Florida Fallen Stories

A descendant of one of the oldest colonial families of Virginia, Fred Stringfellow’s paternal grandfather, William Hall Stringfellow (1818-1869), was a physician and a large plantation slaveowner from Chester, South Carolina, who in the late-1850s traveled south with his newly-married second wife, Sarah (“Sally”) Angelina Dogan (1828-1916), a widow with two children. Bypassing the Okefenokee Swamp, they crossed the St. Mary’s River and settled down near Fort Clarke, Florida, in central Alachua County, where Dr. Stringfellow practiced medicine and raised six more children, one of whom was Fred’s father, Thornton Buford (T. B.) Stringfellow (1860-1945).

 

 

 

Named for his great-uncle, the Baptist minister and pro-slavery apologist Thornton Stringfellow (1788-1869) of Fauquier County, Virginia, and his grandmother’s Buford line, T. B. Stringfellow grew up in Gainesville and was educated in the public schools and the East Florida Seminary, a precursor to the University of Florida.  As a young man in 1877 he began working in the mercantile business for George Knox Broome (1842-1933), a Confederate veteran and later Gainesville city councilman who had married T. B.’s older half-sister. T. B. later entered the wholesale grocery business on the west side of the courthouse square in Gainesville with his brother, Robert Lee Stringfellow (1861-1926).

On July 23, 1885, T. B. Stringfellow married in Volusia County, Florida, 17-year-old Alexandra Ernestine Broome, George Knox Broome’s niece and daughter of the late Robert W. Broome (1840-1878), a Lake City attorney. Ernestine Broome’s great-grandfather, John Broome, a North Carolina farmer born before the American Revolution, had migrated to Spanish Florida before it became part of the United States and established a plantation named “Talofa,” a Creek word meaning “community,” in an area now part of Madison County, between present-day Tallahassee and Jacksonville. One of his sons, James Emelius Broome (1808-1883), Ernestine’s great-uncle, became Florida’s third governor (1853-57), and his younger brother, Ernestine’s grandfather, John Scott Broome, took over as postmaster of Talofa from his father in 1841, managed the family plantation and dozens of slaves, and served as adjutant general of Florida at the time of his death in December 1854.

 

 

 

T. B. and Ernestine had one child, Marguerite Dolores Broome Stringfellow (1889-1977). When Marguerite was three years old, her father, T. B., age 32, shot and killed 28-year-old Charles Hentz Pratt. Son of respected journalist and a Harvard graduate, George Washington Pratt of Pensacola and later Palatka, Florida, Charley Pratt, who was a former associate editor with the Palatka Herald and once served as vice-president of the Florida Press Association, had recently moved to Gainesville, where he began editing the Daily Leader newspaper. Widely regarded as “versatile,” “talented,” “handsome,” “enterprising,” “brilliant,” and a “genius,” Charley Pratt also had a reputation for being “rash” and hot-tempered. More than four years earlier, he shot at an assistant postmaster in Palatka and called him a liar for something the man had alleged, and two years later he assaulted a rival editor in Palatka with a heavy cane, which he broke into splinters over his victim’s head, based on what the editor had printed about him in his newspaper. Word was that T. B. Stringfellow and Charley Pratt were friends, but that ended when Stringfellow learned that Pratt, who was also married, was having an affair with his wife.

Around 8:50 p.m. on November 26, 1892, T. B. confronted Pratt outside of the Stringfellow residence and fired two blasts with a double-barreled shotgun. On the sidewalk lay a motionless Pratt, bleeding profusely, his body “pierced with thirteen buckshot.” At a coroner’s jury hastily empaneled, T.B. Stringfellow confessed to the murder but claimed that it was justifiable because he had caught his wife and Pratt “in a compromising position” at his home earlier that evening. Ernestine collaborated her husband’s story, claiming that Pratt, who had showed up at the house to return one of her handkerchiefs, tried to assault her but she had fought him.  “My God, don’t shoot,” Pratt reportedly had cried before an infuriated Stringfellow fatally shot him. This is “another of those painful domestic tragedies,” commented the Savannah Morning News, “the details of which are too horrible for publication.” The jury agreed and found T. B. Stringfellow, who was only “protecting the sanctity of his home” and had “vindicated his honor,” not guilty. A state case against Stringfellow a month later ended with the same verdict by another jury, which met with popular approval and caused “a ripple of applause in the court room.”

 

 

Testimony during the trial revealed that Ernestine Stringfellow had lured Charley Pratt to her home and was complicit in their affair. Accusing her of infidelity, T. B. Stringfellow later sued for divorce, and his petition was granted on September 24, 1894. The judge also annulled their marriage and gave Stringfellow full custody of the couple’s daughter Marguerite. Ernestine Stringfellow eventually left the state. In 1899 “Mrs. A. E. Stringfellow” was working in Columbus, Georgia, as a “city missionary” for the Epworth League chapter of the St. Luke’s Methodist Episcopal Church, in charge of a night school for working class children. Five years later, still living in Columbus, she married a man from Helena, Georgia, who was later convicted and sent to the Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta for mail fraud.  Last mention of her in the press appears to have been by a small-town Kansas newspaper in May 1905, which said that she was a musical director at the Hephzibah Rescue Home for unwed women and “fallen” girls in St. Louis, Missouri. The article included her photograph. What became of her afterwards is unknown.

 

 

 

T. B. Stringfellow remarried on October 8, 1895, in Gainesville. His new wife, 20-year-old Willie May Adams (1875-1945), a native of Opelika, Alabama, was the daughter of Robert Toombs Adams (1855-1892), a former hotelkeeper in Selma and later Eufaula. Shortly afterwards, T. B. took his new bride to Jacksonville, where he established a branch of the wholesale grocery firm with his brother Robert. By 1900, T. B. was president of Stringfellow Brothers & Co., with a warehouse at 516 Hogan Street. In the federal census taken that year, he and Willie resided at 131 West Adams Street in Jacksonville. Living with them were Fred Stringfellow, age 3, and his younger brother Hart Robert Stringfellow (1897-1981). By 1905, T. B. Stringfellow had moved his family to 410 Cedar Street and was working in real estate. Also, two more sons had been born, John Boyd (“Jack”) Stringfellow (1901-1972) and Arthur King Stringfellow (1903-1974).

 

 

 

Two years later, T. B. Stringfellow returned to Gainesville, where he founded and served as president Diamond Ice Company, an important business enterprise which in addition to the Gainesville plant included another plant at Alachua and the Fruit Growers Ice Company at High Springs. In 1917, Stringfellow became president of the Sweet-Water Mills in Gainesville, manufacturers of old-style stone-ground corn meal, flour, rice, and grits, and in 1922 he became president of the Gainesville Buick Company, handling Buick automobiles, with a branch plant at Palatka. His third son, Jack Boyd, worked with him at the Gainesville Buick Company, while his youngest son, Arthur King, was associated with his wholesale grain and feed business. In addition to these activities, T. B. founded in the 1920s University Realty Company and Stringfellow & Hutchinson Company, a wholesale grocery. When he died in 1945, six months after his wife Willie, T. B. Stringfellow, age 86, was hailed by the Gainesville Daily Sun in his obituary as a prominent resident who became highly interested in civic affairs and who owned valuable property both in Jacksonville and Gainesville for many years. Although his daughter Marguerite Stringfellow, age 56, then of Tampa, was listed as surviving him, understandably there was no mention of his first marriage with Ernestine Broome or his killing of Charley Pratt more than fifty years earlier.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Jacksonville on June 5, 1896, Fred attended city schools in Jacksonville and Gainesville, as did his three brothers. In fact, though seventeen months younger, Hart entered Gainesville High School as a freshman (Class of ’16) on October 9, 1913, the same as Fred. By the time his senior year came, Fred was still classified as a junior at Gainesville High School, while Hart was graduating on time. Both boys played football during the 1915-16 season, Fred as a halfback and Hart, who was taller and a bit heavier, as an end and assistant manager. Fred was captain of the scrubs basketball team and played guard, while Hart captained the varsity team and played forward. At the second annual state high school track meet held April 1, 1916, Fred Stringfellow won first place in the 440-yard dash (time 56 seconds), third place in the 100-yard dash, and fourth place in the 220-yard dash, helping Gainesville High School take fourth place overall.

 

 

After graduating from high school in 1916, Hart entered the University of Florida, where he majored in civil engineering and joined the cadet corps. Serving as Commandant of Cadets and Professor of Military Science at UF since 1908 was Colonel Edgar Smith Walker (1858-1955), West Point graduate (1883), Indian Wars fighter, and Spanish American War veteran. Colonel Walker was also Hart’s uncle, who in 1886 had married Thornton’s younger sister, Sallie Rice Stringfellow (1866-1954), in Gainesville.

 

 

With two years’ experience as a cadet, and after completing First Officers’ Training Camp at Plattsburgh, New York, during the summer of 1918, Hart Stringfellow was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. infantry reserves on September 16. He was assigned as an instructor in the Students’ Army Training Corps (S.A.T.C.) during Fall semester at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, where he was discharged two months later, December 28, 1918.

 

 

Meanwhile, Fred Stringfellow completed his studies at Riverside Military Academy in Gainesville, Georgia, which had a naval department with instruction in the use of wireless radios. On May 10, 1917, a little more than a month after the U.S. declared war on Germany, he enlisted in the United States Navy at the recruiting station in Jacksonville and was given the rank of electrician third-class, radio operator. After two months of basic training at the Navy Yard in Charleston, South Carolina, he was assigned to duty on the USS Reposo II (Section Patrol craft #198).  Originally built in 1882 by the Greenpoint Basin and Construction Company, Greenpoint, Long Island, New York, as the private yacht Sophia, she was rebuilt in 1902 and renamed Empress, later Onondaga, and subsequently Turbese, until May 12, 1917, when she was acquired by the navy and commissioned USS Reposo II.  Only 140 feet long, with top speed of 14 knots, and an armament one 3-pounder cannon, two machine guns and one Y-gun depth charge projector, Reposo II had a ship’s complement of eighteen. Reposo II patrolled the coastline between Key West, Florida and Brunswick, Georgia, into 1918, before remaining at anchor in the Charleston Navy Yard from May to December 1918, when she was later decommissioned. While aboard Reposo II, Stringfellow was promoted twice, to electrician second-class after 267 days and as electrician first-class 242 days later.

 

 

On November 6, 1918, radio operator first-class Stringfellow was transferred to the USS Gamble (DD-123), a Wickes-class destroyer based at Norfolk, Virginia. But five days later, as Gamble was preparing to take part in maneuvers off Cuba and Key West, Florida, Stringfellow was taken off ship and admitted as a patient to the Brooklyn Navy Yard Hospital in New York City. Here he died of pneumonia at 5 a.m. on January 15, 1919, his last word uttered “duty.” At his bedside were his half-sister Marguerite and her husband, George Edmundson Pyle (1885-1949), a former lieutenant in the 347th Infantry recently returned from France. Arriving too late were his mother and his brother Hart Stringfellow, now discharged from the army.

Fred Stringfellow’s body was brought back to Gainesville by train as family members accompanied him. His funeral was conducted by Reverend Bernard Campbell (1887-1943), rector of Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, on January 18. In its obituary the Gainesville Sun wrote that Fred Stringfellow, age 22 years, 6 months, “the eldest born son and apple of the eye of his devoted parents and the pride of all his host of friends, left us with a merry laugh on his lips and went away to do his bit in the Great War….” The Ocala Evening Star said that Fred Stringfellow, who often visited Ocala where his grandmother lived, was simply a “splendid young man.”