Jennie A. CORNWALL
A flamboyant Jennie A. CORNWALL, aka Duchess TAMAJO, played a vital
role in saving the origins of central Florida’s orange culture history. In that
process though, her identity was nearly lost. Jennie has been incorrectly
identified as the daughter of beer mogul Anheuser Busch, but as she was born
1825, her New York birth preceded the arrival of the Busch family in America.
Jennie
survived two husbands, and made national headlines when, at age 70, already the
‘Duchess of Castelluccia’, she married a third time at an extravagant wedding
at the Indian River Hotel in Rockledge. Jennie’s third groom, only 30 years
old, was a self-described “promoter.”
Her role in saving a vital part of central
Florida history occurred in 1881, for newspapers across the U.S. wrote of
Jennie and her Italian Duke acquiring the historic Dummett (Dummitt) Orange
Grove in Florida. The press had become infatuated with an American Duchess, and
their reporting told of how Florida’s first citrus grove had come to be. Jennie
of #cflParadise is celebrated in an EBook, Florida’s Indian River Duchess, part
of a Righting Florida History series.
From Jennie’s New York birth to her first wedding, the Ebook
traces Jennie to Maine’s Dix Island, her first fortune, then on to Italy, a
Paris wedding, and the duke & Duchess of Castelluccia rescuing the decaying
Dummett Citrus Grove, all before her strangest of strange events, a third and
final marriage in 1895 at the eloquent Indian River Hotel in Rockledge, Florida.
The origins of central Florida’s orange culture is known today
in large part because of a very special lady, one who didn’t care for Florida’s
frontier, yet managed to help save its fascinating history through an equally
fascinating story.
Tomorrow: Miss Henrietta Barbaroux, Orlando Educator.
Central Florida History by Richard Lee Cronin
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