On page 42 of the census appendix, after a three-name continuation of surrounding white residents, Rosewood begins with household #92, listed as being headed by Nathan Robinson, while “Carter C.” is listed strangely below him as “Cook.” In fact, the two-story residence here, dating from an 80-acre federal homestead grant in the nineteenth century, is Cornelia Carter’s home, while Nathan Robinson is her widowed son-in-law. Also living there are Robinson’s married daughter Sebie (listed as “Ceba”) and her husband, as well as Robinson’s youngest daughter, Alanetta “Roby” Robinson, age 4—who would pose a conundrum for the claims case of the 1990s.
Other Rosewood survivors would insist that between 1920 and 1923 the Robinsons moved north to Chiefland, making Alanetta Robinson Mortin ineligible for a $150,000 state reparations payment in the claims case. I was assigned to test this claimant as she insisted she had not moved. The story failed various tests of reliability, but I advised the Attorney General’s Office to give the elderly claimant the benefit of the doubt, since the census said she was there at one point. In later years, as an emerging “last survivor” drew heavy journalistic interest, interviews revealed untrue statements about Rosewood from this claimant, and the implication seemed confirmed by further research, saying that here was another of the unacknowledged ironies in the claims case.
Next on appendix page 42—now that the census taker has entered Rosewood—is household #93, headed by Perry Goins. This household and the 65-acre tract of Goins land it anchors would be at the center of a main Rosewood myth, fostered by the excitement of the claims case, and then inflated to epic size by the 1997 motion picture Rosewood. The myth rests on a distortion of time.
Between about 1895 and 1906, it was true that the Goins family, African Americans, had established a thriving business presence in Rosewood, with dozens of employees harvesting pine resin in surrounding forests, for distillation into products including turpentine, as well as pitch and tar for sealing wooden ships.
But the myth used by the claims case transported this bygone face of Rosewood into 1923, claiming that the 1923 violence had attacked not a scattered remnant community but a thriving business center. The 1923 attack was presented as an alleged proof of how African American wealth was not allowed to be transmitted from generation to generation. In truth, the Goins business founder, Martin Goins, died in 1903 and the business then withered, going bankrupt by 1916. Some of the Goins heirs then moved away, but a nephew of Martin Goins, Perry, remained on the 65-acre tract that had once housed M. Goins & Bros. Naval Stores. As the 1920 census shows, Perry Goins continued to live at the old Goins house site with his wife Hattie and their children, but for employment he walked two miles down the railroad each day to stack lumber for the sawmill at Sumner. In 1982 I interviewed his daughter Beatrice, age eight in 1923.
Next, still on appendix page 42, is another household reflecting Rosewood’s decline since the earliest years of the twentieth century (a time when a cedar sawmill had also bolstered the community, until that mill closed in 1911). Originally, the Goins family had begun setting up Rosewood operations in the late 1890s, arriving from their former company compound on 4,447 acres in Hoke County, North Carolina, where the pines had become tapped out. With the Goins migration had come other families sharing a common trait with them: triple ethnicity derived from African, Native American and European roots, so that some neighbors in frontier Florida had puzzled and said the newcomers looked white, though Martin Goins emphasized that he identified himself as a Negro. Census takers labeled some of these families with neither “B” for black nor “W” for white, but “Mu” for Mulatto. No racial hostilities were recorded or remembered in their area, the western half of the two square miles in the scattered Rosewood hamlet. This became the lighter-skinned half of the community (known to some darker Rosewood neighbors as “Yallertown,” for “high yellow“ or light-complected).
One of the families linked to the Goinses was the Haywards, who in those early years around the turn of the century bought an 80-acre tract between the 65-acre Goins plot and the 80 acres of Cornelia Carter (who also “looked white” or “looked like an Indian”). Greeting the census taker in 1920, the old Hayward home (household #94) could still be described in terms sounding superficially like prosperity—not only a house of two stories but downstairs in the parlor was an upright piano. Yet the surviving heir, Mary Jane Hayward, had fallen on hard times, remarrying and fading from community life (the transcribed census had her husband as “Screw, F. W.” but he was F.W. Screen.).
Moving to page 44: The next Rosewood household, #95, is said in the University Team appendix transcription to be headed by “Mouma, John,” but this, less exotically, should be “John Monroe.” When one of Martin Goins’s daughters, college-educated Sophie, had married Monroe, they moved into a comfortable home on a ten-acre plot carved out of the edge of the Goins tract. The census found John and their four children there, but Sophie had died in childbirth in 1917. More than a mile away in the darker-skinned half of Rosewood, Virginia Bradley, Nancy Bradley, and Daisy Mitchell had all died in much the same way, and in the same short period, despite efforts by Rosewood midwife Mary Ella McCoy. The struggling remnant community was a dangerous place to be a mother, quite apart from the racial strife of 1923.
Still on page 44, the next censused household in Rosewood, #96, is listed correctly as Annie Blocker, though neighbors knew this energetic, helpful woman with four children as “Sis” Blocker. She was Mary Jane Hayward/Screen’s sister. Her prospects had soured with marriage to a perennial fugitive from the law, John Blocker, who in earlier years had run a small moonshine shop and card room in Rosewood. Blocker’s place was infamous for an incident, years before, when a traveling gambler had shot neighbor Arthur Bradley in the hand.
All that was gone now, even by 1920 and the census, and by 1923 the shrinkage would be worse. Ironically, the communal decline had cleaned Rosewood up. On both sides of the remnant community timber operations continued to thrive—in Sumner three miles southwest and in a still-bustling turpentine camp called Wylly only a mile to the northeast. Both those places had booming Saturday night “jooks,” makeshift dancehalls giving cramped, violence-plagued solace to the labor force.
But Rosewood, out of sight of both the remaining hotspots on the railroad that served them all, had become a quieter place, notable for households of grandparents doing their best to care for orphaned or abandoned grandchildren.
Soon after the 1920 census, Sis Blocker, too, would become part of the outward migration, leaving Rosewood and moving her children into a shanty in the Wylly turpentine camp. She would be there when the 1923 violence struck Rosewood. She was spared because the violence did not reach into Wylly. Some refugees from Rosewood’s shootout of January 4, would flee to Wylly and hid in a pine grove there. Annie Blocker slipped through the woods to them and brought much-needed food. Ultimately her strong character would win out when she left turbulent John Blocker for good and moved her family far south to the town of Sarasota, where her son Ernest grew up to be a prosperous businessman. Aged 13 in the 1920 census, Ernest Blocker was interviewed by me in 1982 and again during the 1990s claims case. I also interviewed his articulate sister Arthina Bennett (whom the 1920 census had seemed to identify as a boy).
Though the census record doesn’t show it, enumerator Alf Dorsett would make a long leap after the Blocker house. More than three quarters of a mile intervened between the Hayward property, on the western edge of Rosewood, and the site of the next census entry, household #97, which was in Rosewood’s very heart. Dorsett would loop back later to catch houses in between, making the resulting census picture of Rosewood quite a maze. Household #97, however, would one day become the most famous still-extant Rosewood landmark, for that house was not destroyed by the 1923 violence. It would survive, still well-maintained beside a sleepy two-lane highway, into a new millennium.
This was the rambling Victorian home of the Rosewood community’s white storekeeper, John Wright, and his wife Mary (the census, economically, called them both “Wright, M. J.”).
At least three influential whites would be involved in hiding Rosewood’s 1923 refugees from the mob rampage of January 4-7, 1923. These rescuers included Sumner’s mill boss Walter Pillsbury, turpentine camp owner D. P. McKenzie on the other side of Rosewood in Wylly, and, most instrumentally, John Wright in Rosewood itself, the community’s lone remaining storekeeper.
Mythology about Rosewood has often presented it as having two stores as it met 1923, the white-owned Wright store and a black-owned counterpart belonging to resident Bacchus Hall. In truth there was only one remaining store; Hall’s store had reflected the dying timber economy and closed down well before 1923, as his children Sam, Wilson, and Margie would confirm in the 1980s and 1990s. Bacchus Hall himself died in 1919 and his empty store building caught a spark and burned down, its flames unrelated to the later racial conflagration of 1923.
Myths in this regard portray the Rosewood that met 1923 as an economically thriving place of black-owned businesses, supposedly showing that wealth and influence could soon have been accumulated here—if not for the artificial intervention of systemic racism in the form of mob attack, which allegedly cut short a promising future. This reverses the real history: Dying Rosewood arguably was a tempting target for mob aggression precisely because it already looked half-abandoned. There were no African American-owned business at all. If, by contrast. the myths were to say that even in spite of Rosewood’s difficulties it certainly did not deserve to be attacked, and that it remained a place of hard-working people with close family ties, this would be closer to the real history.
And now, finally leaving behind appendix/census page 44, we move deeper into the heart of Rosewood on page 46. The census taker now loops to two of the few other white households in the Rosewood area. Household #98, Luther/“Arthur” Ingram, was so far back in the woods that it was not usually remembered as being part of the community. But #99 was near the community’s center, a quarter mile or so back down the railroad from John Wright’s store. This was the home of white World War I veteran Rob Ingram. Close by lived a third Ingram, Rob’s brother Will, but Will would not be listed by the census until far over on transcription page 50, as household #106, when the trudging census taker doubled back to pick up loose ends. The resulting hopscotch pattern does not make a very easy road map to a cryptic atrocity, and this was compounded in 1993 by errors and mistypings in the Florida “university yeam’s” transcription.
Relations between the white Ingrams and their more numerous African American neighbors seem to have been generally peaceful, barring the kinds of arguments seen all over the woods involving suspicious disappearances of free-roaming hogs. Indeed, suspicions of that kind were so common in the old frontier South that they had kicked off West Virginia/Kentucky’s Hatfield and McCoy feud in 1878. In Rosewood a shoe would finally drop in 1937, when Will Ingram, having been undisturbed by the 1923 violence, would be arrested for stealing a hog. Allegations that a son from one of the Ingram households had joined the 1923 mob remained at the level of unsubstantiated gossip. Despite frequent post-millennial media claims that only one house (storekeeper John Wright’s) was left standing in Rosewood after the 1923 destruction, the pattern was not so neat and other buildings survived: the two white-owned Ingram residences, the home of George and Maggie Bradley (rented from a white), Rosewood’s small shed railroad depot, Wright’s store, and two homes owned by African Americans, spared out of unpredictable sympathy or chance: the Ransom and Julia Edwards household and that of Jim and Luvenia Hall. Nor is this necessarily a full count. There is no reliable inventory of the 1923 destruction.
Disconcertingly, page 44 of the census transcription now jogs again, leaving the Ingrams, who lived south of the railroad, to go north of the tracks and push back into the woods, finding household #100, the residence of Ed and Eliza Bradley. We are now in what might be called the dark-skinned half of Rosewood (as opposed to the light-skinned half to the west, linked to the Goins legacy). Though the Goinses and related families were latecomers to Rosewood, arriving in the 1890s, the darker families like the Bradleys were old settlers, their forebears arriving before the Civil War, perhaps as slave labor building the railroad here, its last track laid in these isolated swamps in March of 1861, at the war’s very beginning.
In census records, African Americans were not identified by name here until after the war brought emancipation. Before that they were glossed in anonymous head counts for each slave owner. The first post-war census came in 1870, when emancipated surnames seemed to pop up out of nowhere, one being Barnabas Bradley, designating a child in an undifferentiated census tract looking roughly like the precursor of Rosewood. Barnabas would grow up to be Ed Bradley’s father—and the father of two other main householders of 1923: John Wesley Bradley and George Bradley. A nineteenth-century neighbor of Barnabas, blacksmith Isaac Carrier, similarly started Rosewood’s Carrier line, which married into the Bradleys to produce a tight-knit Bradley-Carrier faction in the old-settler side of the community. This faction was counterpoised, after the 1890s, by the lighter-skinned Goins domain just west in Section 30.
The Bradleys and Carriers of Section 29, around Wright’s store and the railroad’s shed depot, had smaller individual land holdings than in the Goins area (for example, the eight acres recorded as owned by Ed and Eliza Bradley), but as early as 1886 Barnabas Bradley had been a Rosewood church trustee, along with another dark-skinned old settler, long-lived Bacchus Hall, as they founded Rosewood’s Pleasant Field Methodist Episcopal Church.
This wood-frame chapel and a later competitor, the First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Rosewood, would by 1912 be experfiencing painful quarrels and feuding, amid tense awareness that the small timber boomtown was abruptly dying, its over-harvested natural resources exhausted, with the only choice left being to stay and find some way not to starve, or get out. Most white residents of Rosewood, who before that had been a majority, did get out, many African Americans as well. The hard-pressed core that remained were mostly older African Americans caring for bereft grandchildren or adoptees, with fewer and fewer young adults of job-seeking age still on hand.
There was the consolation of a warm family support network, while garden plots together with hunting in the woods could fill some gaps. A few residents made arduous six-mile-a-day round trips on foot to get paychecks in the still-booming sawmill town of Sumner, or tried lower-paying turpentine work in Wylly in the other direction. In 1920, Section 29’s remnant group, wreathed in moss-hung shadows that were dotted with migration-abandoned homes, may have been confusing to an earnest white census taker from regimented Sumner.
Ed Bradley, for instance, was jotted down in the page 44 census list as being aged 20. In fact, voluminous documentary and testimonial evidence leaves no doubt that Ed Bradley was an aging lumberjack who had worked the swamps for Cummer Lumber, though constant immersion had brought “water poisoning” to his feet, an ailment known to later soldiers in Vietnam as jungle rot. At home, Ed Bradley dressed deer carcasses he shot for sale passing train conductors, planted corn and peanuts to fatten hogs penned at the back of his lot (where the smell wouldn’t carry), cut some sugar cane, and had a cow for milk and butter.
Bradley’s industrious wife Eliza had once been renowned in Rosewood for bringing home whole wagonloads of dirty laundry from Sumner to wash for white supervisory personnel there. But Eliza’s pace was slowing and by 1923 the wagon trips had apparently stopped. For years the aging couple cared for two adoptees, orphaned niece Thelma Evans and dislocated Bertha Carrier (listed in the census as aged 19 and 17). One of them, Thelma Evans Hawkins, I interviewed in 1982. Shortly after the 1920 census was taken, Thelma became one more working-age resident who fled the lack of opportunities in the enclave in the swamps.
Though she loved her adoptive aunt and uncle Ed and Eliza, she reluctantly described her role in the household as that of a child slave, not allowed to go to school but kept working at fireplace-heated flatirons to press clothes that her aunt had washed on consignment. Thelma spoke to me with crisp diction and careful grammatical phrasing, but this bespoke a hard journey.
Breaking away from Rosewood as she neared age twenty, she had made a lonely trip 120 miles up the railroad to the city of Jacksonville, winding up as a domestic working for a wealthy white couple, who encouraged her ambitions. She described how tired she felt doing double duty, working all day in Jacksonville and then going to night school, determined to make up for the unschooled vacuum left from her childhood. Late at night, she recalled, she would nod off as a streetcar took her home, and lack of sleep took its toll. Then one day in 1923 she happened to glance at a newspaper rack. The horrifying headline there cried, “Rosewood.” Thelma was beside herself with worry about her relatives as she read about the killing and flames. She knew that the place burning in the headlines was not a pristine paradise of dynamic promise, as a later age would seem to keep imagining, but she also knew it was not a brooding outlaw’s roost, as the 1923 Jim Crow news stories seemed to sneeringly imply.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Thelma Hawkins would help care for (and imparted her crisp diction to) a young cousin fleeing not mobs but traumatic turmoil at home. In 1993 that cousin, troubled Rosewood descendant Arnett Doctor, by then age fifty, would become the “point man,” or chief publicity agent, for Florida’s Rosewood claims case. In a sentimental new era he would tell eager news media that the lost paradise called Rosewood had been a fantastically thriving “Mecca,” drawing opportunity-seekers, he said, from all over the South, “like Atlanta is today.” He further said that at the moment of its destruction this lost Eden had been a place of “mansions...with manicured lawns.” Even years after Doctor’s 2015 death, new bursts of media excitement would continue to preserve some of those fantasies as if they were fact. Such, apparently, is the power of racial anxiety in a nervous nation.
And still, page 46 of the appendix census transcription has another household to explore: #101, the Halls. This dour old nineteenth-century saltbox of a house, a two-story dwelling but with no front porch, projected a desolate appearance. The nine occupants here, long-suffering Mary Ann Hall and her eight children, had often known hunger, as they lived on in the family home left by the late Charles Bacchus Hall, the onetime Rosewood storekeeper. A stern man with white side whiskers, Hall would be remembered for chasing away children who sought to play with his own. Just across a field was the previous census listing, that of Ed and Eliza Bradley, and between the two homes was Rosewood’s one-room school. This is poignant, for in both homes the children were forbidden to go to school, and were made to earn their keep.
In 1983 I repeatedly interviewed Sam Hall, Bacchus Hall’s second son, who was 16 at the time of the Rosewood violence. Sam Hall was a forthright, careful informant who in 1983 I brought, as contractor for 60 Minutes, from his home in Georgia to on-location taping at the site of Rosewood. I also interviewed Sam’s surviving siblings, Doshia, Margie, Wilson and Mary, but Doshia had become senile and Mary seemed to have blocked out many memories, while the remaining two had been small in 1923, with few impressions retained.
The hazing or blocking of pre-1923 memories in ths household was backlit by some troubling documentation, including prior Rosewood censuses in 1900 and 1910. Long-lived Bacchus Hall had married far back in the past, on March 11, 1877, though not to his wife of later years. After his initial marriage to Margaret Dawkins, later censuses showed, Bacchus Hall had begun growing old with her, while into their childless household by 1900 a young ward was adopted: Mary Ann Davis, from an impoverished family elsewhere in Rosewood. By 1920 the seven children then born to Mary Ann knew as a matter of course that she was their mother, but seemed to think she had always been Bacchus Hall’s wife. An explosive scandal had developed in Rosewood after 1900 when the children began to be born, with neglected wife Maggie still somehow living in the same household, according to the 1910 census. The Halls were apparently scornned by devout Methodist neighbors, but seemingly the younger children were never told the details. After 1910, Margaret Hall disappeared from the records and Bacchus, old enough to be Mary Ann Davis’s father if not grandfather, then married her formally. By that time the community was dying, the old entrepreneur was selling off parcels of land, and hard-pressed neighbors were defaulting on credit tabs at Hall'S store, closing it down. Mary Ann Hall found herself caring not only for a house full of hungry children but the dying old man in a protracted illness. Arduous relief came from labor shortages caused by World War I, as Mary Ann Hall went to the Sumner sawmill and “stacked lumber like a man,” her children recalled. This was the reality behind a later era’s media myths saying that 1923 rioters had cut short the bright promise of an allegedly still-thriving black-owned store—which the myths also multiplied into an image of various such imagined businesses, in a “thriving town.”
When the 1923 violence struck, Mary Ann Hall and the six children who were still at home fled into the woods, with rescue two nights later organized by influential whites seeking to outwit white rioters. The rescue arrangement took Mary Ann and her five youngest children to Gainesville 45 miles up the railroad, where they found housing and at last a chance to go to school. I was shocked to hear Margie Hall say that she was not traumatized by their flight, and instead she was “glad to get away from down there...There wasn’t nothing going on.” The youngest Hall daughter, Mary, was described as going through high school in Gainesville.
In 1994 when the Rosewood claims case paid its ground-breaking reparations, a total of nine 1923 survivors were still living, and received $150,000 each. It happened that three of those survivors were all from census household #101, the Halls (though Sam Hall, the most assiduous in reporting the history, had died in the 1980s and got nothing). Thus a third of $1.35 million in Rosewood survivor payments went to a single family, whose balance sheet of long-term losses and gains was disconcertingly mixed.
But now, at last finished with page 46 of the census transcription, we move to the next page of names, page 48, still in the heart of Rosewood. Here the previously seen pattern of a white census taker's misunderstandings reaches a crescendo, complicated further by 1993 errors in transcription. Household #102, “John Hall,” should be James Hall. Jim Hall, an elderly woodsman, was Bacchus Hall’s less prosperous brother, living in a small home nearby with his wife Luvenia (“Rubina” in the transcription). Then after that comes one of the transcription’s more ambitious errors: “Columbus, John” is said to live with his wife “Columbus, Ona,” in household #103. Columbus? No one from Rosewood ever mentioned a neighbor named Columbus. In fact, the weary census taker has reached the free-thinking household of veteran Rosewood hunter and trapper John Coleman, and his wife Emma Carrier Coleman.
In better days, crusty John Coleman had been town marshal of a budding settlement that hoped to grow larger. He was known as an apostate who scoffed at Rosewood’s more numerous church folk, and stayed home on Sundays to shoot pennies in crack-a-loop games with younger cronies. The Coleman home was another whose parlor held a piano, and in this case no dilapidation seemed to apply. In Rosewood's eariier days of roaring saws and steaming turpentine stills, this home had thrown fondly remembered parties, and Coleman could afford the musical accompaniment. Back then, before the surrounding woods were hunted clean, stacks of pelts shipped north from the Rosewood depot could make a man’s living, as the new Chicago catalog houses like Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck bought furs and hides and stitched their own merchandise in the form of fur coats, hats, and many other items. But then Rosewood's wild game had thinned like the clear-cut trees, and old John had more time on his hands for playing crack-a-loop with the boys. His wife Emma continued to make two-mile trips on a back trail west to reach the Goins side of the community, where John and Emma Coleman’s daughter Hattie had married the last Goins holdout, Perry, joining together the darker and lighter communal factions. Over there, Goins children rejoiced to see Grandma Emma toddling down the path, cradling a batch of freshly baked cookies.
But questions about this page of census transcription go deeper than what appears in plain view. Pieces are missing. Hattie Coleman Goins also had a sister, Virginia, who had married less fortunately, becoming Virginia Smith. The marriage to Allen Smith had left Virginia abandoned with three small children, as her husband Allen moved to where the work was, at Otter Creek twelve miles east, and apparently did not look back. Persuasive testimony from Virginia Smith’s daughter, Nettie Smith Joyner, together with other evidence, places that family of four in a small, smoky hovel not far from the larger residence of Virginia’s parents John and Emma Coleman. It may have been an easy house for a hurried census taker to miss, or perhaps they did not move there until after the 1920 census. Its placement, however, was established by testimony in the 1980s before there was a claims case or money incentive to encourage exaggerations. The four Smiths—Virginia, Nettie, Johnnie, and Gilbert—were present in 1923 and fled the mob violence. At one point Virginia reportedly panicked as a white man on horseback galloped toward her, and she left her terrified daughter Nettie standing in the road. The horseman turned out to be a rescuer, apparently turpentine woods rider Jack Cason, and the Smiths seem to have been reunited at Cason’s farm.
Next (passing the invisible gap in the census where Virginia Smith’s one-room household fails to appear) there is a larger and more impressive house, but also warped in transcription. According to the census, household #104 is headed by a fifty-year-old widow, “Edward, Julie.” But in reality, Julia Edwards (her real name) was not widowed and her husband Ransom Edwards was still the household head. Ransom Edwards had seen some disillusioning things in his long life, and perhaps he didn’t care to greet a census taker.
This comfortable farm, with its fruit trees and livestock, had been a hub of bygone hopes in Rosewood, for back in the boom days Ransom Edwards was not only a farmer and woodsman but superintendent of Rosewood’s segregated black school. He signed teacher paychecks in a flowing hand, but also had a close view of the daunting neighbor-against-neighbor feuds which, residents said, tore at the community’s sinews.
No one managed to catch the arsonist who hit the school, though it was assumed to be an internal affair, involving no whites. This was frontier country, and tempers could flare; forty miles north in the community of Newberry a white school was burned much the same way, apparently by a white neighbor with a grudge. Also internal, apparently, and not racially motivated, was Rosewood’s arson of August 19, 1911, burning down the African Methodist Episcopal Church (founded in the 1880s like the Methodist Episcopal church to the east).
At first, doughty trapper John Coleman was accused of the 1911 church burning; notoriously impious, Coleman also had a son who, bullying one of the Carriers, had gone too far and was shot to death. But whatever his history, more credible suspicions soon fell on former church treasurer Richard Williams, who had reportedly been caught stealing from the collection plate. A jury refused to convict.
The pattern of internal quarrels continued, fueling a reputation for violence as the community shrank.
In 1983 I interviewed Ransom Edwards’s grandson Willie Evans, who had lived with Ransom and Julia in Rosewood. He said that his grandfather had stopped going to church, apparently disgusted by the neighborly acrimony. The old man was devout and had a prized collection of religious books, but he seemed to have closed a door. The destroyed church was rebuilt as the First A.M.E. Church of Rosewood, but then its preacher was shot and killed at the pulpit, by one of the Goins brothers, not by an outsider.
On page 48 the last household, which continues into the next page of listings, page 50, is household #105, labeled as “Bradley, West.“ This was John Wesley Bradley, known to neighbors by his middle name, Wesley. He too, like his older brother Ed Bradley in household #100, was a lumberjack for Cummer Lumber, sawing down towering cypress trees to feed the sawmill in Sumner. Each Monday, Wesley Bradley would walk to Sumner and catch the Cummer log train to travel twelve more miles north to a logging camp at Fowler’s Bluff, in swamps along the Suwannee River. Wesley Bradley would stay there felling trees through the week, then returned on Saturdays. His wife Virginia would by then be preparing Sunday dinner in advance, for as John Wesley Bradley’s name implied, this was a household of hard-shell Methodists, who forbade any kind of Sunday work, or even the running and playing of children on Sundays.
The piety did not imply dour gloom, however. Wesley was a hearty jokester, enlivening his crowded Sunday dinner table with expansive talk. Besides housing nine children, this rambling, one-story residence, edged with an L-shaped porch, was said to keep a room available for visiting preachers, whose appetites for free food on Sundays was said to be noted drolly by the householder. One day Wesley was said to call out across the table (when no visiting ecclesiastics were present) to skewer his busily eating son Donarion, proclaiming: “Son, you don’t just eat like a preacher.You eat like a >bishop!” The roar of laughter at the table promptly renamed the diner as “Bishop” Bradley. He seemed to be called by no other first name ever since. Even the 1920 census called him “Bradley, Bishop.”
A voice from this household, that of Lee Ruth Bradley Davis, belonged to one of the first survivors I found as I began investigating Rosewood in 1982. Also tremendously helpful was Leroy “Lee” Carrier, a boarder who at the time of the violence was living in the same household, that of his uncle Wesley. The differences in the observations of such witnesses help to show why a large pool of informants is important for faithful accounting of such a case.
Between the time of the 1920 census and the January 1923 mob attack, another kind of tragedy would strike Wesley Bradley’s household, for Virginia Carrier Bradley, his tireless wife, died in yet another childbirth. Oldest daughter Callie married and moved away, as did oldest son Hoyt, joining the stream of young people leaving the settlement. Wesley’s sister-in-law Maggie Bradley tried to look in on the younger children. The house itself was in limbo, apparently not owned by Wesley but originally church property. Meanwhile, the Cummer operation in Sumner was gearing down for scheduled shutdown in 1926, when its operations, including logging, would move two counties away. Though strained by many pressures, this household had apparently remained apart from Rosewood’s internal quarrels and feuds. In 1923 it would be a target nonetheless.
On page 50 of the census transcription, after the long list formed by Wesley Bradley’s large family, the census taker doubles back to record one of two white households just south of the railroad, as mentioned earlier on households #98 and #99. Geographically, household #99, Rob Ingram, was not far from the household we meet now, #106, that of Will Ingram, Rob’s brother. As previously said, it was Will who would be arrested in 1937 for stealing a free-roaming hog (one of the signature crimes of old Florida), but Rob, also, was well remembered for his woodland “hog claim,” which brought accusations from African American neighbor Sam King, just below.
Before examining that, however, the next entry on transcription page 50, household #107, was the site of a shocking fatality in the 1923 violence, on the night of January 4-5. This is the home of Lexie Gordon. The week-long Rosewood explosion, January 1-7, apparently produced two main arson sprees, the first burning only a few homes on Thursday night, January 4-5, then the second, on Sunday, January 7, making a more extensive effort to burn down the whole community. It was Lexie Gordon’s misfortune to be in the path of the first spree.
As she fled her burning residence she was shot down. This soon led to legends that perhaps dozens of people in Rosewood were killed this way, by “burn-and-shoot” tactics, a mob method made nationally infamous in the East St. Louis race riot of 1917. At Rosewood, however, both survivor testimony and documents leave no doubt that almost all residents were able to flee into hiding very quickly at the first sounds of gunfire Thursday night, so that when houses were burned no one was inside to be shot while trying to get out—except for Lexie Gordon.
Age 55, a widow, she had been sick in bed with “typhoid-malaria fever” (a diagnosis emerging in the Civil War, meaning chronic underlying malaria infection overlaid with an acute case of typhoid). Flames from unidentified arsonists evidently forced her outdoors, where she met gunfire.
This racial killing was ironic because some African American neighbors viewed Lexie Gordon as being white. Very light-complexioned, she had long red hair. but was listed as “Mu,” for Mulatto, in the census. She, too, was one of the 1890s migrants coming with the Goins pine-resin distillery business. The five acres she and her late husband had bought in 1910 lay on the farthest eastern edge of the Goins area, entering Section 29 and the half of Rosewood where older settlers were darker of skin.
A plot adjoining the Gordons’ was bought on the same date by a lumberjack and farmer named Sam King, who had a similar background. The home he built there for his wife Ellen and adopted daughter Eloise would appear in the 1920 census as household #108. In 1982 I interviewed Eloise King Davis (“King, E....Daughter” in the census) and she described in detail a home with a pedal sewing machine for her mother’s seamstress work, a picture of Jesus over the fireplace and a small toy stove for a pampered only child. All went up in smoke as the Kings barely escaped the arsonists of Thursday night.
The 1920 census then found two households, #109 and #110, whose four occupants were said by other residents to have either died or left the area before 1923. But next came a more notable household, #111, headed by the third of the Bradley brothers. George Bradley and his wife Maggie were “the bold Bradleys,” in part because of physical size. George and several of his children, including girls, were said to be over six feet tall. Their home gave them breathing space, for the eleven people listed by the census in this household, including children and grandchildren, were living in what had once been Ford’s Hotel, another reminder of Rosewood’s decline. Near the defunct hotel were vine-covered stanchions left from the old community hub, a vanished cedar sawmill that had given Rosewood its name, before the mill closed in 1911. Big George Bradley continued to be renowned as a hunting guide. At one time wealthy northern sportsmen had come in by train, seeking wild game in the ten-thousand-acre swamp forest called the Great Gulf Hammock, which lapped up to the back door of Ford’s Hotel. There the shadows of the hammock met ever so slightly higher, drier pine forest, forming an interface that defined the positioning of Rosewood.
The census taker was now making nearly his last crisscross through the settlment's bayhead thickets and palmetto fans. The old hotel that was George Bradley’s house was on the south side of the railroad, and census enumerator Dorsett would now follow those rails toward the farthest eastern edge of the community (more exactly, the rails ran southwest to northeast, and Dorsett was moving northeast through eastern Rosewood, toward Wylly). In this direction there were only five more Rosewood homes to visit—but the count has a major gap. The census would list only four of those homes. Moreover, the one missing from the 1920 census—for reasons probably mundane—would be the single most important nexus in the 1923 violence. This dwelling, which for a frenetic moment in 1923 would make newspaper headlines from New York to Los Angeles, was the home of Sarah Carrier.
But first, before examination of that omitted flashpoint, here are the four homes in that direction that the census did list:
Page 54, household #112. Though Sam Jones is listed in 1920 as heading this three-person household, he was gone by the time of the violence in 1923, reportedly having died. His widow Laura Jones lived on in modest circumstances. If a neighboring hunter killed an opossum, an animal disdained as food by many for its habit of eating carrion, tte carcass might be donated to Miz Laura, since she was not so picky. By 1923 Laura Jones’s son Raymond would be old enough to stack lumber in the Sumner mill, walking to work each day with Sam Hall, 15, from the Bacchus Hall household. The long planks on the fifteen-feet-high lumber stacks in Sumner were heavy and dangerous, and Hall would recall an injury as he fumbled to learn the new job, when he "worked all day with blood in my shoe.” Laura Jones owned her eleven-acre house site, paying its yearly taxes.
Page 54, Household #113: This was a faded but neatly maintained two-story residence with a picket fence cloaked by a rambling rosebush. Chickens and children roamed the sandy yard. Facing the railroad on the north side, this residence looked across the tracks toward a mass of trees in the middle distance, the edge of the Gulf Hammock swamp, where children from the house were forbidden to play.
Visible just north behind the house, a rock road would be under construction by 1923, eventually to cross a sodden barrier called Devil’s Hammock and then reach the town of Gainesville (the road that later became Florida Highway 24). Children playing in the back yard of the house occasionally saw convicts in stripes being transported to work sites father east on the road. Florida’s notorious practice of leasing convicts to private employers was coming to an end by the early 1920s, and the state road gangs of later notoriety were arising.
The household here, #113, is addressed in some detail by the present discussion because at least six of its occupants would be caught in Rosewood's pivotal gun battle of January 4, 1923. Two would receive wounds. But that was nearly three years in the future as the 1920 census taker came to call.
The head of this household is listed correctly by the census as James Carrier, though by 1923 James Carrier had suffered two cerebral strokes and was partially paralyzed; household management had fallen to James's tall, rigorously disciplined wife Emma. Both spouses were in their fifties, caring for grandchildren and their own younger children, though census transcription listed James as aged 24 and Emma as 48. Emma was a sister of Sarah Carrier, in whose home the gunfight would occur, and, forming a double bond, James was also the brother of Sarah’s absent husband Haywood Carrier. “Two sisters married two brothers,” as the family said. In the census list a son, “Carrier, Wood?” was in fact Wade Carrier, who by 1923 would be married, leaving the parental home and moving a mile up the tracks to Wylly. Meanwhile, “Carrier, Eddie” is correctly noted by the census, as is “Carrier, Willard” (a grown son with an undiagnosed mental disability sounding a bit like autism, and giving him a nickname, “Big Baby”).
Continuing with household #113, the census has “Carrier, Goldie,” nearly correct. And “Carrier, Louerie?” is son Lonnie, known as Loamy. But “Carrier, M.” apparently refers to James’ and Emma’s youngest son, little J. C., while below that, the line filled only with a forlorn question mark would seem to designate Ruben Mitchell, one of two grandchildren in the house. Next is Ruben’s sister, easier to puzzle out under the listed name “Longly, Mae Lee,” for her name in fact was Minnie Lee Mitchell. However, the “Longly” mistake, made not by an enumerator’s haste in 1923 but by transcription haste in 1993, raises deeper questions. Minnie Lee Mitchell would indeed grow up to marry and be Minnie Lee Langley. She would be the much-publicized key witness in the 1990s Rosewood claims case. But how could the 1923 census possibly have looked decades ahead to see her married name, Longly/Langley? The “University Team” transcription seems to move unconsciously like a Ouija board, superimposing the known onto the unknown.
Closely related to James and Emma Carrier's household is the next one, #114, containing the young family of James and Emma’s grown daughter Beulah, along with her husband Frank Sherman and their two small children. Beulah’s father James had built for them a small shanty next to his own larger home. The census makes an interesting stab at the name “Beulah,” calling her “Sherman, Beauty,” though this was not even her nickname. The family knew her as “Scrappy” (similarly, her tomboy niece Minnie called herself “fighty”). By whatever name, Scrappy/Beulah would be one of the heroes of the 1923 disaster.
By that point Beulah was not living next to her parents in Rosewood but was in Wylly. Her devout parents had approved of Frank Sherman as a husband for Beulah because he was a preacher, but the marriage had dissolved, as Sherman left the scene and Scrappy—living up to the resourcefulness in her nickname—took the two children to a new home in the Wylly turpentine camp. Her resourcefulness horrified her parents, however, because she became a live-in waitress in Wylly’s jook, its Saturday night dance hall. Notwithstanding this loss of respectability, it was Scrappy who would rise to the occasion on January 4, 1923, when her young relatives fled from the Thursday night shootout. Scrappy hid them in a pine grove in Wylly and kept the shivering children warm through a miserable night, when it was cold enough for frost to form. In 1994 Scrappy’s niece, by then a widow named Minnie Lee Langley, would keep a legislative hearing room spellbound with her description of that night. It was a decade earlier, in May 1983, when I originally managed to locate Minnie, for a segment on 60 Minutes. In the intensity of her story we talked past nightfall in her home, failing to notice in our concentration that no one had turned on the lights, and the reporter’s notebook I was scribbling in was almost too dark to see.
The next listed household, #115, was more than a hundred yards up the railroad from James and Emma Carrier, and on the other side of the tracks, the south side, with a small back porch facing toward Gulf Hammock. This was the modest home of James's and Emma’s oldest son, Aaron Carrier, and his wife Mahulda. The census made another brave stab at Mahulda’s name, calling her something like “Carrier, Wilermena,” but this was not even Mahulda’s nickname or middle name (which was Gussy). This household was almost the last one in Rosewood along the northeasterly course of the railroad, before open country led to the work quarters in Wylly. And this household, too, held a fateful place in the violence of 1923.
In the initial Rosewood manhunt that sparked a chain reaction on January 1, 1923, an excited tracking dog led a posse through Rosewood without turning aside, but then confidently ran up to Aaron Carrier’s front door. Yet at the same time, the posse felt confident that Aaron Carrier himself was not who the dog was following. No one was inside the house. When the door was thrown open the dog seemed to trace the movements of a fugitive who had fled through the house and out the back door—where the dog suddenly grew confused and the trail disappeared. This mystery—along with a succession of others—would set off the week of disaster.
In the census list, the next household is something of an anti-climax after the Aaron Carrier riddle, for it was not featured in the violence in any way that anyone recalled. Household #116, “Davis Hardy,” had only one occupant, hermit-like Hardee Davis, who was the brother of Rosewood’s Mary Ann Hall, the onetime young adoptee who around 1900 had gone to live in the home of then-prospering Bacchus Hall, and had begun having children there. The small cabin of Hardee Davis, like that of Laura Jones, was another place where hunters with unwanted opossums in their kill sacks might unload.
And at this household the area commonly known as Rosewood reached its eastern limit. The next home on the census list, that of Joe Robinson (#117, “Robinson, James”) was considered not to be in Rosewood but in the outskirts of Wylly. Joe Robinson was a step-brother of Sarah Carrier, at whose house the central Rosewood shootout would occur, but no rioters seeking to wreak vengeance for that shootout seem to have disturbed Robinson. Their focus, however warped, was on Rosewood.
By arriving at this figurative boundary we have accumulated a (badly mauled) numerical snapshot of Rosewood via census house numbers, starting on the Sumner side, on the west, with household #92 and ending with #116, including white households along with their more numerous African American neighbors. And as we have seen, occasionally the count is spoiled by looping out into wooded areas not generally classifiable as Rosewood, not to mention numbering errors and other puzzes.
One of the knottiest riddles is why some households were missed, not only the obscure cabin of Virginia Smith, but, especially, two homes that would be central to the coming 1923 violence. The first of these two omitted households, not mentioned here until now, was over on the western edge of Rosewood and stood near the 80-acre homestead of Cornelia Carter, who was censused as household #92. At some distance from her two-story home was a smaller house facing a road that led north, known as Highway 13.
That was the home of a notoriously irritable blacksmith and ex-convict, Cornelia’s 43-year-old son Sam Carter. The manhunt excitement of January 1 would climax, after puzzling turns, by bringing Sam Carter’s death—in what was not exactly a classic lynching but close enough: an impulse murder by a lone drunk before a provocative crowd. Sam Carter’s absence from the census seems to be explained by mobility. Once before, in 1910, a census had found him temporarily relocated from Rosewood to a town called Ellzey. For various reasosn it seems he may have gone back there around 1920, before returning to Rosewood prior to 1923. He was certainly present, and was universally viewed as living in Rosewood, on January 1, 1923.
A similar process may explain the other omitted household, the more central one, belonging to Sarah Carrier. It could be that in 1920 her home was temporarily vacant. Her husband Haywood was often away, for reasons variosly explained, and Sarah Carrier's grown son Sylvester, who in 1923 would be living with her in the house, was in 1920 living in the Sumner sawmill quarters. But Sarah's two youngest children, ages 14 and 20, were still living with her, so she could not easily have closed down the house and temporarily moved elsewhere. She had a grown daughter in Otter Creek, three of whose children were by 1923 living with Sarah. The household interactions in this case are obscure. All of this reminds that the roller coaster census tract in 1920 cannot be taken as a perfect guide. It is most useful (if combined with enough background data from informants and documents) as a general confirmation of the community’s size and condition.
The unlabeled and unexplained 72 pages of census transcription loaded into the 1993 appendix of the “university team” report to the Florida Legislature could easily give to the unwary an impression that this entire, eye-blurring mass represents Rosewood. The lack of labeling on the pages grows especially misleading as the list moves beyond Rosewood’s eastern edge and continues into Wylly. The sizeable turpentine camp there is also part of this enumeration tract, filling transcription pages 58, 60, 62, and 64 with the names of African American laborers boarding in shanties, but without relevance to the 1923 violence. In the midst of those names is household #130, “McKenzie, D. P.,” a white. Daniel P. McKenzie was owner of M & M Naval Stores, the Wylly turpentine operation. In 1923 McKenzie, along with other locally influential whites, was part of the secretive group that sought to circumvent the white rioters of early January and help Rosewood residents escape—though this was a dismal accommodation, like many of the backroom moves of Jim Crow, because it also meant leaving the physical structure of the Rosewood community, the houses and other buildings, to the mercies of the mob, writing them off as being unprotectable.
And still the census has one more surprise. Even after tirelessly knocking at each shanty door in Wylly, census taker Dorsett yet again loops back, censusing a number of white households, and a few black ones, that lie slightly to the north of both Rosewood and Wylly. And only now, as if in a crescendo, does the census finally acknowledge Rosewood’s single largest African American landholding, the 114 acres of John McCoy, making McCoy and his wife Mary Ella, the Rosewood midwife, household #144. The McCoys were linked to the 1890s arrival of the Goins turpentine business in Section 30, the light-skinned half of Rosewood, but their home may have been far enough north to cause a special census trip. Also isolated in that direction was a family of three named Borden or Barton, a mother and two girls known to other children as Cush and Punkin, about whom practically nothing has been discovered. They and a lone, cryptic householder in those woods that the census identified as “Teny, Lara” (household #145) remain to tempt further research. Unfortunately, however, the four decades that have passed since the Rosewood secret was unearthed suggest that little real research will occur, but instead alternating waves of historiographical avoidance of the Rosewood evidence and crusading publicity bursts that mostly repeat rumors and myths—as if local history in booming, fantasizing Florida is fated to remain at the level of the old Fountain of Youth, with Rosewood as one more tarted-up roadside attraction.
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