Jacksonville Reflections - family history (#0012)

Another shot of a vacant, but important, lot!

Much of our life as a family was centered around the family home of our maternal grandparents, which was right here. It was a simple house dating back to before indoor plumbing and when kitchens were outside due to fire hazard, so it had many seemingly impromptu additions over the years to accommodate those modern conveniences. My grandfather had a particular affinity for azaleas, so the entire front yard, entrance walk, and driveway were always framed with azaleas of various colors. Most important, the house had a fairly deep porch that extended along the entire front, with very comfortable rocking chairs that provided plenty of excuse to spend hours on the porch reading, chatting with neighbors, and watching the trains go by – the latter being key.

The Florida East Coast Railway’s main line was just 250 feet from that front porch and it was, for many years, the main route for freight and passengers to the south. Somehow I managed to spend many days and some overnights with my grandparents, so I was very familiar with how much the entire house shook back in the days of steam engines, and my fantasies of long distance adventure were constantly being reinforced by the passage of multiple passenger trains each day. I became hooked on railroading there – and still am.

There’s no shots of the actual house because I didn’t get interested in photography until long after the house was sold and I wasn’t comfortable for many years taking pictures of the homes of other people. The reason there’s no house now is that South Jacksonville is booming and more-and-more homes are being wiped out by the construction of large office buildings and health complexes nearby.

….

History – I’ve no record of when my mother’s family moved in, but we talked a lot so I knew about the family being there when one of my mother’s siblings died in the flu epidemic of 1918 (often referred to as the Spanish Flu epidemic), that another sibling died of some mysterious cause in her teens just a year or so later, that they lived there at a time when my grandfather had to take a ferry to work and my mother took it to school, that they made it through the Great Depression comparatively easily, that the replacement of home delivery of ice for the ice box changed everything, and they couldn’t stop talking about how one my mother’s brothers served in Persia during WWII. If my memory is correct, the last of the family to live in the house moved out in the 1970’s.

(Part of a photo-essay series on personal history and race with keyword FlaAla0518)