Town Builder Robert R. REID

A contentious Governor REED, a fort named for Territorial Governor REID, and a British Capitalist named REED, combined in Florida history to confuse 19^th century surveyors. That confusion spread to historians, as William F. Blackman, in 1927, told of a place called Fort REED, a fortress and town we know now to be Fort REID.

The most confusing of all however, I believe, is found at ORLANDO, the hub of Orange County, and of a merchant from Palatka named Robert Raymond REID III. The son of Territorial Governor REID, the Palatka merchant singlehandedly rescued a county seat on the verge of becoming a Ghost Town. Two Southerners, in 1860, believed they owned a 120 acre tract surrounding a small log cabin courthouse at Orlando. The exact same 120 acres actually! Both men, like so many who had departed central Florida in the early 1860s to fight a Civil War, died in that War.

On the first Monday in January, 1867, the steps of Orlando’s Courthouse was scheduled to be auctioned off - on the steps of Orlando’s Courthouse. As that day approached, 100 miles north, a Palatka merchant boarded a steamboat at his war-torn Teasdale & Reid Wharf. That merchant followed the St. Johns River south, along the same route taken only two years prior by a Navy vessel on a mission – a mission to close out ‘The Rutland Mule Matter’ file.

The merchant disembarked at Mellonville that January of 1867, the very pier where a mule had been delivered in 1865. Here, REID III began a 25 mile trek down on the ‘First Road to Orlando’, passing first through Fort REID, the settlement named a quarter century earlier for his father, REID II. Continuing south REID III eventually arrived at the County Seat, his intended destination, in time to accomplish HIS mission.

Robert R. REID III of Palatka submitted the low bid of $900 to Sheriff John IVEY on the 7^th of January, 1867. Then, with deed in hand, he returned home, perhaps even stopping to visit an aging Veteran of the Indian War, Augustus J. VAUGHN, to thank Fort REID’S elderly homesteader for preserving the fort named for his father.

REID III resumed his role as a prominent Palatka merchant. 13 years later though, he and wife Mary also became Orange County land developers by filing a two page plat of an 80 acre Town of Orlando. The REIDS’S continued living at Palatka. Their two page plat identified the landowner on page one, the north half, as Robert R. REID, while the south half, page two, was said to be owned by R. R. REED.

Now then, about that mule. While researching the man at the center of an 1865 U. S. Provost Marshal file, I happened upon the individual next in this series of Reed vis-à-vis Reed. He will be featured in my Part Five, in this week long series. Arthur Read, aka Reed, aka Reid – tomorrow.