Colleen Blake was the youngest daughter of a pioneer family living on the Ocklawaha River. Her father was a Confederate veteran who migrated from near Macon, Georgia into Florida’s deep interior soon after the war. Central Florida provided a rich land in which to hunt and fish and if luck is with you, grow a little cash crop of tobacco or oranges. The land was not rich, but there was a lot of it between one cabin and another, and that is what Blake, her father, wanted…space.
Colleen’s mother, Molly, brought what culture there was in the homestead. The daughter of a successful cotton broker, she had gone to school in her home town of Macon and then in Charleston before returning home and marring Blake. She had hoped to teach school after the two boys were born, but the war came and Blake left and they had nothing. When Blake returned, there was no hesitation in their decision to search for a new start, so the four of them went south.
The cabin was built before the first winter and into the first year the little farm was self-sufficient and by the third year Blake made a little cash on tobacco. The next year Colleen was born, a sign that Molly took as meaning the new life was safe and secure and now complete.
There was no school in the Ocklawaha Valley but Colleen knew how to read and add and subtract at an early age because of her mother’s instruction. She mostly read the Bible, and the arithmetic problems were centered around counting a few coins or the chickens and their eggs.
Since she was the youngest by a decade, it wasn’t long until both of her brothers had married and started small farms of their own while continue into help Blake and in turn he on theirs. Colleen received even more attention in the form of instruction and by the time she was 16 she was keeping the books for all three farms. She also began working with steamboat captains to arrange shipments of cane syrup, wildflower honey, tobacco and a growing amount of oranges. She even worked out a regular delivery of venison for the St. James Hotel in Jacksonville via one of the captains.
It was in the fall of 1886 as the east coast hotels were being opened up and aired out and gotten ready for the coming season that Colleen made her first steamboat trip. After being closed up all summer, the hotels in Jacksonville, St. Augustine, Ormond and Halifax had be readied in November for the winters earliest visitors, guests whose shortest stay was three weeks and some remained for four months.
The St. James Hotel had been purchasing venison from the Colleen’s family for three years, and now wanted to talk about working as a broker, reselling the meat to other hotels. The hotel’s general manager had arranged for a dinner for a dozen prospective buyers designed to feature Ocklawaha Valley venison. He had written Bake, inviting him and his family to attend the dinner, but Blake was not leaving the riverbank, so Colleen and her mother went.
Colleen could not have traveled farther if she had traveled a million miles. When the steamer chugged chugged out of the mouth of the Ocklawaha River and into the mile wide St. Johns River, she thought she had finally seen the sea. On the larger and more lavish side-wheeler that would take them to Jacksonville, Colleen and her mother were dinner guests of the captain and met people from New York, Boston, Virginia and one from Texas.
When they finally walked into their suite at the St. James Hotel, neither of them had words. They were exhausted from the two day trip and they were simply overwhelmed with the metropolis that was Jacksonville. Colleen’s mother went to her room for a long afternoon nap, but Colleen sat by the third floor window and watched the October Streets grow dim in the evening light. She held divergent thoughts at the same time. She thought all the thoughts of any 16 year old girl, and she thought the thoughts of a well seasoned business man many years older.