In Old Punta Gorda
by Angie Larkin
Revisited

Editor's Note: In Old Punta Gorda is reprinted here with the approval of the copyright holder, The Punta Gorda Historical Society. Copies of the book may be purchased at the Train Depot in Punta Gorda. (Chapter  1-5 , 6-9 , 10-11, 12-13 )

Chapter Twelve

Snake left the cowboy trail for a while; he wanted a change of pace and went to work in a sawmill.  Eventually he came home to work the cattle for his dad and Koon.  “I guess I just wanted to put my feet under Dad’s table again.”  Snake stayed single, (“I wanted to hit the high spots first”) until he was 25 when he married Josephine Taylor and

In Old
Punta Gorda

  Feature Story:
 

He was working with his dad in 1935 when the dreaded Texas tick fever hit Florida.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture forced cattlemen to dip their herds every 14 days.  This was a difficult time for Snake and his dad.  “14 months of the hardest work we’d ever done, dipping in all sorts of weather, hot, cold or pelting rain.”  Finally, the epidemic was licked.

Snake’s lifelong ambition was to have 1000 head of cattle and he strove energetically toward that goal.  There were many setbacks--the Texas tick fever and the horrible screwworm, but he finally reached his goal of 1000 head of cattle in 1955, only to find that his 7,210 acres would not support that large a herd.  (“You figure 10 acres to the cow”).  Snake started cutting back the size of his herd and at the same time sold off most of his large spread.  By 1958 he had sold out completely and become a “retired” cattleman.

Snake, James E. Whidden Sr., lives on 70 acres of his former ranch, a farmland oasis surrounded by a growing commercial area of his own making.  His son, Jimmy, lives nearby in a house built around the old chimney of Snake’s childhood home.  Jimmy is a land developer and owner of the Whidden Industrial complex in Charlotte Harbor.  Snake had another son, Robert, by a later marriage to Billie Jackson.  Robert works with Jimmy in his many enterprises.  For 86 years the Whidden family has helped build Charlotte County.

Chapter Thirteen

We have all heard the phrase, “back when Port Charlotte was A.C. Frizell’s cow pasture”.  Marijo Kennedy Brown, Lula Frizzell Kennedy’s daughter, gave me some interesting aspects of the land and cattle baron’s background.  Frizell and his wife, Pattie, were railroad telegraphers who came here from Alabama in 1918.  “Miss Patty” worked as a telegrapher in a little community near Murdock and A.C. in the Murdock settlement itself.  When they had saved a few hundred dollars from their combined salaries they quit their jobs and invested in the Murdock Mercantile store and a small boarding house.  The store is still there, now a citrus shipping business next to the small Murdock post office.

A.C.’s sister Lula, came to visit and met another young railroad telegrapher, T.I. Kennedy, who had just started working at the Murdock railroad station.  Love was in the air and Lula decided to prolong her visit and started helping out at the Mercantile, a typical store of that era.  It carried a little bit of everything and was also the local Post office.  To quote Tosie Quednau Hindman, who many years later worked at the store and was the postmistress, “We sold everything from half a pound of rat cheese to a fine leather saddle!”

A.C. and Lula’s parents came to join them in Murdock, settling in a big old rambling house where the Charlotte County Administration is today.  Time went on and the sprawling Frizell ranch extended from Charlotte Harbor over to the DeSoto County line, north to the Sarasota line and then down to the Myakka River; A.C. also owned some property in Immokalee.  The erstwhile telegrapher was now a land “baron”.  Much of his property had been acquired slowly, acre by acre, in land sold for back taxes.

Grayce Johnson (Mrs. Charles Myers of Port Charlotte) remembers the Frizell ranch well.  Her father, Pat Johnson, was a cowhand for A.C. Frizell and the family lived in a cabin on the ranch.  The spread was so large that her father often had to go on long trips over the range.  He and other cowhands traveled by horseback, their saddlebags loaded with coffee, lard, flour or meal.  They ate “off the land”, cooking curlews, woodstorks and ironheads over an open fire.  Try that menu for next Sunday’s dinner!

Sometimes Grayce and her brothers would join their father on a raccoon hunt into the Big Slough for a week or more.  Pat Johnson would cut cabbage palm fronds and place them over little pine saplings to form a lean-to for shelter.  Palmetto fronds laid on the ground made a floor and quilts and blankets were the forerunners of sleeping bags.

The family would stay out there ten days at a time, trapping the ‘coons and skinning them.  “My father would make a frame out of palm tree fronds by stripping them down to the stems and running them around the edge of the skins.  We would lay them against the sides of the lean-to in order to dry them in the sun.”  When the skins were cured, Pat Johnson would stack them and wait for a Mr. Harrington to come down from Arcadia to buy them.  Grayce recalls, “That’s the way we earned the money to go on a shopping spree in Punta Gorda.”

Most groceries and such were bought at A.C. Frizell’s commissary on the ranch, the Mercantile Store.  It was like a company store and the people who worked for Frizell were partially paid in artificial money called “babbit” which was crudely stamped out of lead and was negotiable only at the commissary.  So the raccoon money really came in handy.

With little real money to spend, people tended to stay around the ranch and make their own amusement.  Charlie and Betty Slaughter were one of the ranch families who used to give cane-grinding parties.  The sugar cane was ground into a mouth-watering syrup enjoyed by all.  Life on the Frizell ranch was simple, as Grayce puts it, “We didn’t really have much, but it was a lovely time.”

A.C. Frizell had two nephews, Joyce and Jack Hindman, who left their home in Alabama to come live with their uncle.  It was 1934, the boys were in their early teens.  Joyce recalls, “there was an old two-story frame hotel with 18 or 20 rooms just about where the El Jobean road comes into Route 41 now.”  The boys’ grandmother lived in a large frame house and Jack stayed with her.  Joyce lived with his uncle, Frona Frizell, in living quarters back of the Murdock Mercantile Store, the ranch commissary.

After school Joyce helped out at the store which sold everything from shoe polish to bridles, groceries and yardgoods.  There were no school buses in those days so Joyce hitched rides all the way down the Tamiami Trail across the old bridge to the Taylor Street school.  Not many youngsters lived on the ranch then and for sport he used to go hunting on his uncle’s range.  “You could always take a bird dog, be gone an hour or so and bag a lot of quail, wild turkeys and doves.”  Joyce left the ranch his senior year in high school to live in Punta Gorda but still has many happy memories of his stay at the Frizell spread.

A.C. sold a vast tract of land, about 79,000 acres in 1954 or thereabouts, the Port Charlotte and Myakka sections, to the Mackle Brothers or Florida West Coast Land Development Company, later to become General Development.  His Englewood real estate went to the Vanderbilt brothers (about 20,000 acres).  He was active in management until his sudden and unexpected death in 1961 at home in Murdock.

Edith Jones, who still lives in Punta Gorda, comes from a well known local family.  Her aunt, a prominent teacher in town had a school named for her: the Sallie Jones Elementary School on Cooper Street.  Her father, Charles, was one of the Jones boys who owned the popular meat market and her great uncle was Luther Koon, a prosperous cattleman.

In 1940 W. Luther Koon left a large ranch (more than 16,000 acres) down in Dade County to his nephews, the Jones brothers and their sister, Sallie.  It was called the Bee Ranch Cattle Company and they raised Brahman cattle.  In remembering her great Uncle, Edith notes he was a large man, 6’4” and around 240 pounds.  She remembers that, when a couple of those big Brahmans got into a fight, “Uncle Luther tried to separate them on his own.  One of the bulls just picked him up, threw him aside, and broke his leg!”

The ranch was a big operation and the Brahmans so numerous they were widely scattered over the range.  During the screwworm fly infestation in Florida, an inspector had to stay at the ranch for three months to supervise the dipping of the cattle.  There were 15 hired hands and they all came in for lunch.  “Dad did the cooking.  He had a crippled hip and couldn’t ride so they elected him cook.  Mother was smart; she wasn’t about to go down there and fix lunch.  The campout was an old schoolhouse with no hot water and no sink.”  Edith remembers her Uncle Neal, an avid coffee drinker, brewing it in the fields when it was 95 degrees in the shade.  “He’d get a coffee can from the middle of nowhere, put some grounds in it, get some water from a nearby stream and make him a pot of coffee.  You could cut it with a knife”.

Ruth Stephens Allen of Cleveland has yet another recollection of the days of the big cattlemen and open ranges.  One of the most exciting forms of entertainment for local children was to watch the cattle dipping.  Years ago there was an infestation of spotted ticks; the Lykes brothers, big cattle grazers, held roundups to immunize their herds.  “We used to climb on top of our outhouse, which was next to the pasture, and watch the cowboys chase bulls, jump fences and bulldog ‘em.  Never will forget the first time I went to a rodeo.  I was so disappointed.  I had seen that all my life!”

The cattle business is still a prime industry in this area, but the days of the wild and woolly cowpokes, flamboyant cattlemen and land barons are now a thing of the past.