shores of the Peace River. In its way it
was as impressive as the big hotel nearby.
The large frame house was in the
neighborhood of Retta Esplanade and Sullivan
Street. It had five gables and eighteen
rooms including a library and music room. A
verandah encircled the stately home and the
rooms were spacious and airy with tall
ceilings and windows overlooking the bay.
At high tide the river could be heard
lapping under the house. In those days the
shoreline ended at Retta Esplanade.
The owner of this spectacular edifice was
Mrs. Martha Susanna Sandlin Morgan; the
Sandlin and Morgan families were an integral
part of early Trabue and Punta Gorda. I am
indebted to Mattie Mae Hughes of our town
for the following bit of local history:
sometime during the Civil Way, Mrs. Mattie
Mae Hughes’ great grandfather, Talbert S.
Morgan, brought his family down here and
settled on Cabbage Hammock near the mouth of
Alligator Creek. One of his sons, James
Martin Morgan, made a tidy fortune in
cattle, shipping and lumber; he owned a
sawmill on Taylor Road. A partner in the
shipping business was James Sandlin who had
a trading store in town. The two men fared
very well with two boats that plied the
Florida west coast carrying lumber,
foodstuffs and other goods to the early
settlers in the 1880s.
In 1890 James Sandlin built, on Retta
Esplanade, the well-know house with the
‘widow’s walk” that still bears his name.
He was a member of the first City Council in
1887. James came up the hard way--he was
one of three children orphaned at an early
age and had to fend for himself in the rough
and tumble world of frontier days. Once he
was established with the successful shipping
line, he sent for his sister, Martha
Susanna, to join him in Punta Gorda and to
marry his partner, James Martin Morgan. It
was truly a marriage of convenience, a quite
usual occurrence in those times.
James and Martha had six children, four
girls and two boys and, as the children
grew, all hands learned to work in the
family orange grove, another Morgan
acquisition. It was in this grove that
James Martin Morgan, a rugged individual,
finally ran out of luck in 1904. He and his
sons, Henry and Jess, were loading orange
crates when there was a sudden shift in the
load and one of the large wooden boxes fell
on James, the metal stripping gouging
through his shin to the bone.
“Typical of my grandfather”, says Mattie Mae
Hughes, “he didn’t do anything about
it--just told the boys to finish up he was
going hunting. With his leg throbbing
painfully, he took his gun, saddled up and
rode out to the Big Cyprus swamp, trying to
take his mind off his critical injury. He
rode through stagnant ponds and his horse
worked up a good sweat on this feverish
hunt. The brackish water combined with the
horse’s sweat seeping into the open wound
brought on an infection. By the time he
finally rode back home, his leg was swollen
beet red and was full of fever.”
Independent to the end, he dragged himself
to the second floor of the house, propped
his leg up on a railing of the upstairs
porch and bellowed for his daughter to bring
him a cup of hot coffee. The next day he
swallowed his pride enough to ask to be
helped to bed where he died in a matter of
hours of blood poisoning.
Martha Susanna Morgan was just as determined
an individual as her husband and, after his
death, ran the orange grove and tended the
cattle with the help of her offspring. She
was a firm mother with a lot of native
Scottish discipline and kept her children on
a short rein.
When her two sons, Henry and Jess, returned
safely from World War I, she expected them
to stay at home and work the grove. Henry
wasn’t much of a worker but Jess more than
made up for that. He was the mainstay of
the family and, when he fell in love with a
girl named Stella and wanted to get married,
Martha Morgan responded with a firm “NO”!
Jess bided his time. One day when his
mother was out in the grove working Jesse
hitched up her horse and buggy and headed
for his true love, marriage in mind.
Somehow, Martha got wind of this and sent
two hired hands after her boy with orders to
hog-tie him and bring him back.
When Jesse was dragged home, bound hand and
foot, he was horsewhipped, another example
of his mother’s firm discipline. When he
recovered physically from this ordeal (he
was affected spiritually for the rest of his
life) he never went near Stella gain; she
waited ten years before she married someone
else. As Mattie Mae puts it, “You might say
Grandma ruined Uncle Jessie’s life. He had
never touched a cigar, cigarette or drunk
any whiskey up to that point. Afterward, he
just drank, hunted and worked the grove for
Grandma. He never married.”
Mattie Mae excuses her grandmother by saying
that she came here as an immigrant from
Scotland with only a few month’s schooling.
She had been orphaned at an early age,
forced into marriage with a man she didn’t
like and was afraid of losing the son she
loved. This son was also vital to her
family’s livelihood.
This, then, is the lady who spent $50,000 (a
fortune in 1911) on a home for her children;
she had her own peculiar way of showing
love. She not only saw to it that her
offspring had a lovely home, but she sent
all her daughters to college except for one,
Frances Omero, Mattie Mae Hughes’ mother
whom she kept with her at home.
It was Frances who was the artistic member
of the family, who was given music lessons
and became a gifted pianist. When her music
teacher stated that he had taught her all he
could and that she should be sent abroad to
study, her mother turned down the
suggestion. Thereafter Frances made use of
her talents playing for the First Baptist
Church that her father and Jim Sandlin had
built in town. Life must have palled on a
vibrant, talented young girl forced to spend
her days taking care of a huge house while
her brothers and mother worked the grove and
her sisters were away at college.
Romance appeared on the scene with a dashing
young man from Fort Myers who swept her off
her feet. At the age of fourteen, Frances
became a bride and settled down to keeping
her own house out on “Gator” Creek, on land
her father had willed her. Soon she became
pregnant and at the age of fifteen gave
birth to a son, James, healthy in all
respects save for a malformed foot. Her
husband picked this time to leave his child
bride and return to Fort Myers, although he
visited his wife and infant son on occasion.
When the boy was four, Martha Susanna Morgan
paid a New York surgeon $2,000 to come to
Punta Gorda and straighten the child’s
foot. The operation was a success and the
father’s visits to his son became more
frequent. When James was about six, Frances
took him to the railroad station to see his
daddy off on his return trip to Fort Myers.
The little boy clambered up on the train
step to hug his father and, as the train
pulled out, the father picked up his son and
held him close. That was the last Frances
saw of her son for eight years. Today the
mother would prosecute the father for
kidnapping, but not “in the good old days”
before women’s lib!
This was a traumatic time for the young
girl; the ill-fated marriage and abduction
of her son, but Frances was a survivor,
After a short “vacation” with family, (the
Preston Sandlins in Jasper, Florida) Frances
returned to the family home on Retta
Esplanade, immersing herself in keeping the
huge house spotless and preparing the
meals. She was an excellent cook. In
between chores, Frances found solace in
playing her beloved piano.
One of the young girl’s chores was milking
the “woods” cow on the premises. The
Morgans didn’t own a cow but when Frances’
mother spotted a wild cow with calf
wandering near the grove, she would set the
boys to pen her back of the house. They
would feed the cow and keep her for milking.
One of these “woods” cows was an unusually
mean critter with long horns and, when
Frances put the calf aside and started to
milk the mother, the cow charged the girl,
pinning her against the fence with her sharp
horns. Frances screamed at the top of her
lungs, whacking the cow with the milk pail
to no avail. The family were all away at
the grove.
A young man, new in town, who had just
opened a plumbing shop a block away from the
Morgan home, heard the frantic screams,
Grabbing a heavy pipe, he jumped over the
fence--Sir Galahad to the rescue--and beat
the cow off the terrified girl. The young
hero’s name was Thomas Haywood McDaniel and
soon Frances was carrying her delicious pies
and cakes to the attractive bachelor.
Thomas Haywood had never liked his name and
had taken a great deal of kidding over the
Haywood name in school, so Frances started
calling him Howard and for the rest of his
life in Punta Gorda he was known as Howard
McDaniel.
Howard was from Tallahassee and as
distinctive an individual as either of
Frances’ own parents: the stubborn
late-departed James Morgan and the strong
disciplinarian, Martha Susanna Morgan. He
had arrived in Punta Gorda from Bartow where
he had worked in the phosphate mines until
he had a near fatal accident. Howard was
riding a narrow-gauge railway car when he
fell and the bone in one leg was shattered.
A doctor was called, took one look and
advised amputation. “Never!”, said Howard.
The doctor shook his head. “If it was only
smashed in one place, you might make it, but
with two separate breaks, you’re going to
get gangrene and die.” This was before
sulfa and penicillin.
Howard persisted in refusing the amputation,
the doctor left and a close friend of the
injured man took over his care. This buddy
brought him food, washed him, took care of
his bodily needs, saw to it that he moved as
little as possible and kept him well
supplied with whiskey. There were no pain
pills in those days. Thanks to his stamina
and the help of his friend, Howard’s leg
healed and he was able to walk with only a
slight limp.
This finished Howard on the phosphate job
and he worked for a while in Perry at a
turpentine camp as a guard of the prisoners
working there. His reputation as a strong
law enforcer led him to Punta Gorda as a
deputy sheriff. His stint as a law man in
Punta Gorda was short but the late Judge
Rose remembered one incident and told it to
Howard’s daughter, Mattie Mae McDaniels
Hughes, a few years back. “When I was just
a little shirt-tailed kid riding my bike
around town,” the Judge told her, “I used to
go down to the end of the railroad tracks
where there was a saloon. There was a big
tree on the bank nearby and we kids would
park our bikes up there and sit under the
tree watching the saloon because there were
fights and all kinds of exciting things
might happen. This particular day a
Jim-dandy fight broke out and someone ran to
get your daddy. Pretty soon here comes Mac
in his old Model T. He got out with his gun
in his hand and marched into the saloon.
Pretty soon here come two men out of that
saloon lickety split, one behind the other
with Mac right behind. There was a drainage
ditch along the railroad tracks, full of
cattails, rushes and debris. Those men
jumped into the ditch, sloshing along,
running to beat the band, with your daddy
standing in the door shooting his gun in the
air, shouting and ‘don’t come back’. Bang.
Bang.”
Perhaps it was this unorthodox approach to
crime that shortened his term as a deputy.
Whatever the case, Howard left law
enforcement and went into, of all things,
the plumbing business, learning the trade
under Dave Hobbs. He finally opened his own
shop and was there on the fateful day he
saved Frances Morgan from the “woods” cow.
The old adage of “the way to a man’s heart
is through his stomach” proved true in the
case of Howard McDaniels and Frances
Morgan. He finally succumbed to a peach
cobbler with brandy sauce; wedding bells
rang over the loud objections of Martha
Susanna Morgan, who had no use for Howard’s
flamboyant ways and lifestyle. To the day
she died, she always referred to him as
“THAT McDaniel!” 
|
to be
continued in the July Edition of Punta Gorda
Life..... |
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