By Roger Owens
If one does an internet search for the Stephen Foster Memorial or the Stephen Foster “Culture Center State Park” in White Springs, Florida, a veritable cornucopia of interesting information is presented. Directions to the site from Jasper, where I spent summers as a child, are basically “Get on Highway 41 and drive southeast until you see White Springs.” One will be informed of the camping, the hiking, the bicycling, and the carillon bells playing Foster’s most popular songs all day long. There are demonstrations of quilting, blacksmithing, and the making of stained glass. In January, there is Stephen Foster Day, and in May there is the Florida Folk Festival. Of course, much of the most interesting information, as is true with many histories and Federal investigations, is what is not revealed.
By Roger Owens
My uncle Guy’s gas station sat just east of my Aunt Sue’s house, by the turn onto what is now known as North East 38th Street. But I much prefer the moniker it had back in the 1960s: “Buzzard Bay Road.” The station was just west of where Buzzard Bay met County Route 6, the main east-west highway, or what passed for one at the time, into Jasper, Florida. If you took Route 6 past the station and the house, you would arrive in Jasper proper in a few minutes; if you went Buzzard Bay way, you would meet up with County Route 51 north of town. The station sat on the north side of Route 6 facing a bit southeast, and across the road was a corn field that, to the eye of a child at least, appeared to begin at the barbed wire fence and form an impenetrable wall that just kept on going. Out the back was another just like it, but it contained some trees in the distance, which seemed to give a bit of perspective, and to suggest that these fields did not, indeed, continue unto the ends of the Earth.
By Roger Owens
The summer I was ten, I learned that the two massive oak trees that bracketed the driveway to my Aunt Sue’s house had grown from the green oak gateposts in front of the old plantation house. The house, originally a white, two-story clapboard Colonial structure, sat on the north side of Route 6 about three miles east of the town of Jasper, Florida, and had recently been demolished and rebuilt as a one-story, red-brick Ranch.
By Roger Owens
If you head out of Jasper, Florida, going north on State Road 129, before long you will cross the Georgia state line, and pass through the small town of Statenville. As recently as 2010, Statenville boasted a population of just over one thousand souls. Once known as “Troublesome,” Georgia, Statenville is named for Captain James Watson Staten, a Confederate officer who is said to have opened the first store in the town, selling staples like rice, beans, sugar, flour, and coffee to the loggers and turpentiners who “cat-faced” the slash pines for the turpentine, something like how maples are tapped for the sweet sap used for syrup. Turpentining is about the hardest, most dangerous, and least profitable work a man can do; it was mainly done by poor blacks and white men on the run from the law, usually in concert with their production of bootleg liquor.
By Roger Owens
The summer I was ten, I was riding with my grandpa, Amon William Dedge, in his brand-new F-100 Ford pickup truck along County Road 6, headed from Uncle Guy’s Shell gas station west towards the town of Jasper, Florida. At that time Old Red – as the pickup came to be known – was not old, but still Ford eggshell white, not the dull red it would be for many years after, red being the cheapest color you could buy to paint a truck back then. Its wide expanse of hood the day of our drive reflected the unforgiving Southern sun into our eyes as it descended, in infinitesimal increments, toward the distant, cool dream of evening. On either side of the flat, straight, jet-black brush stroke of the newly paved highway, fields of corn, soybeans, and tobacco baked their way ever so languidly up into the steaming July air. The deafening screams of cicadas filled the cab of the truck with their incredible hissing, a high-pitched screeching so ubiquitous that it became a silence more profound than that found in any graveyard. Grandpa didn’t much care for small talk, and, little chatterbox that I was, I had learned that if I wanted to stay on his good side, I would curb my wandering tongue or get left behind on trips like this one. I liked having Grandpa to myself; as one of four brothers it was all too easy to get lost in the crowd. That day was the first time I noticed that I had the same knobby bumps on my wrists that he did. My brothers didn’t have them. I had no idea then that those protruding bones were the early telegraphs of a debilitating arthritis; I thought it was cool that my hands looked the same as his. They made me feel connected, whole, complete.
By Roger Owens
Jasper, Florida, is a little hole in the road near the confluence of Highways 41 and 129 in North Florida, in the shady area somewhere between Live Oak Florida and Statenville, Georgia. It is the county seat of Hamilton County, and today it owns the dubious distinction as the home of Hamilton County Correctional Institution, the site of recent gang riots. Hamilton Correctional has boosted the population of Jasper, as of the last census, to the astonishing number of four thousand, five hundred, and forty-six souls; I don’t know whether the inmate population is counted as real people or not. The growth is astonishing because, back in the 1960s, the population of this backwater was around six hundred. I know for a fact, however, that the black population in what might have been considered the “greater Jasper area” in today’s parlance was not counted back then; Jasper was a “sundown town.” Anyone driving in to town on County Road 6, from east or west, would see signs that stated, in plain block letters, “NIGGER. DON’T LET THE SUN GO DOWN ON YOU HERE.” The black population of the town of Jasper, Florida, was, precisely, zero.
