Olustee Battlefield Historic State Park
5815 Battle Field Trail, Sanderson, Florida
Welcome to the Olustee Battlefield Historic State Park…
On February 20, 1864, 5,500 Union forces, against orders, marched West from Jacksonville, Florida along what is present day US highway 90, with the aim of disrupting Confederate food supplies. Thirty miles into the march, Union troops encountered and fought 5,000 Confederate soldiers in the dense woods near the town of Olustee, Baker County.
Confederate forces, including Baker County’s James Hugh Brown, managed to repel the Union troops, forcing them back to their stronghold of Jacksonville. Union casualties, including members of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the 35th United States Colored Troops and the 8th United States Colored Troops, were 1,861 soldiers.
With 34% of the Union’s soldiers being killed, wounded, or captured, the Olustee Battle, on a percentage basis, was the second bloodiest battle of the Civil War for Union troops. With an additional 946 Confederate casualties a total of 2,807 people died at the Olustee Battle..
The civil war ended fourteen months later on April 9th, 1865.
In 1912, the Olustee battlefield became Florida's first historic site, on which battle reenactments have taken place since 1977. Scenes for Civil War movies, including the 1989 movie "Glory," have been filmed during these reenactments.
In 2018, Florida State Parks promoted a new visitor center at the battlefield with the slogan “The Past Meets The Future Here at Olustee”. Today’s Baker County residents are descended from soldiers who fought for both the Confederacy and the Union, and the meanings and causes of the Civil War are still subject to heated debate.
Discussion
The Civil War is often portrayed as a necessary war that ended slavery; yet some scholars disagree, highlighting, for example, Abraham Lincoln's initial focus on Union preservation over the commitment to ending slavery. Further, after the war’s end, white citizens bitterly resisted the transformation of formerly enslaved people into full citizens, and Reconstruction was sacrificed in 1877 in the name of political compromise between Democrats and Republicans. Slavery was formally ended by the 13th Amendment, except in cases of criminal prosecution. This loophole allowed for the continued exploitation of poor and non-white people, who could be arrested for “vagrancy” or other non-threatening activities, then forced into unpaid labor.
What does the Olustee Battlefield State Park, and popular entertainment and education, teach us about our past, specifically the Civil War? Which heroes does it celebrate? Whose lives does it memorialize, and for whom does it ask us to grieve?
How do Olustee and other Civil War memorials shape our present understandings of American history and violence?
Where and when did you first learn about the Civil War? Who or what taught you what you know about its effects on our nation’s history? How did your ideas about the Civil War change over time?
Northeast Florida State Hospital
7487 FL-121, Macclenny, Florida
We will view our next two stops from one vantage point. On this side of the street is Northeast Florida State Hospital, and across the street is the Fraser property including the family business Southern States Nurseries LLC.
The 613-bed Northeast Florida State Hospital was opened in 1957, its placement in Macclenny was spearheaded by then State Senator Edwin Gardner Fraser of Macclenny. Since its opening the hospital has employed many local citizens.
Sixty years after its opening, on December 7th, 2017, State Senator Ed Fraser’s great-grandson Gardner Fraser was notified by letter that he was being dismissed from his position as a registered nurse specialist at the Northeast Florida State Hospital.
An internal investigation found that on September 7th, 2017 a black patient at the hospital sustained injuries to his face, including a black eye, broken right orbital fracture and fracture of the right nasal bone; when asked who hit him, the patient stated, “the white man hit me.” Gardner Fraser, claiming the patient had spit on him, left his position without legal consequence.
More recently, problems of patient exploitation and inadequate care have been reported at the hospital. In 2022, the Florida Nurses Association reported security concerns after the number of “forensic patients” or individuals with mental illness charged with, or convicted of, a criminal offense, housed at the facility increased 300 percent amid a statewide shortage of beds for such patients. In addition, staff shortages, strains on medical supplies, and the mixing of patients with dramatically different health needs have led to increasing incidents of violence at the hospital.
One patient, Sean Fosbinder, who relied on state care for his traumatic brain injury, was attacked by another inmate in late 2020, leading to his death in January 2021. This incident led to the discovery of past physical and sexual abuse sustained at the hospital. According to state law and the Office of Inspector General, Sean should have been transferred to a skilled nursing facility before his fatal attack.
The family of Warren Barrett, who was brutally beaten by his roommate in April 2021, along with the family and community around Sean Fosbinder, have not been able to obtain justice or accountability from the Hospital or the Department of Children and Families.
Southern States Nursery
5612 Southern States Nursery Rd, Macclenny, Florida
Southern States Nursery
On the other side of the street is the sprawling Fraser property, used for the family’s private residence and the Southern State Nurseries LLC, the Fraser family’s business since 1933.
In 1802 the first of the Fraser lineage, Thomas Jefferson Fraser, was born in the United States. Thomas and his wife Emily Burroughs settled in New River County, which became Baker County in 1861.
Their son Clemon was born in 1847 and eventually married his first cousin Bettie, by whom he fathered 16 children. Clemon served in the First Florida Engineer Corps for the Confederate Army in the Civil War.
Clemon and Bettie’s son James Brantley Fraser, born in 1876, moved back to Baker County in the 1920s, working for Knabb Motors before opening Southern States Nursery in Macclenny in 1933. James started a long line of Fraser nurserymen in Baker County, eventually passing the business to his son Edwin “Ed” Gardner Fraser.
Ed was born in 1914, and went on to serve in the Florida House of Representatives from 1937 to 1940 for Baker County and in the Florida State Senate three times between 1945 and 1963 as a Democratic member for the 29th District. Edwin is largely credited for bringing Northeast Florida State Hospital and the Fraser Memorial Hospital to Macclenny.
Ed’s older brother James Ernan "J.E." Fraser, was a foreman at the Fraser plant nursery, and the official spokesperson and unofficial leader of the Florida Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s, when the Florida Klan reached its pinnacle of political influence.
According to J.E. Fraser, the Florida Ku Klux Klan stood for white supremacy, segregation, and "upholding the law." He once said, "There's plenty of ways to do things within the law and sometimes we have to straighten up the officials," "Fellow sells his house to a n**** in a white neighborhood and we just spread the word. He loses his business and his friends. That . . . boy better just get out of this state."
Edwin’s son Gary was born in Jacksonville in 1942, and Gary’s eldest son Ryan Taylor Fraser was born February 3rd, 1961.
Ryan resigned as a Baker County Sheriff's Deputy in 2001 after wrongfully instigating a high speed chase that killed Debbie Griffis, 20, and severely injured her best friend Amy Thomas, 17. In 2009, Ryan was fired from the Jacksonville Sheriff’s office after shooting unarmed, Black teenager Jerrick Hall in the shoulder. Ryan claimed he shot Jerrick because he feared for the life of a fellow officer. After being rehired by the Baker County Sheriff's Department, Ryan retired in 2017.
On Ryan’s birthday on February 3rd, 2018, his son Gardner Kent Fraser, the great great great grandson of Thomas Jefferson Fraser, the great great grandson of a Confederate soldier, the great grandson of a state senator, the great grandnephew of a Klan leader, and the son of a twice fired police officer, shot and killed his clandestine intimate partner, Dominic Jerome “D.J.” Broadus, at the Fraser’s Southern States Nursery.
Despite having shot D.J. four times in the head, execution style, and making several calls to family members before calling 9-1-1, moving D.J.'s body and destroying D.J.’s phone in a failed attempt to hide crucial evidence and the nature of their relationship, Gardner has yet to be held accountable for D.J.’s murder.
Gardner claims that D.J. attacked him and that he was “in fear for his life”. Under Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law Gardner was allowed to use lethal force without question, restraint, or arrest. For this reason, several Florida State Attorneys, to the frustration of the Broadus family and community members, have refused to charge Gardner Fraser with homicide.
Discussion:
What are the historic and economic connections between the Northeast Florida State Hospital and the Southern States Nursery and why or how do these connections matter today? Who gets to own and control property, and how does the ground we stand on affect our claims to the law’s protection?
What are your experiences or observations of institutional violence and how it has impacted you or those around you?
Heritage Park Village
Fraser-Roberson Cooking Shelter
Knabb Turpentine Display
102 S Lowder St, Macclenny, Florida
Fraser-Roberson Cooking Shelter
Our first stop in the park is the Fraser-Roberson Cooking Shelter, named after Gardner Fraser’s grandfather Gary and his cooking companion Archie Roberson. Gary Fraser, born in 1942, managed Southern States Nursery for the entirety of his life. In addition, Gary was appointed interim sheriff in the early 1970's by Florida Governor Rueben Askew for a six-month term, was elected to Macclenny City Commission, was a member of the Florida Nurserymen Growers Association, and had been named a Master Mason, Scottish Rights Mason, and a Shriner of the Moroccan Temple.
Knabb Turpentine Display
…and just over here, our second stop in Heritage Park, is the Knabb Turpentine display which celebrates the turpentine distilling business of the Knabb family, spearheaded by Thomas Jefferson Knabb of Baker County. A turpentine display at Heritage Park “was constructed by Knabb offspring to honor their family’s contribution to Baker County’s growth and development,” according to the park’s website.
Thomas Jefferson Knabb was the grandson of James Hugh Brown. James, born in 1828 fought for the Confederacy at the Battle of Olustee during the Civil War. James Hugh Brown was married to Caroline Raulerson in 1852 and had 7 children, including Mariah Emma Brown.
Mariah married James Washington Knabb and had 10 children. Thomas Jefferson Knabb, their eldest, was born in 1880 and married Leona Howard in 1902. The same year Leona Howard’s older sister Elizabeth “Lizzie” Howard married James Brantley Fraser in Macclenny, Baker County, making Thomas Jefferson Knabb the eventual great great great uncle of Gardner Kent Fraser.
In the early 1900s, Florida State Senator Thomas Jefferson “T.J.” Knabb and his brother William grew one of the largest and most profitable turpentine operations in the United States. By the mid-20th century the Knabbs owned over 200,000 acres of pine forest in Baker County from which they were extracting turpentine. This territory encompassed over half of Baker County.
“The old saying was that if T.J. didn’t pay his taxes, Baker County would go bankrupt,” one family member told the Times-Union.
The Knabb brothers amassed a fortune by using forced labor of inmates leased from Baker, Alachua and Bradford county jails. “Additional Black workers”, according to Macclenny native Alan Stephenson Boyd's memoir, “were paid in scrip which was essentially a company “IOU” and given a small amount of cash. The scrip was redeemable only at the company-owned commissary, where the workers purchased everything they ate or wore. The prices were such that they were a little more in debt every month. The name for this, peonage, which was slavery in every sense of the word. There was no way out.”
Reports of brutality against prisoners in the lease camps came from all over the state, but the worst camp, according to Convict Supervisor J. B. Thomas, was that of State Senator, T. J. Knabb. Knabb's guards were reportedly so brutal that the Alachua County Board of Commissioners, infamous for allowing abuses to prisoners in their camps, removed their prisoners from his lease.
On May 8, 1923, the Florida legislature, pressured by the North Dakota legislature following the death of Martin Talbert of Munich, North Dakota at the Knabb camp, held a joint investigative committee to look into alleged cases of abuse. Thelma Franklin, a social worker, former school teacher and wife of the Glen St. Mary’s postmaster, shocked the committee with her specific and graphic testimony of the abuses she discovered in Knabb’s camps.
Thelma claimed that over the previous year nine laborers had died at the camp. Thelma recounted that Mary Sheffield and her daughter were shot and killed one week before Mary was to testify in front of the same investigative committee. Mary’s killer was Arthur L. Thompson, a Knabb Turpentine employee known as "Warden Thompson." Thompson claimed that Mary Sheffield attacked him, and that he shot the unarmed woman and her daughter in self-defense.
Thelma continued, “Then there was Jimmy Beach, who seemed to have no home. He was a white man, about 30 years old and was arrested by Knabb when he stopped at the camp and begged for food.
“Knabb handcuffed him and a companion and took them to Live Oak, where Judge Rhoden sentenced them to six months for vagrancy, returning them to the Knabb camp to serve their sentences.
“A few days later Beach was dead.”
Despite the very public nature of the hearings and the revelations of violence at the work camp, efforts to halt the Knabb camps were unsuccessful.
Years later, in 1936, William Knabb and his son Earl’s turpentine plantation was the subject of national press coverage and the two men were charged and arrested by the FBI on violations of peonage laws. The Knabbs and their co-defendants, however, were acquitted by a jury.
Discussion:
How does Heritage Park tell the story of the Knabb family and their business? What portions of the story are glossed over or left out entirely?
What does the story of the Knabb family teach us about the role of class and race-based violence in community development?
Share your vision for a public memorial that would honor the victims of industrial production and economic development rather than those who owned these businesses. What would it look like and whose stories would you want to tell? What kinds of memorials might promote healing, justice, and unity.
Old Baker County Jail and Old Baker County Courthouse
42 W McIver Avenue in Macclenny, Florida
Old Baker County Jail
On October 5, 1920, a white mob lynched four innocent Black men: Fulton Smith, Rayfield Givens, Benjamin Givens, and Duncan Sam in Macclenny, Florida. According to news reports at the time, the lynching was in response to the shooting death of a prominent, white farmer named John Harvey at the Knabb turpentine camp the day prior.
Harvey’s suspected shooter, a young Black man named Jim Givens, fled immediately afterward and mobs of armed white men formed to pursue him. Jim’s brother, Benjamin, and two other Black men—Fulton Smith and 16-year old Rayfield Givens—were questioned and jailed during the search.
At around 1 am on October 5, a mob of about 50 white men overtook the old Baker County jail, kidnapped the three men from their cells, and took them to the outskirts of town, where they tied them to trees and shot them to death.
Duncan Sam, approximately 68-years old and also with no ties to the killing of John Harvey, was reportedly working alone in a field when the vigilante mob encountered him and killed him.
Old Baker County Courthouse.
On the other side of the parking lot sits the Old Baker County Courthouse, now the Emily Taber Public Library. The Old Baker County Courthouse was built in 1908 in the Colonial Revival style and was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 1986.
On March 28th, 1936 at 8 pm the Ku Klux Klan held a public meeting at this site. The notice in the Baker County Press the day before explained the meeting was “for the purpose of informing the public why the Klan is still needed, what it has done, what it will continue to do. The public is invited to come and hear the facts which imperil our country and to know the truth of what must be done for our protection."
In 2015, the Equal Justice Institute ranked Baker County, Florida as the U.S. county with the 10th highest rate of per capita lynchings in the American South between 1880 and 1940. The Equal Justice Institute has documented 4,084 racial terror lynchings in twelve Southern states between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950.
Discussion:
What was the purpose of what the Equal Justice Institute calls “racial terror,” and what is the relationship between vigilante violence and legal / state violence? What has been the psychological impact of racist violence on Black communities in the South?
Beyond memorials, what are additional ways we can commemorate and uplift those who lost their lives to white supremacist racial terror?
Baker County Detention Center
1 Sheriffs Office Dr, Macclenny
In 2021, Gardner Fraser was sentenced to one year in detention at the 512-bed Baker County Detention Center for tampering with evidence after murdering D.J. Broadus at the Fraser property on February 3rd, 2018.
Gardner had previously worked at the Baker County Detention Center as a registered nurse through Armor Correctional Health Services. Soon after being hired on June 15, 2015 Gardner was written up by his supervisor after being cited “for not following the employee handbook, committing acts that jeopardized the health, safety or welfare of patients, and performing his job in a negligent or careless manager.”
One co-worker of Gardner complained that Gardner was “the most negative person I have ever worked with, his demeanor with patients is terrible because he acts more like security than a nurse. He is extremely rude when they ask him a question, he constantly uses foul language…”
Less than 7 months after being hired, Gardner resigned from the detention center on January 7, 2016.
The $45 million dollar detention center overseen by the Baker County Sheriff's Department, completed by Baker County in 2008, is much larger than what is needed to house those who have committed crimes among Baker County’s 27,000 inhabitants. The extra beds at the detention center were built to make a profit through the housing of detainees in the custody of the U.S. Marshals and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
On January 25, 2020, Ben Owen died in the custody of ICE at the Baker County Detention Center, one of four centers in Florida where ICE holds immigrants in return for fees based on the number of people being held.
U.S. officials said Ben, 39-years-old, was awaiting deportation proceedings, accused of having overstayed his visa, when he was found dead in his cell.
His American widow, however, disputes the claim. Ben had overstayed his time in the United States and his widow says she has unanswered questions about what led up to his unexpected and untimely death just two weeks after he was placed in the detention facility.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida has documented dozens of complaints over the last 18 months against the detention center, including issues related to excessive use of force, extreme medical neglect, racist harassment, retaliation, voyeurism, impediments to accessing legal counsel, the denial of menstrual products and clean clothes Menstruating inmates have been forced to sleep on blood-soaked sheets.
Stanley, a young Haitian immigrant, reported a serious assault by guards at Baker County Detention Center. As Stanley recalled, he and other men in his unit wanted the air conditioning to be adjusted, so he asked a guard on their behalf. Enraged at the request, a guard slammed Stanley’s head on the floor and pinned him down as he handcuffed him. Another guard moved Stanley into the hallway, where he was held down as a guard twisted his testicles. The guards reportedly began shouting racial slurs, calling Stanley a “porch monkey.”
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the guards told Stanley, “I’m tired of you fucking immigrants coming to my country thinking you can get what the fuck you want.”
In 2018, with a shortage of immigrants being directed to Baker County, the Detention Center relied on a $35 million dollar loan, re-paid through future tax revenue, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's jail construction program. The USDA refinancing loan, according to the Vera Institute, served to bail out investors in the large, county-run jail and immigrant detention center.
The Vera Institute further found that the USDA has funded over $360 million in jail construction in rural areas since 1996.
Discussion:
What is the relationship between criminalization, confinement, and corporate profit? What links do these carceral systems share with the Knabb Turpentine’s peonage system and with the kidnappings and lynchings in Baker County?
Think about the ways we might challenge our nation’s structures of incarceration and criminalization. Are there non-incarceral approaches we can take towards achieving justice and safety in our communities?
Baker County Courthouse
339 E Macclenny Ave, Macclenny, FL
Our last stop on the tour is the Baker County Courthouse which sits next to the Ed Fraser Memorial Hospital, named after Gardner Fraser’s great grandfather.
A jury was to be selected on February 5th, 2024, in the civil trial for the wrongful death of D.J. Broadus. The Broadus family hoped to win a civil settlement from Gardner Fraser and the Southern States Nurseries LLC. However, on December 28th, 2023, Judge Sean Brewer dismissed the charges based on a distorted interpretation of the concepts of negligence versus intentionality. The Broadus family is in the process of appealing this decision (which is likely to extend their efforts over another few years).
The Baker County Courthouse, where the Broadus family hopes to one day obtain some measure of justice for their slain family member, features a 135-square-foot painting that highlights Baker County’s history. The artist, Gene Barber, completed it in 2001, with the goal of depicting 6,000 years of local history. According to Barber’s guide book, the painting depicts the area’s earliest indigenous tribes to the Olustee Civil War battle to the Knabb turpentine camp. In the top center of the mural are three hooded members of the KKK, like that of Gardner Fraser’s great great uncle J.E. Fraser, riding horseback across a field.
Barber’s entry for the KKK image does not address the group’s extensive and brutal history of racial terror. It instead describes the KKK as a solution to “lawlessness.” He writes:
“Lawlessness among ex-slaves and troublesome whites was the rule of the day. No relief was given by the carpetbag and scalawag government or by the Union troops. The result was the emergence of secret societies claiming to bring law and order to the county. One of these groups was the Ku Klux Klan, an organization that sometimes took vigilante justice to extremes but was sometimes the only control the county knew over those outside the law. The Klan faded from view at the end of Reconstruction. It had minor comebacks in the 1920’s and mid 1950’s. Since then it has become the subject of legend rather than a cause of fear.”
Another vignette in Barber’s painting features a Civil War battle. To the side of the battlefield sits a wounded white Union soldier praying beside a black Union soldier and three Confederates. "In death," the guidebook explains, "there is no difference in color of uniform or color of skin."
In 2002, Circuit Judge Stan Morris ordered the controversial mural be removed from the second floor where court business is conducted, and reinstalled on the first floor. Artist Gene Barber, while taking offense to the judge’s critiques, painted several silver linings in an open letter to the judge, thanking him for moving the mural to a more publicly visible location, and citing the approval of several of his “thinking black friends.”
Barber also provided suggestions on how to move past the controversy; urging critics to leave their ivory towers and accept all cultures and heritages as worthy of preservation, and warning against revisionist history. Barber insisted that criticism of his mural only contributed to racial divisions. Barber concluded his letter writing “Last but not least, lighten up, America.”
Discussion:
What is the role of visual representation (through public art, memorials, monuments, etc) in shaping community identities and understandings of collective history?
How important is the geographic location of a memorial or a mural like the one in the Baker County Courthouse?
On the bus:
Reflecting on today's tour, what histories surprised you, and which ones were you already aware of? What connections can we make between our community’s past and on-going contemporary struggles for justice? Which elements did you find emotionally stirring and which fostered rational thought?
