LIVING HISTORY
Benjamin and Annie Hogg were merchants and land developers on the Treasure Coast in the 1870s. Ben had been sailing the Atlantic between St. Lucie,
Jacksonville, and the Bahamas for some 25 years before the senator chartered his boat for a fishing trip in 1897.
all day to fly away after sundown. There is bright moonlight
and everything is as pleasant as can be except for the mosquitoes
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... Some mornings there are none in the upper balcony,
and we sit up there in the breeze in the moonlight. Two of
the hammocks are strung up there and are comfortable in
the afternoon. We have wire screens in the sleeping rooms
mosquito nets up and get along very well after we go to bed.
The fruit except the oranges are ripe and we are feasting on
mangoes, sapodillas, cattley guavas. The mangoes I had last
year were spoiled. The cocoanut trees are all living. The yard
was grown up three feet in grass which I have had cut off. We
are getting fresh meat and ice from Titusville twice a week.”
He reported they churn their own butter and have plenty
of fish to eat. Other items on the menu regularly were deviled
crabs and green turtle. The Summerlins supplied the chickens
and eggs and oysters.
“If the cholera comes the best place is right here,” the senator
wrote in one letter. “There never has been a case of cholera
or yellow fever or any epidemic disease on the Indian River.”
Quay, after being elected to his second Senate term, was
in St. Lucie in the spring of 1893, accompanied by the whole
family. Improvements to the estate included a well and a
windmill. Returning in November to view the damage of a
hurricane, he wrote: “The telegraph lines are down to Fort
Pierce and the only cocoanut trees that have survived are
those in the nursery. Clarence Summerlin is fixing up the
newly fenced yard and “playing coachman.”
Toward the end of November, Quay informed Agnes that
the railroad would reach St. Lucie within the next three
weeks. “The sick god is behaving,” he assured his family and
he is getting “fat as an alderman.”
Quay and his party made the trip south in Henry Flagler’s
private car in the spring of 1895. After the back-to-back freezes
of 1894-95, all the plants around the houses had died except
TOM BAUMKER
the century plants and Spanish bayonets. There were no oranges,
grapefruit, bananas or vegetables and the table suffered.
TRAVEL BECAME EASIER
Evidently, the Quay house was named, and the first letter
written on Kilcaire letterhead was mailed from St. Lucie in
1897. The private car that uncoupled practically at the back
door of the estate allowed the Quay family and friends to visit
more often. They were in residence in January, March, August,
September and November. In the last month, the senator chartered
the schooner Elizabeth C. Lawrence, with Capt. Benjamin
Hogg, and went out to the snapper banks to fish.
Although held in high esteem by his St. Lucie neighbors,
Quay was, nationally, definitely controversial. But controversial
in public life meant that opinion as to character or actions
was sharply divided.
Typical of his opponent’s view: “The boss unites shrewdness
and audacity with executive ability.” His “profoundest
conviction is ... that the Decalogue and the Golden Rule
have no place in politics. His power is based largely on the
prostitution of public patronage ... with the single object of
maintaining his own ascendancy over the henchmen who do
his dirty work in managing primary elections and controlling
nominating conventions.”
His supporters expressed an entirely different take: He exhibited,
one wrote, a “familiarity with natural men, and want
of all artificiality and snobbery ... a stunted looking man of no
style, his eye is a little oblique, his shape like a three-cornered
nut, and as he drinks whiskey he never has much complexion...
a man of more reading and information ... than the editors
of the Evening Post and probably has a better library than
any other man in public life.”
Another voice assessed his political performance: “Mr.
Quay is a plain, simple, modest and kindly man ... with a
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