By Spessard Stone
The reminiscences of two dissimilar pioneers of Lake City, George Gillett Keen (1827-1902) and Sarah Pamela Williams Niblack Kelly (1837-1929), the former a Cracker and the latter a genteel lady, have been collected, edited, and annotated by historians James M. Denham and Canter Brown, Jr. in Cracker Times And Pioneer Lives.Keen's tales were originally published in The Florida Index, a Lake City newspaper, from July 1899 to January 1902, while Kelly's were penned a few years after Keen's death.
Keen, a gifted storyteller, in his anecdotes provides a humorous and often insightful presentation of Florida Crackers, the term having originated, he informs us, from "the cracking of whips in driving their herds to pasture."
Courts, courtships, frontier life, history, and practical jokes provide venues for his pen. With the exception of the Indians wars, all are related tongue-in-cheek, but often he volunteers moral judgments.
Keen prominently features himself. Perhaps his most amusing and revealing story is his simultaneous courtship of two wealthy women to secure upward mobility so that he could have an overseer.
Sarah Pamela Williams came from an aristocratic background. John Lee Williams, her father, was an attorney, planter, and author, who co-selected the site for Florida's capital.
Her early life of culture and refinement in East Florida was in late 1847 uprooted when, not yet ten, her parents separated, and she and her older sister accompanied their mother to Lake City, where a half-brother lived.
Columbia County was, however, then in a transition to a planter society so Sarah's life remained those of a Southern lady. In May 1857, she became the wife of William Henry Niblack a planter, who died less than four years after their marriage.
She proudly describes the service of her family to the Confederate cause and understatedly relates her means of surviving as a widow with a son through the hardships of the war and its aftermath.
Remarrying William Spence Kelly in June 1874, she moved to Atlanta in 1877 where she remained the rest of her life.
Cracker Times And Pioneer Lives is a delightful change of pace. Keen's Cracker wit and Kelly's planter gentility will appeal to a wide range of history aficionados.
It contains 231 pages, including 17 photographs and illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. The introduction offers a very helpful commentary on the era. "The Cast of Characters," the appendix, features over 300 individuals, many of whom moved to South Florida.
Cracker Times And Pioneer Lives can be ordered for $39.95 plus $4.00 shipping, with checks payable to USC Press, 718 Devine St., Columbia, SC 29208, or, via credit card by calling 800-768-2500. See also Florida Southern College.
This review was published in The Herald-Advocate (Wauchula, Fla.) of August 17, 2000.
January 03, 2001