Palatka mansion (#0378)

Visiting Palatka was a first for me. Even though we drove by it many times when I was growing up in Florida, we were always on the east side of the river and never came over into Palatka. My initial plans to visit it on this trip were simply logistical – there were a couple of things nearby I wanted to visit/revisit, and it was a convenient location for staying overnight. It turned out to be much more interesting in terms of the overall agenda for the trip.

The photo here is a preserved mansion that dates back to 1853. As I discovered to often be the case in settlement of Florida, there was a New York history to the mansion. In this case, the mansion was built by a New York congressman who was active in proposing the statehood of Florida and who subsequently built this mansion and settled here. The plaque near the mansion notes that it was the center of orange groves, though it does not note whether those were operated under the plantation system – the owner died just before the outbreak of the Civil War. During the Civil War that mansion was occupied, at various times, by either Union or Confederate troops. The mansion went through multiple iterations of ownership in subsequent years, including a period of being subdivided into apartments. Thankfully it was subsequently restored.

Source: www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?marker=80742

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