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Surnames: Caldwell
Classification: Query
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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.