School Teacher Diary Illuminates 1898 Pioneer Life

Sometimes, we complain about our living conditions. If the air conditioner breaks, the internet goes down, or traffic is backed up, we feel like we are putting up with serious hardships.  

A talk at the Collier County Museum helped put in perspective how our lives now are different from that of local residents at the turn of the last century.  

Last Tuesday, Naples real estate appraiser and fourth-generation Southwest Floridian Ray Carroll gave his audience an idea of what it was like to be a teacher in the Marco area in 1897 and 1898 and by extension, what life was like for all the hardy souls who lived here in what was one of the wildest, most isolated places in the country. His talk was based on the diary of Frank Watts Hall, who taught the schoolchildren of Little Marco in a one-room, palmetto-thatched schoolhouse. 

Conditions for the residents of Henderson Creek were primitive even by the standards of 1898, and Watt’s diary makes it plain that, to some degree, he realized that. For these hardy settlers, there were no roads, no railroads, no telephones, no telegraph, no radio, no electricity, no indoor plumbing, and no engines on the boats that were the only way to get around. Medical care, such as it was, would have been days away by sailing or rowing.  

The inhabitants of the frontier community didn’t even have screens or insect repellent to keep down the bugs, but as Carroll explained, everybody was in basically the same situation, and they didn’t focus on the comforts they didn’t have.  

As a teacher, Hall received a salary of $35 a month from the Lee County Board of Education. Collier County did not yet exist; the area was part of Lee County and just 10 years earlier, had belonged to Monroe County. Hall also received room and board from the Kirkland family and lived with them on their homestead just across Henderson Creek from where the Rookery Bay Environmental Learning Center is now. 

This could be problematic, as food was often scarce and not necessarily to the teacher’s liking, which became a point of contention with his hosts, whom he found “barbaric” and crude. The family had five boys and four beds in their one-room house, with nine cats and four dogs, and “the odor of dead meat all around. Bah!” wrote Hall. 

The Kirkland family were hunters, and one diary entry from January 19, 1899, notes, “We had squirrels for supper and I ate my share.” 

Another diary gives graphic details of a hunting trip, with Hall wading in the swampy water along with “great numbers of huge, ugly cottonmouth moccasins” to recover alligators that had been shot. 

“While after one dead gator, a live one with its eyes shot out suddenly popped up in front of me, and I grabbed it by the nose and took it ashore,” he wrote. 

The cistern that was part of the family home can still be seen along Rookery Bay’s “Snail Trail,” across the Henderson Creek bridge and back in the woods. The drinking water available at the schoolhouse, wrote Watt, looked “like tea after it has stood all day in kettle.” The wind blew through the schoolhouse, bringing in hordes of mosquitoes in warm weather and frigid temperatures in the cold.  

Education was problematic in these conditions, but Hall apparently taught his 10 or so pupils the “three R’s,” reading, writing, and arithmetic. They ranged from small children up to one girl of 17, of whom Watt confided to his diary that he discovered she “had a lover.” He himself wooed and eventually married another teacher who was teaching at Surveyor’s Creek, now Estero, and was apparently part of a love triangle that also included the teacher on Key Marco who boarded with the family of Capt. Bill Collier.  

Hall commuted with some of the Kirkland boys to the schoolhouse by skiff every day down Henderson Creek, sailing if the winds permitted and the spars did not break, which they regularly did, or rowing if wind and tide did not serve. When the mosquitoes were too bad, they would light a “smudge” fire until “the smudge is nearly putting my eyes out,” he wrote one evening. 

“SKEETERS! SKEETERS! SKEETERS!” Hall wrote in one entry in October 1897, with all caps being then, as now in emails or texts, the written equivalent of shouting.  

The isolation and insular nature of the community is hard for us to relate to or comprehend. Mail service happened on the occasions that someone in the community traveled to the outside world. Getting hold of a newspaper, usually the Fort Myers Press, was enough of an event to be featured in the diary, and the arrival of an order placed with Montgomery Ward was a red-letter day.  

“Almost everybody was related. You had to be careful who you badmouthed,” Carroll told his audience. The history he was relating is personal for him, as one of the early families on Henderson Creek was the Carroll family, living just downstream from the Kirklands. Ray’s great-grandfather is pictured in a few of the photographs with which he accompanied his talk. 

Ray’s sister Cindy Carroll, who participated in the research of Watt’s diary and like Ray, is a leading light in the Naples Old Timers’ Reunion, was there for the lecture and consulted by her brother on several points during the talk. On the subject of squirrel as a dish, though, Ray relied on his own impressions.  

“Nothing else tastes like squirrel but squirrel,” he said. “I like it. You’ve got to get past the fact that a squirrel is basically a tree rat.”  

Hall’s diary, an original copy of which is in the collection at the Marco Island Historical Museum, tells of occasionally shaking or spanking his students and one instance when he had to confiscate the pocket knives of two boys, no small matter in that frontier environment. He later lived in LaBelle with his schoolteacher wife, and became a leading citizen, owning a number of businesses. Frank Watts Hall died in 1939, aged 65. 

With a Sherman tank out front and a locomotive in back, the Collier Museum at the county government center has a lot of content about the “daily lives – and utter isolation – of early settlers” in Southwest Florida. The museum’s lecture series continues in October, when Museum Director Amanda Townsend, just in time for Halloween, will speak and give a photographic tour entitled “Rest in Paradise: Cemeteries of Collier County” at 2:00 PM on October 8.