An evening, around a large fire, all the staff was talking, fanning and poking. As for it, the fire was consuming a comfortable stack of huge logs and small twigs garnished with dry pine needles. As soon as thrown into the brazier, those twigs produced a white smoke, exhaling the delicious smell of burning pine. Suddenly, in a cheerful crackle, the flames shoot up, lighting up the forest up to half a league around. The dried up needles and branches turned themselves for an instant into golden sprays, soon changed to black and felled into ashes.  Only remained the pieces of resistance from which the brazier toasted the faces within fifteen feet.
        "If like the Normans from the Middle Ages, I took possession of the neighboring lands, limiting my domains to the furthest projections of the fires rays?” I did explain.
        -You can do it, was answered to me from everywhere, if you want to pay as many times, four dollars, you will inhabit one hundred sixty acres plot.
        -And how would I be able to acquire so vast properties so cheap?
        -It's that simple: we are in the tax collecting period. The list of unpaid taxes, published in the newspaper, reveals to us that those of the surrounding properties are in that situation. Show up at the tax office, pay them, give your name to the collector and after one year, if the owners did not claim them back, the properties will be yours irrevocably. Waiting for this deadline you can do anything you want on your temporary estate, but do not deteriorate it, as you would put yourself at risk of a request for damages from the claimant."

What an excellent way to collect property taxes! How superior is it to the sending of a white paper notice, symbols of the innocent intentions of the local government; from the free green paper summons, hope; from the pink paper constraint, hypocrisy; We use too many soft colors for our impolite request to pay; the Americans are more informal: it is tax collection time again, you know it, you go to the office and you pay, otherwise your property changes hands.
        It’s easy as pie.
        I would really like this system implemented in France. How would the owners hurry up; what a way to reduce the number of tax office employees; what an advantage for the treasury department; collecting the taxes within fifteen days, instead of waiting for the visit of the taxpayers all year long!

The next day, I told the collector, a charming man, who collects anything you want, that I agreed, for a fee of sixteen dollars or eighty francs, to become the owner of six hundred forty acres of land, around two hundred fifty nine hectares, located township 22, range 18, section 8, and including the North half and the North-East , South-West, and South-East quarters of the South-East fourth of the aforementioned section. He welcomed my overture and collected my eighty francs favorably, but without any receipt. Supplied with a legitimate title and an address very easy to remember in its precision, I went to the surveyor and told him.
        "Surveyor, show me this."

Charming man also, the surveyor goes with me to the site, plays with his compass, looks for a small stake which should be in the middle of some bushes, or a dent cut into a tree or the remains of a fire once burned in a hole. It is his landmark, he surveys: "It starts here, he says, and it ends up there." Then he drives in the stakes at the four corners, these are the borders."
        Survey statement, none; conflicting border markings with the neighbors, trifle!
        No responsibility lies with the surveyor. If you have his work checked by another one, your borders can sometimes vary from one hundred to two hundred meters, unless, to broaden the range of your owner's emotions, he sends you to take possession of a totally different property. But that is of no consequence...for him. The surveyor, his job, his mission is, for a fee of five dollars per day, to drive stakes into the ground where he wants and to leave without any other form of statement.  It is up to you to settle in, build a house, to be on the wrong property, and the day the mistake is discovered, to stand trial that you will lose with all the improvements made on the property.
        In France, the identifications are a lot more complicated: a piece of land adjoining up to Durant, down to Moreau, North to the buyer, South to Boirot; but in return one has neighbors, and at least, one can talk.
        The American identifications are more precise on paper, a mathematical accuracy. The United States, one knows, are divided in squares of six miles each side, all oriented North to South. Each area is nine thousand three hundred thirty hectares.
        This rural separation is called a township and match more precisely to the French canton than the commune, in the administration standpoint.
        The township is its self divided into thirty six sections. The sixteenth is named school-land, land for the school, because the local government is setting it aside for the public schools, who sell it in their profit!
        "Now, my friends from the sawmill told me, a town has to be built."

Division of the American property
The following table shows 6 townships or canton:
Each township is divided into sections in the number of 36 as seen numbered: township 22, row 18. The 16th section is sold to the schools profit.
    In township 23, row 18, we can see that one section consist of 640 acres (259 hectares),  half a section, 320 acres, a fourth of a section, 160 acres.
    Every American citizen  is entitled to a fourth of a section or 160 acres for free (that is  for a registration fee of 70 francs ). These 160 acres are his untouchable homestead.  He must live on it with his family and cultivate it, without which it can be taken away from him.
    The property shown section 14, township 22, row 18, is named: The half South of the North East quarter of the North West quarter of section 14, township 23, row 18.


I opened my eyes as big as a populous city's gate and jolted like a cathedral populated with canons, a city hall with the mayor and his council, a court house crowded with magistrates, barracks swarming with soldiers, schools bristling with children, just felled next to me. From underground, monuments, houses, statues, inhabitants, dogs and cats, mice and rats all things and creatures, finally all the people without whom, for a European, a city does not exist seemed to spring up, and to astound my imagination.

To found a town! Who for heaven's sake could in Europe think about such a venture? Which French property owner ever built a house or a castle in the middle of his field with the ulterior motive that one day thousands, fifty thousands, one hundred thousand souls will gather around his house? Who can predict that, in one or two centuries, some erudite archeologists will make some researches on a large city origin from which, unknowingly he will have laid the foundations? One would call him crazy in the old world, the man who would state that he founded a city; in the mind of a European, a city founder can only be portrayed under the characteristics of an Aurelian, who gave his name to Orleans, of a Cesar or a Constantine; but a man in the flesh cannot have built a city, nor a village, not even a hamlet.

So wrong, truth beyond the Atlantic ocean: We encounter, in America, quite a few people who founded a town and gave it their name.
        "They did not do anything different than you told me Vanier. They bought lands next to a sawmill in order to get construction wood, they plotted the roads through the woods, every one of them straight, going invariably from North to South, from East to West, and each block or "pate de maisons" of one acre size. They built a church, a school, and intended on being a trading post and a post office. This is the beginning."

I did hear about some poor young man, whose ambition was to build cathedrals, but the drawings of theses edifices, to my knowledge, always stayed at the end of Octave Feuillet's quill, so I did not see at all the architect, the contactor and the backer of a cathedral, plus a school, and a post office.
        "We only have to start," the old man, the old of the gang, whispered inarticulately.

I looked at this old man's glabrous face, his little facetious eyes, his mouth always smiling; I would have loved to tear his mask off. I did not know what was behind it: one told me that in his vagrant life he always started and never finished, or instead, that all his beginnings always had lamentable ends. Why did he never succeed? What was he missing? Would this fateful saying: "We only have to start," which makes so many American fortunes, loose all its virtue as soon as he would apply it to his ventures? Yes, and for that reason after having started, in his opinion the important would disappear, only the secondary would attract this fickle butterfly, dwelling on a flower or a grass blade. He repeated to himself this Horace's verse:


and only took this as his motto to start on Monday, to start again on Tuesday, to begin on Wednesday, to draft on Thursday, to undertake on Friday, to learn it on Saturday and to garden on Sunday. The following week was used only to summarize the starts and to look at the preliminary sketches.

He sang in the warm weather, danced at falling leaves, and even though the wintry winter had powdered his noble old man’s head, he felt an eternal renewal warming up his old heart. The front of his big book was dedicated to the muses, and the back dedicated to Mercury, god of trading. The verses and the numbers were squabbling at each other, trying to rhyme between themselves, and it did not make any sense. He had always had some associate exhaling his sorrow in a prosaic rhythm, but it always came out to his advantage.
        "That's business", he was humming turning around. This honest looking man started with the old celadon's mile and ended with the nasty satyr's grimace.
        "start" was he telling his victims, "I will help you, but you know, the interest, as an old master taught me, being one of the most powerful human motives, the only human motive, split in two."
        And he was helping so well, that the whole blanket was pulled on his side.
        The following evening, same setting as the day before. Around a big bonfire, every sawmill employee fanned, poked, and conversed. A few neighbors came to visit: John Kellich and his son Ross, Bradshaw and his two sons, the Bishop brothers, James the old nigger and his son Lewis, every one of them are property owners around.
        Everyone was very happy. Jokes flowed through the flames, which purified everything.
        Sribner, with the most beautiful smoked bronze skin that I have ever seen, showed in a large laugh two magnificent rows of pearls. Two little Negroes bronzed with the same bronze had followed her.
        Suddenly upon a sign of Vanier, everybody became serious. He removed a sheet of paper out of his pocket and read the following:

From now on the geographers will have to place a new little black dot in the middle of a dark Florida forest. They can write me to the above address, general delivery, and in my answer, I will owe myself to give them every necessary latitudes and longitudes to place the dot.

For fifteen days, I had this town and its inhabitants on my hands, heavy burdened, but the post office was not happening. Finally I received from the "Post-office department" having its headquarters in Washington, two sheets, colored yellow and black with questions, with white spaces for the answers. I think I already said that the American administration does not concede anything, regarding the paperwork that the whole world envies us, but that no one follows. It knows not only how to dot the “I’s”, but the accents over every letter and coma’s everywhere.

For this occasion, I experienced it. Having missed, by lack of information, the answers of two or three questions, a sheet of paper of the same yellow color was sent back to me without any explanation. Even though I asked where I send it twice, I never received any answer from the "Post-office department". I gather that I only had to rack my brain, which I did only with immeasurable cautions, in a way that at the present time, the legal process is still in limbo.

Never mind that the mail coach which goes through Johanetville towards the South, twice a week, was right away given the order to stop here, even if it was only to drop passengers.

The Brooksville Register soon published on its postal services chart the following Mail schedule:


        The Mail was always full. To tell the truth there was only room for one passenger.
        We only have to start!
        So let’s start at the beginning, the layout of the town. Of course the orientation is from North to South, to not break with the usual. The streets are forty yards, a little less than forty meters wide; the avenues are sixty yards wide. Each square measures one acre. The town square is 10 acres. The surrounding squares do not measure one acre but tenths of acres, they are called city blocks. They have an important value, because commercial buildings have to be built on them. On this town square, the church, the school, and the "court house" (Palais de justice).
        I name these streets, those avenues, with names of places or peoples close too my heart.


This is not a small labor: surveying, adjustments, driving stakes, logging for public roads, and clearing. Buck, who follows me faithfully and lays down when I stop, seems to ask me where his doghouse will be. Come back later, my sweet dog, I am too busy for the moment.
        Here is precisely a noble rider, riding a noble mount, and coming at a slow pace.
        It is J.C. Pane, the local photographer.

Having found, in Brooksville, Jack with a broken rope, he did not find anything better but to bring that pleasing donkey to the sawmill, then saddle him, place his photographic equipment on his croup, and sitting his lordship on his back.
Everyone is soon in position, including Jack who not understanding anything in the "Do not move", shakes his ears so well, that the loyal lenses above his head looked like a beautiful fan.

Seeing this, the photographer starts to laugh in his long beard, a beard like Pierre Petit, because, he says, he will make the most of this ordeal: a donkey with no ears, but surmounted by a fan is an easy to sell phenomenon.

If this artist told me that he was born in the 17th century, I would not be surprised: his beard is from this era. It grew a long time ago on the chin of a few German Jews. However, J.C Pane is not a Jew at all or Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, or nothing at all, following the bell tower denomination of the country he is crossing. I make him some offers to establish his photographic studio in the new town. He prefers to wait.

My first tenant comes up. It's Arnold, the sawmill's blockman, in other words he is the one who handles the blocks or billets. This nice fellow has a wife and child. When he talks about them, he is moved, and all the sawyers, when they hear him talk, are also moved, because Arnold has praised his wife's culinary talent, and willing to run the boarding-house. She cooks while making music. During the time the little breads (her best specialty) are cooking in the oven with contemplation, the tinny accordion's notes become entangled with the kich-kich of the bacon moaning in the frying pan.

Arnold leaves one Saturday night with two mules and a wagon that I lend him, in order to bring back from Hammock-Creek his wife, his child and his furniture.

The next day, by moonlight, I hear in a distance a music, imprinted in this deep solitude with a sweet melancholy. It is Mrs. Arnold who pours her whole soul into her wind instrument. Soon she is in sight.

How not to go ahead of the first woman stepping into my domain? I welcome her and her accordion. I caress the child, who under the harmony fell asleep. To the father, I ask why he did not bring his furniture.
        "But we are sitting on it," he answered.
        My God! did I think, this is a poor security to back the rent! a real pocket furniture, easy to put away, even on a trip, almost imperceptible to the naked eye, in the moonlight!

This furniture reminded me of the one from Blaise and Manon, who are so nicely singing this from Nadaud:

The fact is that there is only one chair, and that the whole household is numbered by oneness. Arnold must be Unitarian by religion.

There is not a French peasant who does not own better "treasure". I don't even know one whose furniture and old clothes could be kept in an American wagon box. It is true that the French peasant has ancestors and furniture, while here everyone is an ancestor who places himself in his furniture.
        The unpacking was fast.

The next day, I paid a visit to this small household. The child, a three year old small boy, was playing with a hatchet trying to cut into tiny pieces of wood. I quivered at this sight and rushed to snatch the sharp instrument from those tiny hands at risk of being torn into an awful shredding. The mother watched me without any feeling and told me:
        "Don't you know, Sir, that in this country one is born lumberjack?
        -It's possible, did I answer, but as bigger lumberjacks than this little boy cut into their skin, accept that during the time of my visit I’ll keep this little toy to avoid witnessing a family accident."

Naturally the child starts to cry, and the mother to comfort him. She does not succeed in doing it; she is forced to resort to drastic measures, and her famous accordion. Closer it does not sound as good as from a distance; but I am grateful to her for having the crying music stopped, not at all intoxicating, even in the loneliness.

When I came in, this watchful mother twiddled her thumbs; however there was plenty of work. The most ragged man in Florida is Arnold. It reminds me of the ingenious way a canon is made: lots of holes and with a small amount of fabric around. His wife does not often bother to run her needle through as he does not take offense of his coat's roars of laughter. He makes his misery breathe through all the openings with Don Cesar de Bazan's ease and pride, and wrapped in his ragged cape. Those beggars are nothing like our panhandlers. There is no begging in the United States, everyone reaches out for the ax or the hammer. If work does not always get one out of misery, it does keep one from starving to death. These holes in Arnold's clothes, which follow one another without looking the same, are not a vermin’s work, but the work of the tool which tore it up.


However those tears worthiness may be, Mrs. Arnold should acquire this little tool named a needle, so reputable in a woman's hands, so rare in an America' ones. She prefers cooking, kneading her flour and cooking cakes. Mrs. Arnold is born a cook, as her son is born lumberjack. Early on, one learned not to burn her fingers, the other one not to chop them off.
        Great people!

The family dinner is already ready, it simmers on the stove. A Frenchman would never guess of what material this furnace is made of, since it is not made of cast iron, neither steel, nor bricks. It is made of wood! A wooden stove, pine wood full of resin, and it does not burn!
        Great people!

This stove looks like a table with twenty five centimeter edges, constituting a box filled with sand. On this sand are burning firebrands.
        In the desert, we also have furnaces......cheap.

Arnold is coming. During the time his wife is setting the table, he takes out of a trunk large color lithographs, Washington's portrait, an American pastoral, a flirtation master piece, a blond vaporous miss. He hangs all of this gallery on his residence's walls. It is the start of the town museum.

The boarding is open. Misters the lumberjacks, who were happy with nothing when they were cooking themselves, are suddenly very demanding, as soon as they are in the boarding-house. One has to bring back their sobriety, that I believed was normal, and was only a necessity. The guests are fond of sugar cane syrup which we spray on rice and corn. It is also used to sweeten tea and coffee. Lastly we savor it for itself with bread.

As we are in America, it is well known that everyone is eating silently, with method, and that after the meal everyone starts chewing tobacco.

Great connoisseurs of this candy, Arnold treats his little boy, three years old. He does not make any ugly face, the poor boy. After all, as at a so tender age one can handle the hatchet with skill, one can chew candy tobacco voluptuously.

My second house was soon occupied by a general merchandises' store, and soon we could read in the Brooksville register:


Which means that in the entire Hernando county one can only find delicious foodstuffs at J.J. Johnson of Johanetville, and regarding the excellence and the cheapness, one cannot find better for groceries, hardware and clothes; that nowhere else can one buy better
chewing or smoking tobacco. Hay and corn are retailed ad libitum. We can see that there is for every taste, for the animals and for the people, for all the needs and all the pleasures. Even the Louvre store does not sell what J.J.Johnson has.

Boarding-house or restaurant, store or counter, post-office expectation, it appeared that the only things missing for my town to be town looking was a school and a church. Frankly I have to admit that I started to get very serious, I did not come to Florida to play Calvin, Mahomet or to lead my parishioners in their choice of unnumbered sects which proliferate in the United States. I recognize the freedom of religion, and I do not think that following our fathers' faith is bad, but as I also have fathers who passed their faith on to me, it did not suit me to build temples which were not Catholics, Apostolic or Roman.

I declared it, and I have to say that I did not meet any opposition, not that I dealt with people suddenly enlightened by the truth; my people, intensely indifferent in that matter, though that Catholicism was only one of the forms of Christianity, no better no worse than the others, older and less spread, that's all. Most of them did not even make their mind in that matter, and everyone only imagined the religion under the appearances of any ordinary house, used both as a church and a school, with a priest or pastor-teacher to service it. They had no preference, and I had mine to offer them. Nothing was easier than to get along. I decided, in these circumstances, to visit a catholic colony, located forty miles away, in order to realize by myself its star, its organization and its functioning.



(Translated by Gaetan Gessat, December 2008- Copyright © 2008- 2010 by Jeff Cannon)