Samuel Madison’s father was a member of the 48th New York Infantry made up of western Long Islanders, mostly from Brooklyn, known as Perry’s Saints. He made it all the way through the war without being wounded, as far as anyone could tell. It was nearly a year after the war, abut two weeks after Samuel was born, and less and an hour after they found his body with no suicide note that someone said “It was that damned war that messed him up.”
Samuel grew up in the home of his maternal grandparents where he and his mother went to live. The modest house sat on Kapel Street in the Village of Farmingdale where Samuel’s grandfather ran a hardware store. In spite of the traumatic circumstances that put Samuel in this home at this time in a state of fatherlesness, he had a thoroughly happy and secure boyhood.
When he was 14 and had achieved about all he could from the local school, Samuel’s grandfather made arrangements for an apprenticeship with Sackat Hardware Company, the country’s largest importer of general hardware supplies. Samuel would ride the first train into the city each morning where he would be an office boy for 12 hours, taking one of the last trains home. Within a year, Samuel had been promoted, or at least got a better position. Instead of being an office boy he was the office boy for the company’s six primary salesmen. His hours grew longer and the daily commute, even for a 15 year old, was wearing. Probably with a good bit of apprehension he gave up the village life for a life in The Village with three other boys all working similar jobs on Wall Street.
Samuels natural aptitude for hardware served him by helping him make his bosses look good. That gained him their recognition and gained him more responsibility and a bit of an increase in life style. By the time he was 20 he was the personal secretary to the company’s vice president of sales and spent much of the year on the road, shuffling papers while his boss visited clients.
One such trip in October 1886 took the bosses and his entourage from Atlanta, down through and beyond the swamps of the Okefenokee and into Florida. It was Samuel’s first venture into the deep, deep south that was as much on the edge of the frontier as was Wyoming. As most train trips stretched long between stopovers, Samuel had time to himself, time to read, time to write letters home to Kapel Street.
The first part of the trip, Atlanta to Savannah, was on the small regional Virginia and Georgia Railroad and was filled mostly with families and traveling salesmen, not sales executives. From Savannah to Jacksonville, on the Atlantic Coastline Railroad, all the talk in the club car was about labor unions and anti-trust threats. The plan was to schedule a series of meetings from a hotel board room with retailers, manufactures and developers, all who needed hardware by the train load.
After dinner his first evening in the city, he stood on the south balcony of the St. James, looking down towards the river and out beyond, down the coast. He felt he was on the edge of civilization. He could identify all the same sounds as heard in New York, but far fewer and far, far more distant from his world.
This was as far south as he had ever been, almost as far south as his father whose regiment spent nearly six months stationed in St. Augustine, just 30 miles to the south. Maybe during this month in Jacksonville, there would be time for St. Augustine.