Featured Items

US Treasury check

A US Treasury check from Captain Daniel Woodbury of the US Army Corps of Engineers to James Filor. DeWolfe and Wood Collection.

James Filor was Key West’s leading slave owner, and for many years he made money from his human property by renting them to the US Government as laborers for the construction of Forts Taylor and Jefferson. This US Treasury check, written to Filor by Capt. Daniel Woodbury of the US Army Corps of Engineers from Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, is almost certainly payment for the rental of his enslaved people. When President Lincoln issued the emancipation proclamation, Filor knew his income was threatened, and he wrote a letter to the President urging that the Florida Keys be exempted from the new law’s effects (See: https://www.loc.gov/resource/mal.2093400/?st=text).

Source: Florida Keys History Center, Monroe County Public Library.

Sandy Cornish engraving

Uncle Sandie,” an engraving of Sandy Cornish from After the War: A Tour of the Southern States, 1865-1866 by Whitelaw Reid (1866).

Sandy Cornish was Key West’s leading citizen of African descent in the mid-nineteenth century. He was born under enslavement in Maryland in 1793. In the 1840s, he earned his freedom by working on the railroad at Port Leon, Florida. There, after he had lost his freedman papers in a fire, a group of men attempted to seize him to sell him in New Orleans, but he fought them off. To make himself worthless as a slave and immune to such recapture, Cornish publicly maimed himself in the town square by cutting ankle muscles, plunging a knife into his hip, and chopping off fingers from his left hand. After he healed, Cornish and his wife Liliah made their way to Key West, where he became a successful farmer, raising livestock and growing a variety of vegetables and tropical fruits. When emancipation came to the island, Cornish led the celebratory parade. After emancipation, Cornish founded a church, which still stands today as the Cornish Memorial AME Zion Church. Sandy Cornish died at Key West in 1869.

Source: Florida Keys History Center, Monroe County Public Library.

Negro Emancipation Jubilee article, Key West 1863

“INTERESTING FROM KEY WEST. THE NEGRO EMANCIPATION JUBILEE.” From the New York Herald, February 11, 1883, p.8.

A reporter for the New York Herald was at Key West and witnessed the parade that celebrated emancipation’s arrival on the island. The unidentified reporter was not particularly impressed by the participants and wrote a decidedly racist account of the proceedings. Nonetheless, despite the ugly tone of the writing, the joy and pride felt by the celebrants comes through quite clearly.

Source: Florida Keys History Center, Monroe County Public Library.