LIVING HISTORY
JEAN ELLEN WILSON
ST. LUCIE COUNTY REGIONAL HISTORY CENTER
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The St. Lucie Club in the village of St. Lucie, which was built by a consortium of Republican officials as a private winter resort, now houses apartments.
built the St. Lucie Club and would later take possession of
the property. Vare’s descendants, the ranching Peacocks,
sold their vast acreage to developers who would create Port
St. Lucie.
CAME SOUTH FOR HIS HEALTH
Quay maintained residences in Beaver, Pa., and Washington,
D.C., but he came to the Indian River for his health — he
had inherited the family weakness of the lungs. His mother,
father, brother and sister all died of consumption and he
always lived with the probability of the same fate. He also
came for the fishing — Old St. Lucie was directly across from
the original Indian River Inlet, at that time one of the sports
world’s destinations for tarpon fishing.
Before building their own quarters, the Quays boarded at
the St. Lucie House, which for years after the Civil War was
the southernmost point of nurture for fishermen, hunters and
explorers of what was then a wilderness. It was operated by
the Paine family — Jim and Tom with their mother as cook.
Emily Bell, in her My Pioneer Days in Florida, recalled the
vacationing Quays in their early years on the river: “They
came to our house and we gave dances ... We would invite
the guests and send ox teams for them to come down ... Dick
Quay loved to dance what he called a cracker breakdown,
and was a sport right. He paid the fiddler and the man who
beat the strings. Ben Souy and wife always came, and he
would dance till the last minute, then sing ‘We Won’t Go
Home Till Morning,’ and it was three in the morning many
times when they would leave.”
A New York World reporter who came to St. Lucie described
the Paine place thus: “The cottage where they board is back
The logbook of the St. Lucie Club, pictured shortly after it was built in
1902, is a who’s who of movers and shakers of the Gilded Age.
from the water about one hundred yards, and is a private
boarding house and hotel combined, there being no other inn
in the village. St. Lucie contains about one hundred inhabitants,
mostly fishermen and orange growers.”
Once, when boarding at Paine’s, Quay was joined by a
raucous party of fishermen on board the yacht Minnehaha,
whose log related how the senator taught them a new game
— poker. Indeed, the accusation of his enemies that he was a
gambler was all too true. >>