The Tatler of Society in Florida is Now Available Digitally

Courtesy of the Spring 2018 issue of the St. Augustine Historical Society newsletter. I used several articles from the Tatler in my book ST. AUGUSTINE & THE CIVIL WAR (Civil War Series) finding interesting tidbits on former Civil War Generals and when they were in town and what they were up to. It was not digital with an index at the time so I know I didn’t get the full use out of this fascinating reference.  Now if they can just get this source available online.

Hidden Treasures: The Tatler  Written by Bob Nawrocki

The arrival of Henry M. Flagler and the opening of his hotels brought wealthy winter tourists to St. Augustine by the train load. Before email, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media, the wealthy visitors used print publications to find out what their peers were doing.

Anna Marcotte, who previously worked on the St. Augustine News, started The Tatler of Society in Florida to document the comings and goings of wealthy visitors to St. Augustine; The Tatler was only published during the winter season. The Tatler offered a listing of who came into town, where they were staying, menus of specials events, descriptions of dresses and gowns worn to dances and ads for hotels and souvenirs.

The Research Library has the only complete collection of The Tatler in the United States. It is an invaluable resource for a researcher looking into the Gilded Age in St. Augustine. Until recently, the only way to find information in The Tatler was to read each issue until you found the information you needed. This took time and caused wear and tear to our only copies of The Tatler.

Thanks to the hard work of Marty Cawley, a Research Library volunteer, The Tatler is fully indexed. Ms. Cawley went through each issue and indexed the articles and photographs in each issue. The information was entered into Emily, our online catalog, and is available to anyone with access to the Internet. To access our catalog, visit oldesthouse.org and click on the Research Library button.

To protect our set of The Tatler, the entire run has been scanned and converted into a set of PDFs. To scan our bound set, it was necessary to use an oversize scanner. Matt Armstrong, Collections Coordinator of the University of Florida Historic St. Augustine Library at the Governor’s House, offered use of their library’s oversize scanner for this project. Chad Germany, Assistant Librarian, scanned the collection and organized the PDFs. The PDFs are only available in the reading room of the Research Library. The fragile original copies of The Tatler will be placed in secure storage where they will be in temperature and humidity controlled space, preserving them for the future.

Historian Patricia C. Griffin Has Passed Away

I received this notice in my email today.

Dear Members of the St. Augustine Historical Society,

It is with great sadness that I announce the death of Dr. Patricia C. Griffin. Dr. Griffin was always available to assist the Society whenever we called upon her. She was a former president of The St. Augustine Historical Society, one of the very few Research Associates of the Society as voted by the Board of Trustees, and a contributor to El Escribano and The Oldest City. She shared in the academic work of her archaeologist husband, Dr. John Griffin, and her knowledge and love of St. Augustine was her gift to others. Her texts, Mullet on the Beach: The Minorcans of Florida, 1768-1788 (Florida Sand Dollar Books) and The Odyssey of an African Slave by Sitiki, are classics–wonderful examples of weaving anthropological perspective into historic writing.

She will be greatly missed, and we offer our condolences to her family.

Sincerely yours,
Magen Wilson
Executive Director

Patricia Conaway Griffin, Ph.D.
January 30, 1920 – December 31, 2017

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Well known to St. Augustine for her groundbreaking ethnic studies. Dr. Patricia Griffin examined the first twenty years of Florida’s Minorcan community in the 1988 El Escribano: Mullet on the Beach (Later republished in book form by the University Press of Florida.) As early as 1971 African Americans became a major focus with a study of the Frenchtown neighborhood in Tallahassee and later as editor & annotator of The Odyssey of an African Slave by Sitiki. Short articles written for the historical society included: Emerson in St. Augustine and Mary Evans: Woman of Substance as well as the chapter on the Second Spanish Period in The Oldest City: Saga of Survival. She was active with the project to microfilm the Roman Catholic Church records in the Island of Minorca and the historical society published her diary of the 1994 expedition in El Escribano. Dr. Griffin served as President of the historical society in 2003. In 1992 as a tribute to her scholarship, the Board of Trustees made her one of the very few Research Associates of the St. Augustine Historical Society.

Pat was born in San Luis Obispo, California, an old Spanish Franciscan Mission town. She received an AB from University of California (Berkeley) in 1943. In 1945 she completed a Master’s degree in social service administration at the University of Chicago. A Master’s degree in anthropology came in 1977 from the University of Florida. She earned a Doctorate in anthropology from the University of Florida with her dissertation on the impact of tourism of local festivals, specifically St. Augustine. Dr. Griffin spent the majority of her time since 1954 in St. Augustine when her late husband Dr. John Griffin accepted the position Executive Historian of the St. Augustine Historical Society. From 1955 to 1957, she taught history and social studies in St. Johns County high schools. The Griffins were founding members of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of St. Augustine in 1985. She was on the faculty of Florida State University from 1970 to 1980. She was editor of the Florida Journal of Anthropology in 1975. In the 1980s, she held various positions as an administrator and clinical social worker with the Tri-County Mental Health Services, Inc. The Historical Research Institute at Flagler College inducted her in the 1990s. Pat edited her husband John’s papers into Fifty Years of Southeastern Archaeology: Selected Works of John W. Griffin for the University Press of Florida in 1996. Some of her most recent writings were as an historical and anthropological consultant for archaeological reports on several eastern Florida plantation sites excavated by Ted Payne.

In addition to her career in teaching and social work, she and her late husband John raised five children over the course of their long marriage. Dr. Griffin was an avid runner who held two age records in the Gate River Run in Jacksonville. In 1984 she was a member of the Silver Haired Legislature of Florida. From 1980-1985, Dr. Griffin served on the Board of Directors of the Area Agency on Aging which covers all of northeast Florida plus Flagler & Volusia Counties.

Condolences may be sent to the Griffin family at 901 North Griffin Shores Drive, St. Augustine, Florida 32080.

Secrets of Spanish Florida on PBS

Premiering on PBS tonight:

The documentary “Secrets of Spanish Florida” was funded in part by the St. Augustine Historical Society. They also contributed to the research for the project. Be sure to catch the premiere Tuesday, December 26th, 2017 at 9:00 p.m. on PBS. For more information, click here.

 

 

 

 

Charles Tingley Wins Major Award for Work on Alexander H. Darnes

 

Charles Tingley

At the recent annual meeting of the Florida Historical Society, Charles Tingley, Senior Research Librarian for the St. Augustine Historical Society was presented the Arthur W. Thompson Award for the best article in any issue of the 2016 Florida Historical Quarterly. 

The article titled, “Another Invisible Man: Alexander H. Darnes, M.D.,” concerns a long forgotten man who was born and raised in St. Augustine enslaved by the Smith family. He spent his teenage years as the valet to Edmund Kirby Smith, a U. S. Army officer who became a Confederate general.

After the Civil War, he received his college education at Lincoln University in Chester, Pennsylvania and graduated with a medical degree from Howard University in 1880. He immediately set up a medical practice in Jacksonville, Florida. He was the first African-American with a modern medical practice in Florida.  Darnes was the physician to James Weldon Johnson, the author of Lift Every Voice and Sing and was fondly remembered in his autobiography.

He served with courage during two of the greatest health emergencies in Jacksonville

Alexander H. Darnes

history: the small pox epidemic of 1884 and the yellow fever epidemic of 1888. At the time of his death in 1894, Darnes was the Deputy Grand Master of the Prince Hall Masons of Florida.

Mr. Tingley began researching Alexander Darnes prior to the St. Augustine Historical Society erecting a statue to A. H. Darnes and E. Kirby Smith at their childhood home in 2003. This building is now the Research Library for the Historical Society

New Executive Director at the St. Augustine Historical Society

The Board of Trustees of the Historical Society has selected Magen Wilson to be its executive director. Ms. Wilson has been a member of the Society’s staff since 2011. During that time she has created exhibits and presentations, served as manager of the Oldest House and Museum Store and currently oversees the operations of the properties, staff and programs. She will begin her duties as executive director in the middle of September 2016.

New St. Augustine Historical Society Marker to be Placed

The Saint Augustine Historical Society invites you to attend the unveiling of the historic marker “ST AUGUSTINE ON ANASTASIA ISLAND” on September 8, 2016, at 11:00 A.M. in the open field (overflow parking lot) just north of the St. Augustine Alligator Farm (999 Anastasia Boulevard).

Through the generosity of the Alligator Farm and Mr. David Drysdale, the Society is able to place this marker in a highly visible and easily accessed location.

THE MARKER

ST AUGUSTINE ON ANASTASIA ISLAND
St. Augustine, the oldest European-settled city in the United States, was located on Anastasia Island from 1566 until 1572. Spanish settlers had founded the city on the west shore of the Matanzas River on Sept. 8, 1565. They built homes and a fort. The fort and the supplies inside burned. On May 18, 1566, a council voted to relocate the city to the barrier island across from the first location. St. Augustine moved to the barrier island for protection from hostile Native Americans and European enemies entering the port. Documents describe in detail the city’s 6-year presence on the island–two forts, government buildings, barracks, a jail, homes, wells and fields for crops. No physical evidence has yet been found. Quarrying in the 17th and 18th centuries and erosion probably destroyed the remnants of the city on the island. Sixteenth-century reports note that the island city was two leagues (5-6 miles) from a strong house on San Julian Creek, placing the city in this general area of high ground and near the 16th-century inlet. The relentless ocean eroded the town’s location. In 1572 St. Augustine returned to the mainland.

El Escribano: The St. Augustine Journal of History Volume 50, 2015

The 2015 issue of El Escribano, complete with a 2013 date, issued by the St. Augustine Historical Society has arrived. If you aren’t a member, I highly recommend joining. If you are a member your copy should be arriving soon if it hasn’t already. For those wondering, a loose translation of escribano is “scribe” or “notary”. In early St. Augustine the escribano was one of the few who could write and so in their honor the journal was named.

As always, this is a nice journal and has plenty of interest for those who study St. Augustine history. Contents include:

The Oldest City: 1565-1605–Eugene Lyon

St. Augustine’s 375th Birthday Celebration–Margo C. Pope

German and Swiss Immigrants in Eighteenth Century Spanish St. Augustine–Diana Reigelsperger

Excerpt from In Camp with L Company–Corporal George W. Petty

Contributors