Not my Caldwell line but very interesting! Thanks for sharing. Looking
forward to the next espisode.
Jane Foley
Cornelius, NC
----- Original Message -----
From: <dtoolgrl(a)yahoo.com>
To: <CALDWELL-L(a)rootsweb.com>
Sent: Sunday, October 31, 2004 7:30 AM
Subject: [CALDWELL-L] Caldwells David, Andrew and Frank
This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list.
Surnames: Caldwell
Classification: Query
Message Board URL:
http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/an/DRH.2ACIB/2552
Message Board Post:
This Story appeared in The Orlando Sentinel, by Jim Robinson reporter. I
am not
related but thought the info might prove useful. I do own the house
they are writing the story about. If you would like more info just e-mail
me.
This is the first of two columns about three generations of the Caldwells,
from
North Carolina during Colonial America to post-Civil War Mellonville.
Today: A family history.
David Andrew Caldwell, whose family would join the early pioneers of the
settlement
of Mellonville, was just a child living on a Greensboro, N.C.,
farm during the Civil War when Yankees stole his pony.
Determined to get it back, Caldwell waited until nightfall and sneaked
past the
sentries to the Yankee camp to find where they had tied up the
stolen horses. He slipped a rope over the head of his pony and led it far
enough away that he thought he could mount and make his escape.
But Yankee soldiers, standing around a fire on a rise overlooking the
camp, had
seen every step the young boy took from the time he approached the
horses. They watched him walk the pony a few dozen paces, then hop on
bareback and ride off.
Not a shot was fired.
Instead, the Yankees stood and applauded as the young Rebel disappeared
into the
night.
That young Rebel was the grandfather of Susan Wight of Winter Springs.
Wight, 82, is a retired physician, a career choice shared with many others
of the
Caldwell generations. She spent 35 years living on a sailboat
traveling between Philadelphia and Grenada and practicing medicine in the
U.S. Virgin Islands.
But, she has returned to spend her retirement years in the county of her
birth. The
house where she was born on Sanford's Palmetto Avenue at East
Sixth Street has been demolished. It was across from what today is called
the Little Red School House.
The house built by her great-grandfather and grandfather survives today as
the
oldest house in Seminole County. (More about that next Sunday.)
Revolutionary roots
Her family's story begins with her great-great-grandfather, David
Caldwell, a
Colonial patriot-minister and self-taught physician who founded
two churches and an academy in Greensboro, N.C. Her great-grandfather,
Andrew Caldwell, served in the Confederacy as a surgeon and brought his
family to Florida in late 1860s. Her grandfather, David Andrew Caldwell, who
also became a physician, was a teen when he came with his father to the
citrus-growing settlement of Mellonville, later absorbed into Sanford.
David Caldwell is a legend in North Carolina as Presbyterian minister,
educator and
Colonial patriot. He was born in Lancaster County, Pa., on
March 22, 1725, as the oldest son of Andrew and Martha Caldwell. His father
was a farmer, but Caldwell trained as a carpenter, building houses for four
years before entering the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University).
He graduated with the class of 1761. He became a teacher and continued to
study to become a minister. After working in North Carolina as a
Presbyterian missionary, he was ordained in 1765, staying to become founder
and pastor at two churches.
He soon opened an academy on his 550-acre farm, a portion of which is
preserved as
a city park in Greensboro, N.C. Today, the academy is commonly
called the David Caldwell Log College, but it was never called that in his
time. The "Log College" name comes from a Presbyterian seminary of that name
in Pennsylvania. Caldwell's academy adopted the same curriculum.
The academy started in his farmhouse, remaining there through the American
Revolution. After the war, he moved the family into a larger house. Caldwell
and his wife, Rachel, had eight sons and one daughter. Some 20 students
boarded with the family, and the Caldwell children and Rachel Caldwell
tutored them. Biographers credit her with much of the students' spiritual
education.
Biographer Ethel Stephens Arnett writes that five of the academy's
students
became governors of different states, including John Motley
Morehead of North Carolina. Others served in Congress. They might have
absorbed their early political influences from David Caldwell.
Some historians have called him a militant minister. Others, said Susan
Wight, have
called him a coward. Wight said her grandfather tried to make
peace between the British and the American colonists.
He traveled back and forth as a mediator between "the rebellious
backcountry
farmers and the Colonial Government during the War of the
Regulation in 1771," according to historians for the David Caldwell Historic
Park in Greensboro. Before the American Revolution, some of the western
North Carolina colonists, called the Regulators, refused to pay taxes in
protest of what they considered abuses of authority by the colonial
government. The governor's army put down the revolt, but revolution remained
in the air.
Caldwell became a voice of the patriots, speaking out against the British
crown,
prompting British Gen. Charles Cornwallis to offer a reward of 200
pounds for his capture. The British plundered his house and destroyed his
library and furnishings. Caldwell fled, and his family hid in a smokehouse.
They survived on dried peaches.
Arnett writes, "Rachel put up strong resistance to British attempts to
capture
her husband and sack her home in 1781. One story tells of her
wrestling away a tablecloth from a British soldier."
Caldwell, who had no formal training as a physician, and his wife treated
the
wounded among the patriot army of Nathanael Greene. Some accounts also
say he gave equal treatment to British soldiers.
Caldwell served at the convention that wrote North Carolina's constitution
in
1776, and in 1788 when North Carolina considered the U.S. Constitution,
he opposed its adoption unless the Bill of Rights was added. Caldwell was 64
in 1789 when the University of North Carolina was chartered. He declined an
offer to become its president, citing his age, but in 1810 he accepted the
institution's first honorary degree of doctor of divinity. He continued
making patriotic speeches to recruit volunteers for the next war with the
British, the War of 1812. He continued preaching until a few years before
his death in 1824.
Doctor by necessity
Andrew Caldwell, one of David Caldwell's sons, left North Carolina to
study
medicine at what today is Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.
He would return to his home state to serve as a Confederate surgeon during
the war in which his son retrieved his pony after Yankees took it from the
family farm in Greensboro. The son would follow his father into a career as
a physician.
After the Civil War, Andrew Caldwell packed an ox cart with the family
belongings
and resettled in North Florida, where he expected to support his
family from the profits of an orange grove. He hadn't planned for one of
Florida's bitter winters. A deep freeze burned out his grove, and once
again, he turned south, this time loading his family onto a St. Johns River
steamboat that carried the Caldwells to the wharf along the Lake Monroe.
Much of the land around Lake Monroe was low, flat marshlands and swamps.
Still,
Arthur Ginn and Algernon Spear were turning profits from their citrus
groves at Mellonville, then a tiny community of 13 families.
Caldwell bought land for a grove along Mellonville Avenue where the Fort
Reid
stockade had stood three decades earlier. Mellonville Avenue dates to
the Second Seminole War of the 1830s and 1840s as the northern end of the
military trail laid out for mule teams to haul supplies from Fort Mellon to
soldiers at Fort Maitland, Fort Gatlin (Orlando) and Fort Brooke (Tampa).
In 1910, Annie Caldwell Whitner, Wight's great-aunt, wrote a brief
collection
of her experiences, The Tale of a Mosquito -- a Story of Early
Sanford. Mellonville and the settlement of Fort Reid in the 1840s were
within what then was Mosquito County. Mellonville served as the county seat
after Orange County was created and Florida became a state in 1845.
The Caldwells arrived in Mellonville after a referendum moved county
government to
Orlando but before a new town to the west would be named for
its promoter, Henry S. Sanford, whose town would swallow up Mellonville.
Andrew Caldwell had no plans to practice medicine in Florida. He came to
Florida
hoping to improve his own health, not that of others.
But the little settlements that would become Sanford had no physician. He
could
have arrived as early as 1867, the date cited by Whitner. Orange
County property records (Seminole was part of Orange until 1913) show that
Ginn sold Caldwell the property at Mellonville Avenue and East 24th Street
in 1871.
"This gentleman," writes Whitner of her father, "had come to Florida with
no intention of revealing his title of M.D., but what could a humane man do
but respond to the calls of distress? Soon he found himself taking mule back
trips all over Orange and into the adjoining counties, one within 15 miles
of Tampa, traveling all day without sight of human habitation."
An accidental shotgun discharge in 1870 mutilated a girl's hand. Kate
Vaughan
(later Powell) was living at the Fort Reid community. (It's spelled
Fort Read in some accounts, but the old fort was named for Florida
territorial governor Robert R. Reid). Caldwell didn't have the right
surgical instruments. Instead, he found a tenon saw, a fine steel carving
knife, tweezers and coarse silk thread. He sent horsemen to neighboring
settlements to find chloroform.
"The amputation," Whitner writes, "was quickly and successfully made, and
our surgeon often expressed a wish that the professors of his alma mater,
Jefferson College, Philadelphia, might have witnessed the operation and
inspected the healed limb."
Next Sunday: Restoration of the Caldwell House, recognized as the oldest
house in
Seminole County.
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