Florida Fallen Stories

When the Hendersonville Motorcycle Club held its first races in its history on Saturday, January 9, 1915, riders and their bikes came from nearby Asheville, North Carolina, on the early morning train. Despite the cold, hundreds of spectators lined the racetrack some three-quarters of a mile long, from the starting line on Main Street to the end on newly-paved Fifth Avenue. There was not a bend on the course, judged to be the best in the South. Among the ten cyclists competing that day was 24-year-old Aston Jensen, who came in first place on his Harley-Davidson, with the fastest of his three runs clocked at 41 and 3/5ths seconds.

In addition to motorcycles, Aston Jensen also loved sailing and deep-sea fishing, pastimes he first learned and continued doing in his native Florida. Born in Jacksonville on December 21, 1891, he was the eldest of five children born to Lucy Elizabeth St. George Aston (1860-1943), daughter of Rev. John Meredith Lawrence Aston (1825-1880), who served as vicar at St. Nicholas’ Church in KingsNorton, Worchestershire, England, for more than twenty years. In 1886, she had arrived in the U.S., and five years later, on May 23, 1891, in Titusville, Florida, a recent widow of Francis Phelps Braendlin, she married Johan (John) Lauridsen (Laurence) Jensen (1857-1914), a native of Skanderup, Denmark.

 

 

In the late 1880s, John Jensen had traveled from West Virginia to the Indian River section of Florida, where he established the area south of Eden that bears his name, today’s Jensen Beach. Jensen dreamed about growing pineapples there. He had the land surveyed and platted and in 1894 what would eventually be the business district came into being. With the help of nearby native Indians and Bahamian laborers, he cleared more than 130 acres of land with high rolling hills on the western Indian River shores to build his pineapple plantation.  The small settlement of Jensen with about two dozen families was granted a post office in 1890, which John Jensen’s brother-in-law, John Sorensen, served as postmaster until 1895. By the following year John Jensen owned and managed the Al Fresco, the first hotel built south of St. Augustine, with forty rooms and three stories, located close to the Indian River, just off Main Street.

The Al Fresco was the social center of Jensen, a town that would have a school, churches, cemetery, bowling alley, bakery, grocery, dry goods store, meat market, bank, barbershop, livery stable, boat shop, Masonic Lodge, and a train depot. It was here that John and Lucy Jensen raised their family, which by 1900 included Aston, age 9, his brother, Meredith St. George Jensen (1896-1976), and sister Lucy Katherine Jensen (1900-1984). (Two other children, John, Jr., born 1893, and Florence, born 1894, died in infancy.) Nearly a dozen years after its founding, Jensen shipped over one million boxes of pineapples each season, earning the town the nickname “Pineapple Capital of the World.”

 

 

John Jensen left the area in 1904, selling land and the Al Fresco Hotel and moving to Asheville, North Carolina. But the Sorensens, John’s sister and brother-in-law, remained in Jensen, as did Lucy’s older sister, Katherine Aston Harmer (1858-1941), both sets of relatives whom Aston Jensen would continue to visit during the winters. In the 1910 census for Asheville, Buncombe County, John Jensen listed his occupation as pineapple planter, and when he died of Bright’s disease on November 1, 1914, he was simply described on his death certificate as “Capitalist.”

In Asheville, Aston Jensen attended James Anderson Winn’s School for Boys, a private prep school founded by Winn’s father, a minister. (In 1913, after 16 years in Asheville, Winn relocated to Jacksonville, Florida, where he became principal of the University School for Boys.) Aston also participated in sports, playing for the Montford boys, a neighborhood team that won the Asheville Y.M.C.A. Intermediate Basketball League in February 1910, and coaching the Montford team to the city Y’s baseball championship later that summer.

 

 

 

In September 1910, Aston Jensen entered North Carolina College of Agriculture & Mechanic Arts in Raleigh, majoring in agriculture. But he appears to have dropped out after his freshmen year. Over the next several years, he was “engaged in business” in Florida, according to the  Asheville News Gazette of April 5, 1913. He was also spending winters with his aunts in Florida, so noted the St. Lucie County Tribune. On one occasion someone sighted him riding on his sailboat the Albatross. With its large mainsail and a powerful 12-horsepower engine, the Albatross “glided through the water like a duck.”  After his father’s death in 1914, Aston’s occupation in the Asheville directory was listed as farmer (1915) and clerk (1916). He was associated with the Fleichmann’s Yeast Company in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, before becoming a traveling salesman for the E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, based in Wilmington, Delaware, makers of pesticide, fertilizer, and other chemical agricultural products. His territory with DuPont included Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he stayed in the Magnus Hotel.

 

 

On June 5, 1917, Aston Jensen registered for the draft in Asheville. But rather than waiting to be drafted, he joined the North Carolina National Guard on July 31, 1917. Called into federal service, he was ordered to report to Camp Sevier, near Greenville, South Carolina, for training.

 

 

He was assigned to the 105th Sanitary Train, 117th Field Hospital, 30^th (“Old Hickory”) Division, which originally consisted of National Guard units from North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee.  On November 12, 1917, he was promoted to mess sergeant, and on June 4, 1918, his unit boarded the British troopship Mauretania at New York City for duty overseas. Two weeks earlier, his brother Meredith, who was the battalion sergeant major in the 319th Field (Heavy) Artillery Regiment, 82nd Division, also had left for France.

 

 

From the time that Aston Jensen arrived in France, landing in Calais on June 22, to Armistice Day, November 11, the 30th Division suffered 8,954 casualties, of whom 1,629 were battle deaths and 7,325 were wounded.  The function of the 105th Sanitary Train, which included its four motor ambulance companies and four motorized field hospitals, both numbered 117-120, was to provide food and temporary shelter, medical, and surgical care for the wounded, sick or injured divisional troops in combat, in camp, or on the march. A total of 14 deaths was sustained by the 105th Sanitary Train itself, most from ambulance companies, including 1 killed in action, 2 died of wounds, 7 of pneumonia or influenza-type illnesses, and 1 each of typhoid fever and alcoholism. Aston Jenson was added to that list, dying on either November 28 or 29, 1918, of injuries he received from a railroad accident. More than a hundred American soldiers died because of train accidents while in France, many of them after the Armistice. At the time of his death, the 30th Division (minus artillery) was at the American Embarkation Center near Le Mans, France, preparing to go home. Details of Sergeant Jensen’s death are unknown.

 

 

 

 

Aston Jensen was buried in Grave 37, American Plot, French Civilian Cemetery, Meaux, Seine-et-Marne, about 25 miles northeast of Paris. On February 18, 1920, Lucy Jensen, still living in Asheville, applied for a passport to visit her son’s grave in France. Accompanying her was Aston’s 19-year-old sister, Lucy Katherine Jensen, who at the time was attending school in New York City. On December 17, 1922, Aston Jensen was reburied in Grave 46, Row 10, Block B, Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, near the small French village of Belleau, some 25 miles northeast of Meaux. In May 1931, Lucy Jensen was one of five Goldstar Mothers of Minneapolis, Minnesota, who sailed on the President Harding as part of the 3rd annual government-sponsored pilgrimage, to place a wreath on her son’s new grave.

 

 

 

 

 

Aston Jensen’s name was not included on Florida’s Memorial Scroll. But it was inscribed on a plaque inside the Memorial Belltower at the North Carolina State University in Raleigh, dedicated on Veteran’s Day 1949 to the nearly three dozen students and alumni who died in the Great War. And the Jensen name also lives in the town of Jensen Beach, Florida, a community of some nearly 12,000 people who each year since 1988 have held a pineapple festival.