Page 21 - OCL October 2017 Old City Life Magazine

“ THE FRONT OF THE PARK COMMEMORATES THE LANDING OF PONCE DE LEON OVER 500 YEARS AGO. IT IS ALSO A PERFECT EXAMPLE OF
A ROADSIDE ATTRACTION THAT PRE-
DATES THE GIANT MO”
“The place was relatively untrammeled until September of 1565 when Pedro Menendez de Aviles came ashore here on a military mission,” says Keating of the post-Ponce de Leon days. “He was tasked by the king to destroy the French, who had set up shop about 40 miles north at Fort Caroline.”
In 1587, Fountain of Youth became the site for the first mission church built by the Franciscans.
USE THAT ATE FLORIDA.
flowers.
“The artesian
spring was free flowing as it had flowed for thousands of years,” Keating explains. ““A seismological event had collapsed the spring to a
still pond,
so Williams welled it in to be able to water his lilies, irises and
tropicals.”
In 1868, Williams opened the area to the public,
but it didn’t become a real, bonafide tourist attraction until the early 1900s when Dr. Luella Day McConnell (aka Diamond Lil) purchased
the land adjacent to the Matanzas Inlet and was instrumental in tirelessly promoting the area as the
landing spot of Ponce de Leon in 1513.
McConnell claimed to
have found a coquina cross
in her garden measuring 15 stones tall and
13 stones wide with a silver salt cellar underneath containing a parchment paper authenticating Ponce de Leon’s landing. The parchment
has been authenticated twice to be a vellum from
between 1280 - 1420 AD, with writing dating to between 1500 - 1530 AD.
The park’s next owner, Walter B. Fraser, an educator from Georgia who vacationed in Florida before relocating to the Nation’s Oldest City
in 1927, saw the potential of St. Augustine to
be a tourism venue and continued the work of McConnell to promote the Fountain of Youth as the birthplace of Florida.
Today, Mission of Nombre de Dios has been reconstructed using local cypress, which was known to 16th century Spaniards to be durable and resistant to wood-eating insects.
Over the next few hundred years, the park was largely uninhabited or used for agricultural purposes. That is until 1868 when English florist H.H. Williams purchased the property and used it for the commercial cultivation of fruits and
GUESTAD.COM 21
ABOVE:
WALTER B. FRASER
LEFT:
ORIGINAL GUESTBOOK
OPPOSITE PAGE:
INSET:
PALM DRIVE CIRCA 1927
MAIN:
PARK ENTRANCE CIRCA 1930