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A Columbia County Boy's Recollections and Memories of Columbia County Florida (2012) Lenvil H. Dicks

CONVERSATION WITH A FORMER SLAVE

About 9 miles South of Lake City, turning off U.S. Hwy. 41-441 at the Circle R Ranch there is a black
top road running East, and known as Gabe road. Therein lies a tale.

There are probably very few people in Columbia County who can recall personally knowing a former
slave. Gabe Shears was a former slave, and I can recall a conversation between him and my Father, the
Reverend John Dicks, at which I was present, together with my older brother, Tribble. I had to be about
four years old at the time of the conversation, due to the fact that Tribble was there, and he entered the
U.S. Navy fora life time career at sometime before my fifth birthday.

I can actually remember my Dad’s conversation with Gabe Shears, who would have been about 90 years
old at that time, and I’m sure that some of my recollection probably has to do with hearing my Father
recount the conversation several times in later years, to other people.

Gabe Shears said that when he was quite a young man, apparently a teen-ager, that he was in Lake City
at the time of the Battle of Olustee. He recounted that some local doctors, (or it may have been just one
doctor) forced him to help them in the gruesome task that they found before them after the Battle of
Olustee was over.

Gabe said that there was an old two story house sitting apparently right where the Blanche Hotel is now
located, and that the house was set up as an emergency hospital for the doctors to try to lake care of the
wounded from the Battle of Olustee.

The wounded men were brought in on two-horse wagons, and the wagons apparently transported
soldiers from both the Confederate Army and the Union Army, who were being brought to Lake City for
medical treatment. From what he recounted, there must have been a very large number of them.

He said the doctors forced him, although by that time he was a freeman, to assist them, and that it was
his duty to carry an amputated arm, leg, hand, foot, or any amputated part of the soldier’s body over to a
window and simply toss the amputated limb out onto the ground. He said that after a time, the pile of
amputated limbs got high enough that he had to go outside and remove some of the amputated limbs
from the top of the pile so that he would have room to put additional amputated body parts out of the
window.

I believe that probably the one thing that he recounted which has caused this conversation to stick in my
mind for all of these years is that I can remember him telling my Father that sometimes at night in his
bed, that he could still hear the terrible screams of the men who were having parts of their body
amputated. They had no anesthetics, and, the surgery was done on the wounded soldier while he was
still fully conscious, and being held down, and in place by other people.

Inasmuch as this conversation would have taken place about 1932, or sometime in the first part of 1933,
it would appear that Gabe Shears was still hearing men scream in his sleep some seventy years later.

Gabe Shears, as a former slave, was given forty acres and a mule, by the United States Government.
That forty acre tract of land was later owned by Mr. Paul Pearce, and after his death was owned for
many many years by his son Ellis Pearce. After the death of Ellis Pearce, the property was purchased

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