A brief history of evil: Three centuries of forced agricultural labor on the banks of the St. Johns…

On Thursday, April 8th, the museum crew returned to South Florida — driving 500 miles in a single day — for a very special event at the Miami Workers Center. It was a great night, getting to share the museum with some of our oldest and closest friends in the state. But, without a doubt, the highlight of the evening, and indeed one of the highlights of the entire six-week tour, was the unveiling of the newest addition to the Modern-Day Slavery Museum catalog: a map of British slave plantations in North Florida during the late 18th century.

The map (right), which a CIW delegation first came across at the British Museum when in London three years ago to receive the Anti-Slavery International award, allows us to trace the arc of three centuries of forced labor, not just at the state level but within the confines of one particular North Florida community. The story of this community — of this soil — is the story of the evolution of slavery in Florida writ small.

The story begins on the banks of the St. Johns River in the 1770’s on a plantation owned by Denys Rolle, a former member of the British parliament. According to the University of North Florida’s historical archives:

“The Rolle estate at ‘the narrows’ on the St. Johns River was unmanageably large, stretching for twenty-three miles along the St. Johns River from Federal Point to the north shore of Dunn’s Creek… The towns of East Palatka, Hastings, Spuds, and San Mateo, and the fields of potatoes, cabbages, and winter vegetables that surround them, now occupy portions of a three-county conglomerate once owned by Denys Rolle.” (Note: the plantation sits east of the river, just inside the north-east quadrant of the map above; the map below is a detail showing the exact location of the Rolle plantation.)

As 78,000 acres was a bit too much for Rolle to cultivate on his own, he built his plantation on forced labor, first with indentured workers from England, then with enslaved Africans:

“Despite his early losses in East Florida, Rolle returned in 1779 with 150 enslaved Africans and new overseers determined to resuscitate operations at Charlottia. He had finally recognized that his repeated experiments with white indentures had failed and instead brought Africans with him on this return to Rollestown… In all, Rolle purchased more than 200 enslaved Africans. When his total expenses related to land acquisition, construction, agricultural tools and farm animals, and the failed experiments with white indentured laborers are considered, it is clear that his personal investment in East Florida was considerable.”

Producing turpentine, indigo, rice, and corn, Rolle operated one of the largest slavey plantations in British Florida, and it marked the first chapter in the history of forced labor on that patch of land, but certainly not the last.

In the early 1900’s, before the explosive growth of large-scale winter vegetable production in Florida, the predominant agricultural industries were turpentine extraction and logging. Both industries were rife with exploitation and, in particular, forced labor. Here below is an extended excerpt from an excellent article by Jerrell Shofner, professor emeritus of history at the University of Central Florida (“Forced Labor in the Florida Forests: 1880-1950,” Journal of Forest History, January 1981):

Convicts leased to harvest timber c 1910
source: Florida State archives

“With nearly twenty million acres of virgin long-leaf pine and considerable stands of cypress, Florida was the scene of a rapidly developing lumber and naval stores industry. By the late nineteenth century… although Florida freedmen had evinced a determination to make a place for themselves following the Civil War, obstacles had ultimately proven too great. When the national government withdrew its support after 1877, Negroes rapidly lost what gains they had made during Reconstruction… Accordingly, during the next decade and a half a system of Jim Crow laws rigidly reinforced the customary segregation of the races. Similarly, laws were enacted giving legal sanction to employment arrangements that had developed by custom after slavery had ended.

Two institutions — convict leasing and debt peonage, often overlapping, sometimes merging, but always operating at the expense of laborers — developed in the wake of emancipation.”

The St. Johns River region was no exception. A major logging enterprise in Osteen, just miles south of Rolle’s plantation, was the site of a particularly coercive operation that would presage conditions exposed seventy years later in the area’s potato and cabbage fields. Shofner writes of the Osceola Log Company in the 1930’s:

“When it was cutting cypress logs at Osteen, near the St. Johns River in Volusia County, its workers were recruited by promises of $4 per day paid regularly. Once in the camp, employees found that room and board were deducted from this sum in addition to the costs of supplies purchased from the company commissary at typically inflated prices. Accounts were kept only by the bookkeeper, who told the workers what their net balances were. One escapee had seen men draw eight cents in net wages for two weeks of work. The gates were locked at night and on Sundays. The foremen acted as guards and carried weapons. Denied permission to leave when offered a better job, Fred Black and a companion slipped out of the camp in the early morning hours, waded several miles of swamp, walked eighteen miles, and finally caught a ride into Daytona Beach.”

Which brings us to the third — and hopefully final — chapter of forced labor in the history of this particular piece of land on the banks of the St. Johns River.

In 2007, Ron Evans was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison on drug conspiracy, financial re-structuring, and witness tampering charges, among others. Evans recruited homeless U.S. citizens from shelters across the Southeast with promises of good pay and housing in exchange for harvesting crops in the surrounding potato and cabbage fields. At his East Palatka labor camp — the same East Palatka where 230 years earlier Denys Rolle brought Africans to work as slaves on land he called Rollestown — Evans deducted rent, food, crack cocaine and alcohol from workers’ pay, holding them “perpetually indebted” in what the Department of Justice called “a form of servitude morally and legally reprehensible.”

In Florida, Evans worked for grower Frank Johns. Johns was 2004 Chairman of the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association, the powerful lobbying arm of the Florida agricultural industry. As of 2007, he remained the Chairman of the FFVA’s Budget and Finance Committee.

The situation eerily echoed conditions found in the 1930’s logging camp. Evans’ farm labor camp was surrounded by a chain link fence topped with barbed wire, with a No Trespassing sign. As one man who worked for Evans for eleven years recently explained to us at a museum tour stop in St. Augustine, “If you leave, you get beat up, so I just slipped away in the middle of the night. That’s how I got away from Ron.”

Another worker, one who spent seven years in Evans’ employ, added, “He’ll tell you this and that, but he won’t do for you like he says… He gets everything on the books, and all your money, that’s in his pocket. He just takes everything you got.”

Evans’ workers walked in the footsteps of the slaves that Rolle brought to Florida in the 1700’s. Their sweat mixed with the same soil. They gave their backs, their bodies, their lives to the same thankless task: harvesting Florida’s crops.

Their stories are the story of slavery in Florida, past and present. And it is to their stories that the CIW’s Modern-Day Slavery Museum is dedicated so that their sacrifices and exploitation will never again be forgotten.

For a closer look at the history and evolution of slavery in Florida as a whole, click here to download the Modern-Day Slavery Museum pdf.