G. W. Browder.
Clinton, Ky.
A People Peculiar.
Twenty years or more ago, riding through the flat, palmetto-fringed pine woods of east Florida, before Standard Oil Flagler built his coast railroad to Miami, sundry lean, swarthy, active people of both sexes, were frequently to be met with, more especially in and about St. Augustine, and to the southward towards New Smyrna. They are doubtless to be found there yet, though the great influx of miscellaneous strangers renders their racial traits less noticeable than formerly.
Ask one of the large-framed Swedes, Germans, or other scions of a more pronounced North-of-Europe type, who and what these Latin looking peasantry are, the chance is you will be answered, or at least would have been at the time I alluded to above:
“When folks want to be civil they call them Minorcans; when they don’t they are mighty apt to say something about Doc. Turnbull’s niggers. So, there you are—take your choice.”
As a matter of fact, they are a really worthy and industrious element of our composite population, not unlike the descendants of Longfellow’s Acadians, the “Cajuns” of southern Louisiana. Though of a hybrid sort of Spanish ancestry, from the Balearic Isles in the Mediterranean Sea, they have Americanized themselves through several generations of quiet usefulness in an humble, unobtrusive way.
What is their history? How came they here?
That takes us back to the year 1767. The Floridas had only recently been ceded by Spain to England, when some fifteen hundred colonists, mostly from Minorca, one of the Balearic group, were landed at Musquito Inlet, one hundred miles south of St. Augustine.
Many think that the only people held as slaves in the South prior to the Civil War, were negroes, or possibly in very early colonial times, a few spiritless tribes of Indians. Yet these colonists (ancestors of the present Minorcans now strung along the lagoons and bayous of the east coast, intermittently for many leagues) were made, willy-nilly, for nine long, weary years, to toil amid the swamps and hammocks of what is now Volusia County, as the virtual slaves of a British Trading Company of that era, headed by Sir Wm. Duncan and a Dr. Andrew Turnbull, shrewd Scotchmen of wealth and social position, who operated their scheme from London; Sir William being the resident manager there, and a financial magnate on the Stock Exchange himself.