Florida Fallen Stories

Moses Waters was angry at Dick Morgan. Armed with a Winchester rifle, he sent word to Morgan to meet him at Crow Bridge, on Coldwater Creek, about 13 miles from Milton, Florida. After Morgan refused to retract what he had said about him, Waters fired at Morgan, killing him outright, the ball entering two inches above his navel. After the shooting that occurred on Monday, June 10, 1889, Waters fled. Sheriff William Jackson Johnson of Milton described Waters “as a kind of Bohemian in his habits, having no particular home, and a very dangerous man.” Still at large, the 72-year-old former Confederate deserter was “a natural woodsman,” which led Sheriff Johnson to believe that he would never be apprehended. Morgan, age 42, who was also a Confederate veteran, wounded at Dallas, Georgia, July 28, 1864, was married and a father of 13 children, ranging in ages from 17 to 2. But on July 6, the sheriff of adjacent Washington County succeeded in capturing Waters after all and turned him over to Sheriff Johnson, who placed him in the Santa Rosa County jail without bond awaiting trial. On October 18, 1889, a jury found Waters guilty of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to life in the Florida State Prison in Raiford. He died while in custody on February 22, 1890.

Seven years later, on February 7, 1897, Moses Leonard (Dick) Morgan was born in an area later known as Gull Point, Florida, the youngest of six children of Delaney Leonard (Len) Morgan (1855-1924) and Georgiana Athey (1860-1940), who were married in Pensacola on October 7, 1881. And though he never knew his father’s older brother Richard, he would proudly take his nickname Dick. He was also named for his maternal grandfather, Moses Prescott Athey (1823-1899), a native of Montgomery, Alabama, who had relocated to the Florida Panhandle in the 1840s and had lived in Santa Rosa County until the 1880s, before moving to Pensacola. Moses Athey too would suffer a violent death on July 15, 1899, around midnight, when as a night watchman at the Perdido wharf, where vessels were docked, an unknown assailant crept up behind him and smashed his head with an iron bar, crushing his skull. Authorities blamed his murder on either a gang that had been in the area robbing freight cars or a black man against whom Athey had testified in police court recently. But both leads resulted in no arrests and his murder went unsolved.

 

 

 

 

 

In 1900, Dick Morgan was living in enumeration district 15, which included Ferry Pass, then just north of Pensacola city limits, with his father Len, age 46, mother Georgiana, 40, and four of his siblings, Charles (1882-1907), Theodore Scott (1888-1963), Dora Iola (1891-1978), and Rhoda Jeanette (1894-1973). Another brother, Eugene, died as an infant in 1885. Len Morgan told the census taker that year that his occupation was “logging,” but the kind of timber work he was doing appears to have involved the removal of tree stumps left by lumber cutters and preserved underwater, a practice known as “deadheading.” In 1902, the Pensacola Tar & Turpentine plant was established at Gull Point to extract tar and other pine products from submerged trunks and tree remnants. Dick’s older brother, Scott, worked as a watchman for the plant when he registered for the draft in June 1917.

 

In 1910, the Morgans were living in the Old Roberts community, where Len, age 57, was doing “odd jobs” and so was Scott, age 22. Completing the household were Georgiana, age 50, and Dora, 19, Rhoda, 15, and Moses (Dick), age 12, none of whom were attending school. The following year Dora married Jesse Lee Reynolds (1890-1938), who also worked at the Pensacola Tar & Turpentine plant and at the time of his death was superintendent of the Southern Pine Extracts Company of Pensacola. And in 1916 Rhoda wed Private First-Class Luther Furman Stone (1897-1965), of Pembroke, North Carolina, who had enlisted in the Regular Army in 1914 and was a radio operator stationed at Fort Barrancas, located on a hilltop overlooking Pensacola Bay. Stone would be sent to France on August 25, 1917, and remain overseas until February 3, 1919. After he was honorably discharged as a Radio Sergeant in September 1920, he worked for the U.S. Customs Service, Border Patrol, in St. Augustine and Miami, and Houston, Texas.

 

 

Some three weeks after the United States declared war against Germany, Dick Morgan, 20 years and 3 months old, volunteered at the Navy recruiting station in Montgomery, Alabama. He passed the physical and was ordered to Norfolk Navy Yard, Virginia, for six weeks of basic training.  Promoted to Fireman Third-Class, he was on the battleship USS Texas (BB-35) for training exercises for five days before being assigned to the USS Louisiana (BB-19). From June 11, 1917, to June 1, 1918, Morgan served aboard the Louisiana as part of a crew of 881 officers and enlisted men.

 

 

Built by the Newport News Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Co. at Newport News, Virginia, Louisiana was laid down in 1903, launched in 1904, and commissioned in 1906. Although she took part in the world cruise of the Great White Fleet (1908–09) and a pair of trips to European waters (1910-11), she primarily operated along the east coast of the United States and in the Caribbean during her career. Between July 1913 and September 1915, Louisiana made three voyages from east coast ports to Mexican waters, her second voyage in 1914 coming at a time when tension between Mexico and the United States was at its peak. Returning from the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana was placed in reserve at Norfolk, where she served as a training ship for midshipmen and naval militiamen on summer cruises. By June 1917, when Dick Morgan joined her crew, she was assigned as a gunnery and engineering training ship for gunners and engine room personnel, cruising off the middle Atlantic coast until September 1918. After the Armistice she saw duty as a troop transport, making four voyages to Brest, France, and bringing American troops back home. Following her final trip back from France, she reported to the Philadelphia Navy Yard, where she was decommissioned in October 1920 and was sold for scrap on November 1, 1923.

 

During routine gunnery practice on June 1, 1918, at about 10:46 a.m., a shell accidently fired from USS New Hampshire pierced the port side of Louisiana, killing one man and wounding several more, including Chicago-born Seaman Ladislaus (Slavek) Lukas (1896-1964), son of an Austrian tailor, who later worked as a cook for the Union Pacific Railroad based in Denver. The next day, Len Morgan of Gull Point, Florida, received an official telegram from the Navy Department in Washington, D.C., informing him that his son Dick Morgan was the one sailor killed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dick Morgan’s remains were returned to Florida and were buried in Old Roberts Cemetery, near his brother Charlie’s grave.