Martin County’s lucky stars lined up when illness brought Edwin Menninger to the St. Lucie River Region, changing its journalistic future forever.
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see,” a famous quote by Thoreau and the slogan of Gallery 36 and the belief of photography artist Lisa Renee Ludlum.
The Ashley Gang was Florida’s most notorious crime family of the 20th century, using a tiny community now in Martin County as its base of operations.
Jensen was designated a post office on April 17, 1890. Four years later, with the coming of Henry Flagler’s railway, John L. Jensen subdivided a portion of his homestead as the Town of Jensen. Pineapple growing and commercial fishing were the main industries.
1925: Martin County is created from northern Palm Beach County and a portion of St. Lucie County. Stuart is the county seat. A former school becomes the courthouse.
They believed a county of their own would usher in an explosion of prosperity. But it wasn’t only the business leaders in tiny Stuart, Florida, who were chasing after a windfall. It was the Roaring Twenties.
Steve Carr’s interest in the Ashley Gang began as a child growing up in Lake Worth, where he would hear his grandfather, William Carr, and friend, Woody Upthegrove, talk about the gang’s exploits.
Sandra Provence learned a thing or two from her grandmother, the sister of outlaw John Ashley, about how to comport herself as a descendant of Florida’s most notorious crime family.
As the daughter of Ashley Gang outlaw Ray Lynn, Inez Lynn Hamilton had an unusual —and intentionally misleading — story that she would share with her grandchildren about her father’s death.
With John Ashley in prison and three of his brothers dead from their criminal activities, leadership of the Ashley Gang in 1922 fell to John’s 17-year-old nephew, Hanford Mobley.
