Hernando County had been made know to me as the most beautiful hunting land in Florida. The perspective of finding myself face to face with  game  less offensive than the partridge and the hare was so tempting, that in leaving Palatka, I had nothing more pressing than (to go) to discover the county, situated between the 28th and 29th latitude of the Gulf of Mexico.
By railroad, I soon (attained) got to Ocala, the county seat of Marion County, a city of 3000 inhabitants, built partly in brick and partly in wood. Three quarters of the town had also burned down, three years ago.

The public square is now surrounded by more than brick buildings, some buildings, such as the  courthouse and town hall are veritable monuments.
 
Several railroad lines crossed  at Ocala, crossing a country covered with magnificent orange groves, orange growing plantations of which the superior quality was renowned in all of Florida.  When we left Ocala, one of the most prosperous cities  in the state and reached the head of the Wildwood line, the saddest city and the least advanced in Sumter County, the boredom that seized you at West Tocal resumes in you.
 
Wildwood however, it is still steam locomotion; but it is necessary to say adieu (goodbye) to go out of this city of eight to ten houses. It seems to me that in its last bellowing/roaring, the locomotive put something tender in my senses like a regret for leaving me there, for abandoning me for eight months to the lazy allure of horses and mules.
 
Goodbye then sensible steam! I say and disappear in the large woods. Ten hours on the way (walking) by the sandy route without meeting a living soul, not one inhabitant. To be exact, after having gone down the Withlacoochee River by ferry, with horses and car, a house! And in detail an American house containing an isolated telegraph office in the deep  woods.  If the employee hadn’t been absent for several days, I would have been able to make known to my family, by the instrument that symbolizes the best of the conquests of man over nature, that I had found myself in the most primitive place, the most savage/wildest on earth.
 
The sovereign of the brackish waters of the Withlacoochee is without contest the alligator or caiman, the chief/head of the youngest branch of dinosaurs, of which the crocodile is the king. It had many little ones as much as fitted in his jaws: with a single blow they broke in two a strong big fish, indeed even the black legs of Negroes carelessly lost in their kingdom/realm. The white legs were less sought after, which was a little consolation to those not Negro.
 
I hear the sinister snorts/grunts from these amphibians hidden in the tall grasses, wallowing in the mud.  A snout appeared I send him a ball, but with no other result than to silence all these monsters for a moment.

I look/excavate with my eyes all the nooks and crannies of this river, where the banks are defended by the inextricable virgin forests, the gigantic trees, the great flowering magnolias, the pine trees, the cypress linked by the lianas (a type of plant) and the wild vines,
The impenetrable panthers and rattlesnake dens. These virgin forests cross in the swamps that enriched themselves since the world is a world of plant debris, humus/mold of an incomparable fertility, from which derived, I am tempted to believe, the name hummock or hammock  (hill, mound).


The unhealthy fumes that escape nourishment from it, hang from trees, like the salt and pepper hair unkempt, or like hanging spider webs.  This sort of moss, which is called Spanish moss, gives the country the appearance of a country flooded after which the waters have receded, leaving the algae hanging on the branches.
 
What a beautiful horror in that wet and dirty chaos.  We need the sun not to sully its rays when they fall into these majestic cesspools.  And the Withlacooche is long if not wide. Its source is in Polk County, in central Florida, and it empties into the Gulf of Mexico at the 29th latitude, north of Crystal River. I leave it to its destiny, and I accomplish mine by resuming my unending trek through the woods.

In Europe when we speak of the first vestiges of civilization left in the wilderness by hardy pioneers, we envision some rock with an inscription or a route traced by the axe chops while crossing the virgin forest. It was thus at the time of Jean Ribault when our compatriots planted markers for the French Armies; but since the invention of the telegraph, in order to guide travelers through the maze of the wilderness, civilization---the new Ariane (reference to Ariadne who helped Theseus escape from the Minotaur’s labyrinth)---used  trees as poles for placing the iron strings for the telegraph.  The telegraph wires, electricity conductors and travelers, such were the marvels of the desert.
 
The forests are mixed with other milestones by which we can trace man and beast:  the ripped tin, the rusted wire, the rotten canvas bag, and the smashed barrel.  Lost sentinels of civilization, the tin had contained the meat raised in the countryside; the wire was the iron link which had tied/compressed the hay bale which came from a country with bountiful pastures;

The canvas bag contained some grains of corn or oats which had been harvested in the fertile countryside of the west; the smashed barrel is still pale from the flour which had frolicked in the windmills’ air and had been brought there from happy countries/lands.

What a journey! My God, what a journey!  How the group of middle class people groan! 

The traveler enters Florida by a door of fir trees which closes and shuts him in.  Now he is condemned to a present of fir trees, a future of fir trees, and a past of fir trees. In front of him, on his sides, behind him, above his head eighty feet high columns topped with chandeliers of green branches suggests regret for the small bit of blue sky which is the only consolation to the fir tree for the eternal white sand and gray grass.

The view is disturbed there.  One moment it stopped with pleasure on the little palm trees, which decorate our salons and which grow there like our ferns and brooms do in France.  Soon it will just like the case of our parasites in the woods.

From time to time a glimmer of hope filters across this unending colonnade of firs: a plain! Without a doubt, a tender green prairie, maybe dotted with flowers, with a murmuring stream!  Quemadmodum cervus ad fontes aquarum (How stagnant compared to fountain water) And your mind sighs after the water of the fountains, after the infinite horizon, after the vault of the heavens, after the daisies, the cornflowers and poppies of beautiful France!
 
Fir trees and palmettos!  Beautifully you have happened upon the plain, but the plain flees in front of you, abandoning you to the firs and palmettos for life.  O forests without beginning or end, where the squirrel can jump from branch to branch and cross Florida from north to south without ever touching the ground!  Dried up pine trees on the ground, skeletons of trees with many small bones (I mean the smallest branches). Curious work of the time, that left there a dimmed patina of old silver of which a metal polisher would envy the range of the patina.  The gusts of wind laid to rest on the ground many giant skeletons and broke them into a thousand pieces of fantastic forms.  In these private deserts some movement of life---a simple boa or at least a hippo would seem to you a happy encounter.  Precisely, over there, wouldn’t it be? Alas, it’s only a serpent of wood,
the jaws; the pivot of a large root set perfectly---the head of a pachyderm!

In that prison of trees, the lesser vulture is a friend, the crow has charm in its voice, the beak of the falcon appears less snubbed. These companions of misfortune were made for your amusement. The vulture glides majestically, developing a wingspan where the shadow throws itself on the body that he covets. The master crow perched on a tree, you recall, with thoughtful attention, the story by de la Fontaine. The falcon describes the graceful curves and comes to settle just on the high pitched point of a small withered fir tree, with the lightness of a rope dancer who lands on the platform after her acrobatics. With the bleakness of the desert at that point the mind that can give an idea of the lightness of the bird, comparing it to that of a woman!
 
At last Brooksville, the county seat of Hernando County.  I arrived there at eight in the evening, worn out, stiff and content. The profound darkness was covering the town for an hour and a half.  I was surprised that the cart didn’t have lanterns. They are, they seem, useless in this part of the country and were replaced by the instinct of horses, which are better than ours.

I paid twelve dollars, a little more than sixty francs, for the hardship of traveling sixteen leagues (48 miles) and ten hours with the difficulty of traveling in sand. It is truly for nothing!
 
I rested comfortably in my bed at the boarding house. They had offered me a bedroom with two beds, one already occupied; but I said that the society of cockroaches that I saw running on the walls was enough to charm my loneliness/solitude.
 
On my awaking, I was really surprised. Dropped off at night in the principle city of Brooksville, I found myself, at daylight in the country! The streets of this county seat - the equivalent in the French department – gave a faithful/loyal image picture of a chain of green hills with ravines and precipices, at the middle of which  horses, mules, cows, and pigs graze freely in good accord and friendship with the inhabitants. I perceive a swarm of vultures that came swooping down on the body of a donkey. Quickly my gun to kill them!

They explained to me that the highway is entrusted to the company of these predators.  There are not sweepers in Paris to remove the refuse and rubbish with such meticulous care.  In effect, in two turns of their beak, these birds of prey had made the infectious carrion a very clean carcass. Unfortunately they did not take it away. It was not their job. It was no one’s job. Job means any kind of work, the whole task or whole job.


It is not the job of the vultures to consume the appetizer such as smudged papers, greasy rags, old scraps of leather, pieces of iron, fragments of wood crates, pieces of tin cans, old rotten bags, and  clothing shredded to pieces, that dot the green roads.

No one ever dreams of fixing/mending in Florida. A button can fall off without the fear of ever being replaced by a happy rival. A tear in a garment, nobody will stop it from extending at liberty. A splash of mud, the wind will brush it off.

Clothing is discarded only after it has passed from the shoulders of the white people to those of the Negroes. When this black inhabitants of these deserts can no longer tell which hole to put his leg or arm through, he throws it in the large public square of Brooksville, in the company of old hats, of nameless boots without leg sections, to the great joy of roaches, cockroaches, bedbugs, fleas and other mites that feast with delight on the human sweat.

I ventured beyond the public square. I end up in the main street: all the houses were made of wood! The houses are square shaped, resting on wooden blocks 50 cm high. One would say a huge armoire/chest with feet. The trading houses/business areas are flanked by enormous signs; and look like shanties at the fair which have been installed permanently on a mound. Most contain general merchandise, where they sell everything, butter and jewelry, smoked meat and lace, shoes and dishes/kitchenware/crockery; where, if you lack money, you can exchange beef for a complete outfit. Because it is not easy to get change from beef, you get an account and they put credit that is the same value as the animal, and you can take an umbrella, a hat, stationery, cigars, a subscription to the Figaro, finally all that constitutes the charm of life.  


Two other houses contain drugstores, pharmacies that are really proper and very appealing. Also I see three houses where doctors work. I do not know where doctors and pharmacists have been educated; but at the infirmaries I’d be wary of the prescriptions and the manner in which they were prepared. If it does not do well it can only do harm. I would have more confidence in the specialties sent by boxes or bottles from a large factory in the North. One can assume that the medicines are from a formula approved by the Academy of Medicine in New York, while the prescriptions!... I’ve been given one by a doctor who was too sure of the rank he held of himself.

They sell whiskey, rum, brandy, all strong liquors in general in the pharmacies, and they only sell it there as a prescription because someone is sick!  The American pharmacy, the tree of knowledge of good and evil, reminds me of these arsonists who came early to extinguish the fire ignited by their own criminal hands.

Bars, tobacco shops, a hairdresser, offices of attorneys at law, admitted lawyers as a notary public, a renter of horses and carriages, a coachbuilder, a saddler, carpenters, restaurants, boarding houses, a skating-rink, three printers editing many newspapers, ironmongers, merchants of grain and fodder, a watchmaker, a painter. Such is the business world.

A large hotel, the “Hernando Hotel”, very well maintained, comfortably furnished, owned by Major John Parsons, run by L. Y. Jennes. The cooking trusted to the care of a black woman, the wife of old James, former slave of the Garay family is very good but very expensive: three dollars a day including the room, ten to fifteen dollars per week. It is true, an orange grove surrounds the building.

It is located on the highest point of Brooksville three hundred feet above sea level, and from its lookout the view extends ten miles round. This setting is very rare in Florida, to have flat country covered with forests, and which alone seduced/attracted the founders of the city. There’s a water shortage and in fact, no water flows through/waters it, and it’s necessary to go a good distance to find a lake. On this elevated plateau there are pretty villas, sheltered by orange groves, the post-office, the telegraph and Court House.


The Court House, it is the common house for all the degrees of jurisdiction from the simple police force to the Court of Appeals and the criminal court. * It is the town hall and the théàtre. In the courtroom one is condemned to death, and one gets married, the drama overshadows the comedy.  On the ground floor, several notary publics and lawyers have their offices. There are the mortgage and registry offices, held by the clerk of the court; the treasury, tax authorities, the hotel sales, and still many other things.  *(This criminal court judges the persons accused of crime “murder, rape, armed robbery”, of attempts and complicities of crimes. It is a not permanent jurisdiction, but meets generally every three months during a fortnight.)
 
As the vultures do not have the job of the cleaning of Court House, the parquet floor, cluttered with old papers, oranges peels, and cigars ends, has never undergone the insults of a broom. Everyone carries a little rubbish in on his shoes, and it has established itself to be an average size bit of garbage and sand which rises above the level of the shoe’s sole. In contrast to the parquet floor, the litigant is all that is being perfectly cleaned.
 
Brooksville has two churches for the white and two for the Negros. The two first are, one a Methodist, the other Baptist. The pastor of the latter is the Reverend Franck de Courcy, descendant of a former Huguenot family, which emigrated following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.  As for the Negro churches, the devil himself, as black as he is, could never know what they adore there in the middle of the epileptic chants, the stamping of feet and the clapping of hands in rhythm, in the preachings of loudest of the black group.
 
Useless to say that white or Negro, these churches are made of wood. The white ones really have the appearance of a church with their bell-tower. From afar, they appear just like these monuments which the children build with the pieces of wood of their building set. They appear to be posed on the lawn, and in fact they do not have any more of a foundation than the other wood houses in Florida. It would be believed that they could dismantle these churches piece by piece. 

Brooksville had two co-ed schools, one a community school and the other a free school. The teacher of the last reads French, strives to speak and teach it. A good point for the teacher.  The small students go to class barefooted and bare-legged. They don’t wreck the floor. In America the wooden shoe was unknown to people of different sexes of all ages. Brooksville is administered by a mayor, a central (main) commissioner, the secretary to the mayor, a city receiver, nine aldermen or counsel, including the mayor. The school board is composed of a president and four members.  That’s the municipal government.  In the administrative headquarters of Hernando County, the sheriff was both the magistrate and the hangman.


France, as we see it, does not have the power over magistrates on hand. The actual President of the United States, Grover Cleveland, in his capacity as sheriff, hanged three men, which did not prevent him from getting married. The magistrate or the sheriff is assisted by a general counsel.  The superintendent of the academy, the treasurer general, contribution director, and the tax- collector have the same powers as in France. 

A public school board is to primarily work with the president and secretary of the school board.  The court is composed of a judge, a solicitor, a bailiff and twelve jurors for civilian and criminal cases. Its sessions take place twice a year, in March and April.  The tribunal court is composed of one judge, and that’s enough; this judge sits on the bench only one time a month.  He is a man of leisure.  At last the county sends to the house/parliament a senator and two representatives.

The organization of the public service is therefore complete in each county, just like in France with each department.*   (*France is divided into 96 départments for governing purposes.)

But I did not see everything the first time in Brooksville; the first time I did not see anything. This town seemed elusive, strange! I did not understand this! I saw the inhabitants, but in my mind, there was not a sufficient number of people for so many stores and churches. “Wait till Saturday”, they told me, “you will see.” It is Saturday, market day. Market of what? No one is bringing anything.

I see the natives flood the wooden sidewalks but their goods/commodities do not interfere with the traffic.  I waited to see the arrival of the carts full of the country folk and of vegetables, of country women and of fowl, pouring out everywhere on the public square in the colorful movement of the invasion of the town by the countryside. I hoped to see the fat farmer’s wife offering “a skinned alive duck” to the beautiful city woman who quibbles/argues with her. None of this.  If a native brought his goods, he immediately sold them to the general store with which he has an account, and in return he carried away the groceries of all kinds and not a lot of change. This native is rare in Florida because the little bit that he produces, he consumes.  Thus Saturday is country day:
 
An inappropriate/unsuitable name if one hears it and thinks peasants. In Florida there are neither city people nor country people. Everyone is the same.  They live in the city or in the woods, that’s the difference.  


The arrival into town, on a Saturday, convinces you of the fact.  No carts or wagons! Everyone arrives as owners in buggy, small light cars mounted on four large, very fine wheels; in wagon, a sort of truck on four wheels, hitched to two mules; on a horse, a kind of animal on which one sits; on the back of a mule, an animal too proud of being descended from the horse to be persisted as being stubborn like a donkey.

By all these methods of locomotion, ladies and misses of the woods spread into Brooksville, dressed in all white, lightweight frocks (dresses), wearing large shepherdess hats.  One would say the bouquets of daisies brought from nearby were made by satyrs and fauns.

They (the men) really look like the pastoral and woodland deities, the men with their goatees!  At least their big hats, their shirts without collars, their worn coats, stained and torn, their trousers tucked into their boots, do not let them be confused them with tumblers in travel fairs.

Everybody being a gentleman in the country, these are thus gentlemen.  Our jockeys, beef drovers, and pork merchants are certainly not as good, but our brands are incomparably better.

However, I saw, with my own eyes saw, - we see strange things in the desert - some outstanding gentlemen, well shod, well dressed, well groomed, the likes of George Brummell. They do not seem to be fashionable.  The dresses of their wife and their daughters were sent out from good dressmakers in New York.  How much I prefer the white muslin and the shepherdess hat that are going to delight these girls of free America, so fresh in the eternal Florida spring (weather)!

The beginnings of Brooksville do not go back in the mists of time as Mycenae and Ilios.  If we judge it by the age of the oldest plantations in the county, the foundation of Brooksville must not go beyond thirty years.  Like young girls, young American cities have their years of renewal/revival and, depending on the latitude, of the blooms of the lilac bush or the orange tree. The old cities hide their age under their ruins, the young proclaim it by their trees.

Twenty years ago, in the parliament of the South, Brook and Sumter, were serving as deputies.  On a beautiful day at the end of an argument, Brook stunned Sumter by knocking him out. Is it for this exploit that the name of Brooksville was given to the city that we occupy? Or was it because of the more honorable value of Brook’s rank, which if I remember, was a major or a general.  I don’t know; in any case, but one must believe the knockout did a little more for Sumter because they named the county (Sumter) and county seat (Sumterville) for him.


For a long time in memory of these two boxers, the inhabitants of the city kept the usual tradition of burning the brains.  Especially in disagreement with the Negros, they entertained themselves by making them bite the dust. They had so few distractions during those times! Fortunately other concerns modified their morals/behaviors. Since three Negro brothers, bad fellows it seems, were struck down by the same hand, the series of rifle and revolver shootings were ended.

The legend of American cities built in a day may receive some damage from those of Florida. Indeed, a city begins to develop, to build its first house when the neighborhood, people living next to their plantations, require a supply and business center.  The first house is always one of the counters* or stores which provided all necessary items and included the post office and telegraph office. The general store merchant served as the postmaster.  (*based on an agreement between producers or sellers, and mediating between them and their customers.)

It is easy to imagine the first colonists upon their arrival by the archaeological remains left around Brooksville. They have not done differently than those I have seen gravitate around the source of the pretty little stream, The Wikiwachee, where they would inevitably build a city one day.

The first accommodation was the Beautiful Star Hotel or the Golden Sun Inn, residences for night or day. All of the amenities of existence.  

It’s the age of the great outdoors.  The desires of man being insatiable, he was tired of the vault of the heavens and the erected tents.
It is the age of the canvas.  Still gripped by the sting of ambition, he cut down trees and pines and made them into shaped logs that were superimposed upon each other, covered everything from shingles to the axe cuts, and he called this primitive house, this first home, log-house, which meant made of blocks, of logs.  

It is the age of squared off wood.  Then a sawmill was built in the area, biting the green wood with its beautiful teeth. Houses rose and were lived in even as the sap still dripped from the veins of the wood.

It is the age of the plank.  The establishment of the sawmill, in other words the mill of the saw, attracted workers, settlers, and  provided wood for building their houses, their enclosures. Soon the first house of Brooksville is on the ground. Others followed suit. And there it is, a city.  In the near future, fire, on a day with a big appetite, will devour three quarters of the city. To rebuild it, they will no longer use wood.  

It will be the age of stone or brick.


The history of Chicago. In Brooksville, this is some of the history of the first chapters.  The following will never be as interesting as the First Prairie City and the  Queen of Lakes. You can’t have everything.  Brooksville is situated on a pretty hill, breathing pure and life giving air which makes it a good place for the ill, just like Cannes and Menton in France.  It has no lake to admire in its waters nor rivers to communicate with the big commerce centers. The railroad must soon, they say, bring it out of its isolation.  There was no theater in Brooksville, but from time to time, the comedy of society.  The performance of this kind of theater that I attended doesn’t deserve to be left in the forgotten.  The artists, recruited from Brooksville’s high society, charming artists, my faith, and very distinguished actors, played with natural ability that amateurs do not always attain, two short one act plays. Naturally the courtroom served as the theater. The scene was decorated with red drapes giving a glowing effect, but what strange chandeliers, sconces! What exotic lighting! Cigar boxes nailed to the wall and filled with candles!

In the most pathetic moments, attention was sometimes diverted by two dry, although humid noises.  These ladies seemed to find it as common as if these gentlemen chewed candy. I expected to see a boy pass through the ranks during intermission and shout: “Programs for two plays, vanilla snuff, orange snuff!  After the performance, one of the actors would come forward and announce the last scene and close the curtains.  Several minutes afterwards, the reopening: all the artists, arranged on the stage; in the center, Juliette tenderly hanging on the arm of Romeo, behind them,  immobile in his white tie and frock coat, a pastor. After a touching speech, he takes Juliette’s hand and places it in Romeo’s, asks the two if they consent to be take each other as husband and wife, and, upon their affirmative response, joins hands and blesses them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
Comedy, believe it?  No way!  The pastor was a true pastor in flesh and  bones  and power, the valid marriage following the laws and rites: only divorce or death can now break it.

The crowd of spectators passed among the newlyweds.  but the Frenchman, born evil, took some interest in the destiny of those lucky performers of a comedy in which the ending was filled with wishes.  He followed them until he saw them disappear into a house from the wooden age which seemed to them like a palace from the golden age.

We are really well behind in France with our issues of civil and religious marriage, of contract, of banns* and of arrière banns,** with all sorts of ceremonies!  At an early hour, in Florida, it is as easy to enjoy the rays of the honeymoon as it is to catch a sunburn.  (*public announcement of an intended marriage  –  **a call to military service by the monarchy.)

It was a benefit performance, a benefit for a cemetery! Here, indeed, everyone is doing admirably although there are doctors,
and when by the merest chance, they die---for the principle of the matter,---they are buried anywhere, at the corner of the woods, under an orange or palm tree. They do not suffocate you under six feet of earth; what work it would be for the company of  vultures, loaded, besides the road, the removal of the bodies...after burial!

In order to provide a place of refuge for the dead which was lacking, some
people had thought to make a cemetery out of a comedy; they certainly did not expect to see a marriage.



(Translated by Zephyrhills High School French teacher Linda Fernatt and her dedicated students Kayla Allen, Erika Andersen, Kayla Caruthers, Amber Doughty, Kelsey Fisher, Marissa Flanders, Deborah Herlan, Cassandra Lenz, Lauren Pasquale, and Stephanie Schlageter- Copyright © 2008- 2010 by Jeff Cannon)