The Making of St. Petersberg

By Will Michaels

A wide-ranging history of this city on Florida’s Gulf Coast, one of America’s oldest, with numerous photos and maps included.

The Making of St. Petersburg captures the character of this bay city through its past, from the Spanish clash with indigenous peoples to the creation of the downtown waterfront parks and grand hotels. Take a journey with local historian, preservationist, and former museum executive Will Michaels as he chronicles St. Petersburg’s storied history, including the world’s first airline, the birth of Pinellas County, and the good old American pastime, Major League Baseball. From hurricanes to home run king Babe Ruth, the people and events covered in this work paint a rich portrait of a coastal Florida city and capture St. Petersburg’s unique sense of place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 3, 2010
• ISBN: 9781614237761

Will Michaels

Will Michaels has served as executive director and trustee of the St. Petersburg Museum of History, president of St. Petersburg Preservation, vice-president of the Carter G. Woodson Museum of African American History and a member of the City of St. Petersburg Community Planning and Preservation Commission. He is also the author of The Making of St. Petersburg and a regular contributor to the Northeast Journal.

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Preface

This is a selection of articles previously published by the St. Petersburg Northeast Journal between 2004 and 2012. The articles cover various aspects of the history of St. Petersburg and Pinellas County and are roughly arranged in chronological order. They were selected to give both an overview of key events and notable personalities of our history and to provide a general sense of place for our city. The articles have been lightly edited to make them current and, to some extent, link them together, and they are presented as chapters. These chapters are also grounded in my local history course previously offered through the Life Long Learning Program at St. Petersburg College. The course was entitled Turning Points in St. Petersburg History. While it is recognized that there are often many antecedents to a particular event in history, and that these antecedents build up over time, nevertheless there are events that serve as benchmarks in the evolution of history at all levels.

Several chapters have special significance as they deal with three centennial events. One is the centennial of the creation of Pinellas County in 2012. Two other centennials will be celebrated in 2014. The first of these is the launching of the world’s first airline, which occurred on January 1, 1914. The second is the beginning of Major League Baseball’s spring training, which began with the St. Louis Browns on February 16, 1914. Both were momentous events. The first marked the beginning of a new cutting-edge technology that has since transformed the world. The second was the beginning of a love affair between Major League Baseball and St. Petersburg that left an enduring stamp on our city’s sense of place.

History is a cumulative affair. As years pass, we usually obtain a fuller and more complete understanding of earlier events. Sometimes this is the result of new information, sometimes the result of new perspectives. Much of the material in this book is derived from previous local histories. These particularly include such major works as Karl H. Grismer’s The Story of St. Petersburg (1948), Walter P. Fuller’s St. Petersburg and Its People (1972) and Raymond Arsenault’s St. Petersburg and the Florida Dream: 1888–1950 (1988). Dr. Arsenault’s work still remains the Bible of our local history, and his insights and keen observations are frequently quoted in this effort. Rosalie Peck and Jon Wilson’s works have been relied on especially to access the history of our African American community. I would be remiss if I did not also mention the work of my friend the late Scott Taylor Hartzell. Scott in particular made an important contribution to oral history and local biography.

Many other works of local history and city documents have been drawn upon, as well as oral histories taken by the St. Petersburg Museum of History’s Founding Families Project, which I have had the privilege to participate in since its beginning in 2008. This work is intended to be a selective history, addressing only a sampling of our city’s turning points and highlights, with an emphasis on our city’s sense of place. The topics selected are generally covered more fully than in previous histories. For those wishing to read a detailed comprehensive history, I highly recommend Dr. Arsenault’s authoritative and very readable work.

The title of this work is The Making of St. Petersburg, and the first chapter describing the origins of our city also uses that title. As cities are made and evolve, they develop a sense of place, and that is the thread used to weave this work together. The National Trust for Historic Preservation defines sense of place as: Those things that add up to a feeling that a community is a special place, distinct from anywhere else. Such special places have strong identities and characters that are deeply felt by residents and many visitors. These special places also contribute to the personal identity of those who grow up in them. The final chapter directly addresses St. Petersburg’s sense of place. The chapter is based on a talk given at a panel with Ray Arsenault and Gary Mormino sponsored by St. Petersburg Preservation in 2009. The talk was later rewritten as an article published in the Northeast Journal.

There are actually many senses of place for a community. This work is by no means definitive and only suggests some of the special features typically ascribed to our city. The term sense of place as used here is not limited to landscape, waterscape, climate and the built environment (which may be referred to collectively simply as landscape) but rather also encompasses the people who have lived here and made St. Petersburg their permanent home. A city’s sense of place will be somewhat different for those who have lived in that place and for those who visit. For those who are visiting, our sense of place largely has to do with the physical landscape and their impressions of our people. For those who live here, sense of place includes this, but it also includes the many personal memories, social relationships and emotional meanings associated with our physical landscape. This is sometimes referred to as social landscape. Visitors and tourists do, at times, appreciate aspects of the physical landscape that are not appreciated by the native. On the other hand, some physical landscapes have little appeal to the visitor or tourist because they have no personal associations with them. For everyone, though, knowing something of the history of St. Petersburg will add to an understanding and appreciation of our sense of place.

I wish to acknowledge the many people who have helped in one way or another with this work, including the staff at the St. Petersburg Museum of History, especially Ann Wikoff and Marta Jones; the staff at the Northeast Journal, particularly Jen MacMillen, Susan Woods Alderson and Julie L. Johnston; my wife, Kathy Michaels, for her encouragement and assistance with editing; and the following persons for reviewing selected chapters or aspects: Dr. Raymond Arsenault; Dr. Warren Brown; Bob Guckenberger; Jessie Marshall; Jeff Moates, MA, RPA; Dr. Gary Mormino; Dr. William Parsons; Tom Pavluvick; Linda Ruth Tosetti (granddaughter of Babe Ruth); Jon Wilson; and Fritz Wilder. Most especially I am thankful to the many people of St. Petersburg who shared their personal histories through interviews, family papers and photos.

The Making of St. Petersburg

It was a Russian by the name of Peter Demens who with General John C. Williams and his wife, Sarah, created the city of St. Petersburg. Peter Demens (pronounced de-mens) was a Russian aristocrat who had served as a captain in the tsar’s Jaeger regiment. Despite his service in the tsar’s regiment, he became an advocate for social reform. After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and the repression that followed, he fled Russia for the United States. Another possible reason for his immigration to America may have been entanglement in some legal difficulty of which he was later acquitted. He Anglicized his name from Pyotr Alexeyevich Dementyev to Peter Demens. He soon became owner of a sawmill in Longwood, Florida, where he also was elected the town’s mayor. In 1885, he signed a contract to supply railroad ties to the Orange Belt Railway. The Orange Belt was being built from the lower St. Johns River to Lake Apopka. When the owners of the railway were unable to pay him for the ties, he took over the railway. He completed the link to Apopka in 1886. He then looked about for further profitable locations to extend his railroad and settled on the Pinellas Peninsula some 120 miles distant.

Hamilton Disston, heir to a vast fortune from a tool manufacturing company, became interested in Florida real estate after making a fishing trip to the state. In 1881, he bought 4 million acres from the Florida state government for twenty-five cents per acre, making him the largest landowner in the United States. Disston was particularly interested in the Pinellas Peninsula, where he had acquired 110,000 acres. He believed Pinellas to be the ideal future site of a prosperous port city and consequently founded Disston City (today’s Gulfport) on Boca Ciega Bay. But to really put Disston City on the map, he needed to make it the terminus of a cross-Florida railroad.

Original town plat for St. Petersburg, dated 1888 and filed by Peter Demens in the Hillsborough County Courthouse in Tampa. Sixth Avenue later became Central Avenue. Reservoir Lake later became Mirror Lake. Williams Park is shown as Park. It was not named in John C. Williams Sr.’s honor until after his death in 1892. Courtesy St. Petersburg Museum of History.

Portrait of Peter Demens that at one time hung in the Detroit Hotel. In addition to bringing the railroad to the hamlet that was to become St. Petersburg, Peter Demens built the three-and-a-half-story Detroit Hotel and the three-thousand-foot-long Railroad Pier, image circa 1900. Courtesy St. Petersburg Museum of History.

At this time, there were two railroad tsars in Florida known as the Two Henrys: Henry Flagler and Henry Plant. Flagler’s rail and companion hotel interests were confined to Florida’s east coast. Plant was a self-made man who had worked as a railroad and maritime express shipping executive. After the Civil War, he acquired a network of railroads throughout the South. Plant’s interests were in Central and West Florida, where he completed a railroad, the South Florida, running from Sanford to Tampa in 1884. In 1890, he completed the 511-room Tampa Bay Hotel, at the time the largest building in the world to be powered by electricity. Disston was not able to make a deal with Plant, who had invested in Tampa as Florida’s major west coast city, and did not want to encourage another competing city across the bay. So Disston turned to the up-and-comer Demens. Disston offered Demens sixty thousand acres of land if Demens would rapidly extend his Orange Belt Railway to Disston City.

Peter Demens and his family. The photo was taken when he ran a sawmill in Longwood, image mid-1880s. Courtesy St. Petersburg Museum of History.

Demens, however, did not want to end his railroad at Gulfport, but instead wanted to extend it even farther to Mullet Key, which gave better access to the Gulf of Mexico. Mullet Key would later become the site of Fort De Soto. This would require expensive bridges and causeways, so he asked Disston for another fifty thousand acres to finance the extension. Disston’s Florida Land and Improvement Company turned down the request.

Rebuffed, Demens looked about for an alternative site for the terminus. This was probably a calculated bluff on his part, as there was no readily apparent alternative site. At this point, Henry Sweetapple, Demens’s partner, met with General John C. Williams and his wife, Sarah. (Williams was called General as a courtesy title.) Sarah Williams and Sweetapple were both Canadians, a bond that likely helped reach an agreement to bring the railroad to Williams’s property, which was in the vicinity of an area then known as Paul’s Landing. In exchange for diverting the railroad to this area, including the construction of a wharf deep enough to accommodate commercial shipping, Williams agreed to assign to Demens 250 acres of prime property.

Coming to an agreement was one thing, but executing it was another. The railroad extension to Pinellas was begun in January 1887. Bad weather, delayed steel shipments, defective equipment, lack of financing and even a yellow fever epidemic challenged completion of the railroad. In September, irate creditors chained and padlocked the Orange Belt’s locomotives to the rails. After witnessing this event, Henry Sweetapple died from a stroke. The padlocking was followed in October by the rail workers surrounding the Orange Belt offices and threatening to lynch Demens if they did not receive their back pay. Additionally, just as the railroad was about to reach its goal, a local property owner refused to allow the railroad to cross his land. Demens ordered tracks to be laid on either side of this property and then, in the early hours of a Sunday morning, had the tracks laid across the forbidden land before he could be stopped.

General John C. Williams Sr. Williams acquired more than 1,600 acres of land in the area now known as St. Petersburg in 1875. In 1887, he signed an agreement with Peter Demens to bring the Orange Belt Railway to St. Petersburg in exchange for 250 acres of waterfront land. General was a courtesy title. Courtesy Heritage Village & Library.

Sarah Williams Armistead. John Williams married a young Canadian-born widow, Sarah Craven Judge, in 1882. Sarah Williams took a lead role in negotiating the agreement to bring the Orange Belt Railway to southeast Pinellas with Peter Demens’s associate, Henry Sweetapple. That Sarah Williams and Sweetapple were both Canadians probably facilitated negotiations. Sarah later married St. Petersburg mayor James Armistead after Williams’s death, image circa 1907. Courtesy St. Petersburg Museum of History.

Demens and the Orange Belt Railway employed many African Americans to build the railway and the Railroad Pier. They also built the Detroit Hotel and were its first occupants. African Americans would continue to have a major role in literally building the city and contributing to its success throughout its history.

John and Anna Donaldson and their family were among the first African Americans known to settle in lower Pinellas County after the Civil War. He owned a forty-acre farm northwest of Lake Maggiore and worked on construction of the Detroit Hotel and the Railroad Pier. Donaldson is buried at the Glen Oak Cemetery in South St. Petersburg, image circa 1900. Courtesy St. Petersburg Museum of History.

An Orange Belt train, with the Detroit Hotel in the background. St. Petersburg’s founders had high hopes for an area largely populated with scrub pine and palmetto bushes, image circa 1893. Courtesy St. Petersburg Museum of History.

Finally, on June 8, 1888, the locomotive Mattie puffed and huffed its way to the end of the line at what is now Ninth Street. The area was then known informally known as Wardsville, but not for long. As the railroad was being built, post offices were designated at stops along the way. Ella Ward was designated the postmistress for the