The History of Northeast Florida

Most residents of and visitors to Fernandina Beach are aware of David Yulee and The Florida Railroad.   Yulee holds a special esteem in the town and most people know his story.   A statue of David Yulee stands outside the historic railroad depot in downtown.   However, like most visionaries, Yulee was an idea man, visionary, and entrepreneur. He chartered the railroad and raised capital but subcontracted most of the actual planning and construction to experts. David Yulee, a prominent figure in Florida 's history, was born in St. Thomas , U.S. Virgin Islands , in 1810. In the early 1830s, he relocated to Florida and eventually established himself as an ambitious entrepreneur. Yulee secured a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1845, just a few months after Florida became a state. His passion for transportation led him to propose a plan for a railroad connecting Fernandina Beach , on Amelia Island , to Cedar Key on the Gulf Coast . Yulee, driven by the desire to improve...

President Abraham Lincoln was concerned about his re-election chances in 1864.  The country was in the middle of a terrible Civil War that had claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of citizens in the last three years. Despite victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg the previous year there still seemed to be no end in sight for the war.  Many people did not agree with Lincoln ’s conciliatory attitude towards the rebel states.  Others believed that he had gone too far when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation effectively turning the war from a campaign to save the union into one whose purpose was to abolish slavery.  Absolutely no one liked the draft.  In short, Lincoln needed votes and his thoughts turned to Florida . Florida had become the 27 th State on March 3, 1845.  It entered the union as a “slave state” and was highly dependent upon slave laborers for its agrarian economy.  Almost half of Florida ’s entire population was slaves who wor...

Florida likes to execute people.  Since centralizing judicial execution in 1923, the State of Florida has executed more than 300 convicted criminals.  Prior to that, when executions were carried out by individual counties, documentation is scarce.  While Florida ranks sixth overall in state-sanctioned executions historically , it holds a solid fourth place since 1976, behind only Texas , Oklahoma , and Virginia , a period during which some states have slowed or outlawed executions altogether . Capital punishment worldwide has a long history that extends back thousands of years.  In Florida , there is evidence of Native American tribes executing members for various offenses.  As early as the 1500s, French explorers documented the beheading of Timucua sentinels for the crime of falling asleep at their posts.  It could have been worse for them, as boiling was another method of execution used by the natives. When the Spanish arrived in 1565, they brought...

The night was clear and hot at Raiford Prison on August 17, 1979.  Suddenly, the lights on the Northwest side of the perimeter fence flickered and fell dark.  Three figures darted across the prison yard.  One of the men was caught in the focus of a search light.  Guards fired warning shots from the tower and the man dropped to the ground.  The other two continued on unnoticed, scaled three fences topped with barbed wire and disappeared into the Florida night. One of the escapees, Willie Griffith, who was serving a life sentence for the murder of a cab driver, managed to elude capture for eleven years.  When he was finally arrested in Holladay , Utah , his wife and mother of his two young children was shocked as she was completely unaware of his past criminal life. The other escaped prisoner, Frederick Barrett, also serving a life sentence for murder, spent an astounding thirty-two years on the run before he was taken into custody. Frederick Mark Barr...

Gerard John Schaefer grew up in an environment that today is recognized as a recipe for raising a serial killer.  His mother was overly doting towards him, and his father was an abusive alcoholic who was away from home much of the time.  He was born on March 26, 1946 in Neenah , Wisconsin .  His father, Gerard John Schaefer, Sr., was a traveling salesman.  His mother, Doris, was a housewife. He was the oldest of three children, the others being a girl, Sara, and a boy, Gary. When his father was home, he often belittled Doris .  He never missed an opportunity to make it clear that he thought young Johnny, as he was called, was useless and that he preferred his daughter to him.  On top of this, both parents were dogmatic Catholics who enforced strict adherence to their faith. The family relocated to Nashville , Tennessee , and shortly thereafter, they moved to Atlanta , Georgia .  Around the age of 12, as Schaefer approached puberty, his disturbing pro...