LIVING HISTORY
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A mortgage dated March 9, 1901, documents the arrival of the Gladwin
family in Fort Pierce. The mortgage was written on stationery from R.R.
Gladwin’s wholesale fish business.
him but also about my own family’s 118-year history in
Fort Pierce.
THE NAMESAKE
The story of the Gladwins in Florida begins in 1878, when
another Stephen Nelson Gladwin — the soldier’s paternal
grandfather — moved to Melrose, Fla., from Higganum,
Conn. His children who would survive to adulthood included
a daughter and two sons, including my great-grandfather,
Robert Reed Gladwin, then age 9. (He was actually born Robert
Usher Gladwin but later changed his middle name to Reed
at the age of 12 because he didn’t like the acronym RUG.)
At the time of the Gladwin family’s arrival in Florida, the
nation’s citrus industry was in its infancy, and Melrose was
just about as far south as citrus was being grown. Local growers
would bring their citrus to Melrose, where it was then
taken by steam ship across Lake Santa Fe and Lake Alto and
then through a series of canals to Waldo, where it was then
transported by rail across the United States. Whether it was
the lure of citrus that brought the elder Stephen N. Gladwin
to Florida is unknown. He was a boat builder by trade (the
1870 federal census listed him as a carpenter) who by 1885
had reported his occupation in Melrose as “fruit grower.’’
In 1890, ahead of two freezes in 1894 that would move
the citrus industry south, Stephen Nelson Gladwin moved
his family to Titusville, then the end of the railway line. He
soon entered into a partnership in which he ran the region’s
first ice company, the Indian River Ice Manufactury, before
returning to boat building at the turn of the century. He died
in 1909.
ARRIVAL IN FORT PIERCE
Stephen Nelson Gladwin’s son, Robert Reed Gladwin,
around 1888 became an express agent for the Southern Express
Company, a service that transported letters, valuables
and other goods over railway lines. In 1895, he married Florence
McMeekin of Hawthorne, Fla., who had grown up just
12 miles away from him in Melrose, in Putnam County. They
moved to Jacksonville — apparently the most convenient
location for his job — and had their first child, Stephen Nelson
Gladwin, the soldier, on Nov. 28, 1896, and a daughter,
Marion, in 1899. >>
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