed briefly.
Elsewhere, he was sufficiently convinced by accounts of the French arrival to draw a map showing the location of Fort Caroline — a location that remains in dispute.
Davis’ recitals become far more detailed and convincing as he lists events, people and especially organizations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. However, his lists are selective, consisting of those that he considered important or deserving of notice, and his descriptions of Black citizens are baldly racist. Overall, he was a man of his time. His book is a resource — but also an artifact.
In the century since the book’s publication, credible research and writing has begun to fill in the story of this city. Daniel Schafer’s work on the Kingsley family and Jacksonville’s experience of the Civil War are important markers of legitimate scholarship. So too are James Crooks’ two works on modern Jacksonville.
They are joined by authors such as Abel Bartley, Charles Bennett, Robert Broward, George Buker, Robert Cassanello, Ennis Davis, Dorothy Fletcher, George Foote, Richard Martin, Edward Mueller, Robin Robinson, Michael Tolbert, James Ward, Wayne Wood and others who have written about aspects of the city’s past.
Others are currently researching Jacksonville from fresh perspectives based on emerging resources.
It is time for a 21st-century approach to historicizing Florida’s biggest, most complicated and most interesting city. As part of our ambitious mission, the Jacksonville History Center has the goal of publishing an authoritative new volume — the first in a century. We are overdue, but intent on meeting this need, because Jacksonville history matters.
Alan J. Bliss, Ph.D., CEO, Jacksonville History Center
This guest column is the opinion of the author and does not necessarily represent the views of the Times-Union. We welcome a diversity of opinions.