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A History of Columbia County Florida (1996) Edward F. Keuchel 77/340

A History of Columbia County, Florida

are intelligent and respectable, but it harbors a set of
tavern and grocery-keepers who are a disgrace to Florida.
What supports the hamlet I can hardly imagine, unless it
be the fact that it is a sort of resting place for the
teamsters and travellers, who have occasion to pass from
Jacksonville to Middle Florida.35
Lanman was amused when he remarked that the town’s only
claim to distinction was based upon the reputation it received
when its citizens drove off an official state surveying party.36 This
was the incident in 1846 occasioned when Colonel Robert Butler,
the Surveyor General of Florida, ordered Deputy Surveyor A. M.
Randolph to proceed to Alligator and survey that part of the
Arredondo Grant in Columbia County. Fearful that confirmation
of the land claim would result in the loss of their land, a citizens’
group headed by William B. Ross met the surveying party near the
courthouse. Ross bluntly told Randolph “Sir, you cannot pass.”
When Randolph persisted, asserting that he was there as an
official agent of the state, his compass and surveying chains were
seized. He was told that any additional attempts would be at the
peril of his life. Randolph quickly judged that the issue was not
worth a life, so he returned to Tallahassee. Surveyor General
Butler was forced to prepare an unsurveyed plat of the Arredondo
Grant, and it was not resurveyed until 1897.37
For the rural folk of Columbia County Lanman offered the
following observations:
The opinion that I formed of the people generally who
lived secluded in these piney woods, was that they were
uniformly kind and obliging, moral as could be expected,
but certainly not over-burdened with intelligence. Many

“Charles Lanman, Adventures in the Wilds of the United States and British
American Provinces (Philadelphia, 1856), Vol. II, p. 133.
36Ibid., pp. 133-34.
37 Florida Department of Natural Resources, Division of Land Records, Letters
of the Surveyor General, Vol. 5, pp. 203-05; James J. Miller, “An Archaeological and
Historical Survey Assessment of the Lake City Plan 201, Columbia County,
Florida,” (Gainesville, 1977), pp. 18-20.

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