Nancy & Martha Hudson of OAKLAND Plantation

HUDSON is a family name rarely associated with central Florida history, a very sad fact, especially considering the earliest role a father-son team, and their courageous spouses, all played in an 1850s attempt to tame a remote #cflParadise.

As is often the case with many of this region’s earliest pioneers, the Hudson line is not easily located when searching early Orange County histories. And even when occasionally mentioned, only Isaac and Edward Murray Hudson appear briefly as one-time early county residents. Women’s History Month seems the perfect time to set the record straight.

Nancy (MURRAY) Hudson was the wife of Isaac. Martha (GRAY) Hudson was the wife of Isaac and Nancy’s son, Edward Murray Hudson. Nancy and Martha both died within a month of one another in 1858, the same year the father and son Hudson team sold their Florida land and moved west.

Nancy and Martha Hudson remain significant clues to learning the origins of central Florida, but like pieces to a complicated jigsaw puzzle, the clues, or puzzle pieces, are not always easily discovered.

Historian Blackman quoted Robert B. F. ROPER in 1927 as saying that his father, William C. Roper, purchased the 660 acre Oakland Plantation (at present day Winter Garden) from Isaac Hudson in 1859. The Oakland Post Office was established by Roper the next year.

Isaphoenia C. (Ellington) Speer (Women’s History Month Post of March 5, 2018) was accumulating hundreds of adjacent acres along Lake Apopka at the same time as Isaac Hudson.

Talladega, Alabama, where the bodies of Nancy and Martha were laid to rest in 1858, was one common connection between the Hudson women and Isaphoenia, the half-sister of Benjamin F. Caldwell of 1857 Talladega, the 4 acre land donor of #ORLANDO.

Another common puzzle piece link between Isaphoena, the Caldwell’s, and the two Hudson women was their birthplace, ABBEVILLE, South Carolina. As early as the 1850s, one family was coming together to establish a new central Florida homeland. The Hudson’s however, after the loss in one month’s time of both spouses, picked up and moved to Texas. “Isaac Hudson, deceased,” Talladega court records state, “who died in Texas, intestate, on the 13^th May, 1865; and whose only child, Edward M. Hudson, also died in Texas, intestate, on the 23^rd October, 1861.”

“Dr. Starke, finding himself and many of slaves stricken with malaria”, wrote Blackman in 1927 of Hudson’s 1858 neighbor, “moved out from the hammocks of Lake Apopka.” Soon after Dr. Starke sold to Isaphoenia, the two Hudson wives had to be buried, and two Hudson widowers, with four motherless children in tow, each child under the age of 10, departed for Texas. Within a year, the four children would be orphans.

Did Nancy and Martha Hudson die at Oakland in West Orange County of malaria? The puzzle piece required to answer that question is still missing, but whatever took place on the southern shore of Lake Apopka in 1858, the event was tragic enough to send the Hudson men packing.

Tomorrow: “Her form floated among the orange trees.”

#WomensHistoryMonth