The St. James

the st. james stood quiet,
cool yellow October dusk light,
a promised new start

William Harneiski (@ the St. James)

William Harneiski was first introduced to tile laying by an uncle in his native village some 60 miles from Warsaw, Poland in the mid-19th century. William had a natural talent for piecing things together, for looking at what may seem random to others and immediately recognizing a pattern by which all the pieces fit perfectly.

His uncle convinced his parents that William’s talent could earn real money for the family if he were to go to Warsaw to work and apprentice under masters. That had to be during his early teens because by the time he was 18 he was working for an architect as a mosaic layer traveling with another two dozen mosaic layers working on projects all over central Europe, a job he kept for only two years before he and a distant cousin left the continent and settled in London.

After less than a year William’s cousin returned to Poland, but he stayed finding plenty of work laying mosaics and tiles in private homes. He became quite popular among a group of Americans who were living in London, largely southerners, cotton and tobacco producers, and owners of railroads and shipping lines. Most had, along with their money, taken refuge in England during the Civil War, and wound up staying. As they built new town homes or county estates, it became quite the rage to have Harneiski lay the entrance hall or the center space in the parlor.

With a steady stream of wealthy clients, William’s business grew until he himself employed a small army of skilled and unskilled laborers and three designers. The projects moved more and more away from where his clients lived to where his clients worked, office buildings, bank lobbies, board room foyers. He had done one church alter space.

William’s day to day involvement in tile laying had long since ceased. He received reports on a weekly basis delivered to his estate in Somerset where he spent his time in a massive studio, sketching new designs. He only ventured from the estate for monthly visits to London for meetings with some new and all the long established clients. In was in one such meeting in the spring of 1886 that finally got William to cross the Atlantic.

On the recommendation and introduction from one of his longest and most faithful clients, he agreed to take a leave of absence from his company and work with a young New York architectural firm designing resort hotels in Florida. There would be lots of mosaics.

The late summer crossing was as smooth as could be expected and William’s introduction to New York was completely absent disappointments. The firm’s projects were visionary, the budgets liberal, and the opportunities for expression near limitless. In early October, the design team traveled to Florida to see the site. The two day train trip from New York to Jacksonville was as much a trip back into time as into a foreign land.

William had been in Jacksonville for nearly a week before the group was ready to travel the 30 miles farther south to St. Augustine and tour the construction site. At dusk the night before the trip, William walked the grounds of the St. James Hotel, its east façade silhouetted against the setting sun. He did not know the words but he felt the feeling of being a chosen person in a chosen time and place.

Samuel Madison (@ the St. James)

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.

Colleen Blake (@ the St. James)

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.