Introduction

Moss Culture is dedicated to publishing essays by FSCJ students on the history of Jacksonville and Northeast Florida. Jacksonville history remains a relatively untrodden field and Moss Culture provides an opportunity for students to make original contributions to knowledge of our area’s past. Our hope is to turn students into scholars who write for the public and not just a professor. Though the journal was conceived as part of the college’s course, AMH2071: The History of Jacksonville, all students are welcome to submit essays. The publication will be updated annually over the summer to include essays submitted during the academic year.

Moss Culture takes its name from the Spanish moss that drapes in profusion on Jacksonville’s trees. Neither Spanish in origin nor a moss, Spanish moss got its name from French colonists who compared it to the scraggly beards worn by Spanish men. For thousands of years, people in Northeast Florida have woven the moss into the fabric of our area’s history and culture. The Timucua used it to make garments and as temper in their clay pots; fugitive slaves wore it as camouflage when hiding in the woods; Civil War soldiers made it into blankets; tourists collected it as a souvenir from a tropical paradise; filmmakers framed it as a backdrop to signify Southern settings for their audiences; and fiber factories gathered it to make mattresses. Spanish moss also played a leading and tragic role in the city’s darkest day. On May 3, 1901, a spark from a stove at the Cleaveland Fibre Factory ignited a mass of drying moss. The resulting firestorm destroyed 75% of the city and led to the creation of modern Jacksonville.

The nature of Spanish moss also resembles the nature of Jacksonville, particularly its cultural geography and demography. In the United States, Spanish moss is found exclusively in the South, particularly the lower South where Jacksonville is located. It has long been a romantic—even gothic—symbol of the region, and has long figured in Jacksonville’s image as a Southern city. Spanish moss is a plant without roots and Jacksonville is a city whose residents have most often not had roots in the area. Spanish moss is also migratory, the wind carries its seeds and fragments to other trees, particularly oaks, that it festoons. For more than two hundred years, Jacksonville has been remade by migrants, people from across the country and the world who were guided by winds and currents to settle amid the city’s moss shrouded trees. We hope the essays published here will capture Jacksonville in all its diversity and complexity and, like Spanish moss, evoke the unique character of Northeast Florida.

– Dr. Scott Matthews, Professor of History at Florida State College at Jacksonville