PART IX
Coronet, Fla.
Wed., April 21, 1926
Arriving here in Coronet on Sunday, we set up camp on a farm outside of this little mining town. Our tent is pitched in a pasture overlooking a duck pond and marsh. We never can be lonely, for not only five children play around the tent all day, but every kind of domestic animal known to man, and a number of undomestic ones, are near at hand. The pasture is the abiding place of seven cows, two horses, a mule and a goat. Innumerable guinea hens, turkeys and chickens with their respective families, come often to visit. In the next field are a bull and three calves, the latter coming home for their meals night and morning, and in a far-off corner dwell a couple of hogs and their piglets. Eight large black ducks inhabit the pond as well as several marsh hens and their chicks, whom I have seldom seen but often heard, their singular call higher than that of the guinea hen. Lots of blue, white, and gray herons alight at the water’s edge daily. The boys say a baby alligator lives in the pond, besides several water moccasins and hundreds and hundreds of frogs with almost as many voices. The baby frogs squeak, the grown-ups honk, and the big old grandaddies grunt, just like a pig. What a cacophony they make at dusk!
Several cats and dogs wander our way frequently, old Buck, the big shepherd, who sleeps by the hour under the motorcycle. One of the cats ate our butter last night and stole our bacon the night before. When Bill got up to shoo her she was so scared she dropped the bacon and, with a splash, jumped right into the middle of the brook. Last night a cow kept rubbing herself against the tent. Bill helloed and banged the canvas, but nothing would stop her until he got up and threw a stick at her. Such are trials of the camping life!
Most of the people we have met so far have been tourists or sojourners like ourselves, but the Englishes, who own this farm, are real Florida crackers, and seem to work just as hard and long as the farmers up north. We buy milk, butter, eggs and strawberries from them very reasonably. I sent Mother a couple of jars of homemade guava jelly. But the Englishes have also given us a lot of vegetables, milk, hot biscuits. They had us to supper a couple of times, too.
Old man English has had sixteen children, ten by a previous wife, and six by this one, among which are adorable two-year-old Rita, spoiled by everyone, and boy twins, Lloyd and Moyd. The latter more appropriately should have been named Voyd, as he is a bit empty in the upper story. But that is rather unkind for Moyd is sweet and likeable. He is very fond of a billy goat and will say: “Watch me stand on my hind legs like Billy.” Then he’ll raise one leg, wrap it around the other and lift his arms in the air. Billy, by the way, keeps us awake at night, running up and down a fallen log near our tent.
The first wife’s bunch are all married and moved away except a son living nearby with a nice young wife and cute baby, with whom we suppered one night. Their shack was very primitive, with no glass or even paper in the windows, just wooden blinds that shut out light as well as cold.
Mrs. English, Senior, is pretty and capable, but doesn’t seem to know how to turn a house into a home. Everything is clean enough but not tidy or attractive. The children, and perhaps the elders too, go to bed wearing all their day clothes. Saturday night we heard the mother say, “Now din’t ye go to bed with them dirty clothes on. You put on clean underwear and a clean dress afore ye go to bed tonight.” It doesn’t seem a question of poverty--just a custom, I guess. Bill and I think our manner of living is rather rough and ready, but our tent and cooking arrangements are trimmer and more orderly than their houses.
Mrs. English raises hundreds of baby chicks in incubators and breeders. The boys found a couple of marsh hen’s eggs, which she hatched in the incubator, but the chicks died soon after she put them in the brooder. Although the hens are brown and white, the little fluffy chicks are solid black.
While swimming in the pond today, the boys saw a big water moccasin. They weren’t a bit scared, they said, because a moccasin could not strike while in the water.
Coronet village and phosphate plant, newer and more attractively arranged than Brewster, are also company owned, this time by the Coronet Phosphate Co. After inspecting their Hopewell and Pembroke mines, the latter about thirty miles distant, we found them both to be in the same apple pie condition.