State of Florida VS Cornelius Taylor

The year 1845 saw another disaster at the Taylor homestead when a boatload of men arrived from Mellonville to “do business” at Enterprise. They had really come over to “settle the score” with Taylor and drive him out of the country. A fight ensued between Taylor and Henry Crane, the county clerk, over possession of county records.

Taylor left and returned on horseback with a shotgun. Encountering Theodore Hinsdale on the lakefront, he shot him in the abdomen, leaving a hole the size of a coffee can. Taylor was arrested and tried for murder in St. Augustine. His attorneys raised the then unheard of sum of $18,000 – representing all of Taylor’s assets -- to bail him out. The jury believed Taylor’s claim of self-defense; he was acquitted.

In 1846 a court case questioned the legality of Taylor’s claim to the plantation in San Pablo near current day Jacksonville and his right to sell it to the timber contractors of Palmer and Ferris. Combined with economic difficulties, these problems may have caused Taylor to leave Enterprise in 1847 and take his family to Texas. There he bought a ranch to raise cattle for the army during the war with Mexico. Indian raids ended this venture, prompting Taylor to head to California to try his luck in the Gold Rush. He was reported to have been lost at sea in a hurricane off Mazatlan in 1849 on his way to California.

Catherine Taylor, whose father descended from Minorcans at the Turnbull Colony of “New Smyrnea,” returned briefly to Enterprise in the early 1850s where she reportedly ran a boardinghouse, possibly the original inn on the shell mound, before finally returning to Jacksonville to run the Taylor Hotel. She and her children sold the Enterprise tract to the James Starke family who built a large home called “Bueno Retiro” on a knoll beside one of the springs. This would become a boardinghouse serving the railroad clientele in the late 1800s.

Jacob Brock’s Enterprise: Boomtown on the River

The center of activity in the Enterprise area moved a mile west along the lake in the early 1850s when Jacob Brock, the most prominent steamboat captain on the river, saw the potential of the site as the head of navigation on the river. Florida had become a mecca for invalids seeking a healthier clime and a new wave of well-off travelers seeking adventure in the newly promoted Florida wilderness. Brock had transported many of them on his Jacksonville line.

In 1851 Brock started purchasing land in the present area of Enterprise, laying out streets and lots, and building a wharf. The property he bought included a wood frame store and possibly a small boardinghouse. Virgil DuPont, probably related to the large and influential DuPont family in St. Augustine, had already acquired a land grant near a small flowing spring later known as Benson Springs near the present Progress Energy Power Plant and ran a small hotel with a post office and surrounding orange grove.

By 1854, Brock would complete his own 100-room hotel that would put Enterprise on the map as “the premier destination on the St. Johns.” From his wharf he operated the first regular line of steamboats from Jacksonville to Lake Monroe.

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