Fannie’s legacy: How a mixed-race couple settled early Lake Worth |
Fannie’s legacy: How a mixed-race couple settled early Lake Worth
The Palm Beach Post
West Palm Beach, Florida
2013-08-06
pages D4-D5
Scott Eyman, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
They thrived until Jim Crow laws forced them from the town.
Before there was Lake Worth, there was a town called Jewell.
It wasn’t a big town — the initial population consisted of 13 people — but a town nonetheless, with those people mostly engaged in wrenching a living out of boggy soil, with a post office founded and manned by a black woman named Fannie James.
There are no extant photos of Fannie, or, for I that matter, of her husband Samuel, even though Fannie lived until 1915. But their immeasurable importance is attested to by the comments of their peers m the Jewell community as well as in the historical record. Historian Ted Brownstein reconstructs both of these lives and the town they helped found In “Pioneers of
Jewel,” recently published to celebrate the centennial of Lake Worth.
It’s a fascinating excavation of the past made possibly mainly by the profusion of on line databases that have become available in the last 20 years.
“The Post ran some articles about Fannie and Samuel in 1999, which is not that long ago,” says Brownstein. “At that time, It wasn’t known where they came from, whether they were black, Seminoles, or mulattos. There was nothing about their histories before they arrived at the Lake…
…Sam and Fannie were lightskinned, which probably worked to their advantage Sam’s death certificate states that his mother was Irish, more proof the early history of America was a place of fairly open intermarriage, far more than was acknowledged at the time, far, far more than was allowed In the 20th century, when the Jim Crow laws came down…
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Tags: Fannie James, Florida, Jewell, Palm Beach Post, Sam James, Scott Eyman, Ted Brownstein, The Palm Beach Post