HISTORY OF PASCO COUNTY

San Antonio

A Short History of the San Antonio Area

On February 15, 1882, two men walked up a pine covered hill in what was then the southern part of Hernando County. From the hilltop they looked down upon a large and exceptionally clear lake. Government surveyors in 1845 had missed the lake altogether and the area was virtually uninhabited so the men probably felt that they had discovered the lake. One of them drew a Latin prayer book from his pack and read that the day was the feast of St. Jovita. He accordingly named the lake in honor of that early Christian martyr. The two men proceeded around the lake to the hilltop where St. Leo Abbey now stands and one of them decided that he would reserve that land for himself.

The travelers were Edmund F. Dunne, former chief justice of the Arizona territory, and his cousin, Captain Hugh Dunne. Judge Dunne was one of the attorneys involved in negotiating the Disston purchase of 1881, when Hamilton Disston of Philadelphia purchased four million acres of state owned land at twenty five cents an acre, thereby providing Florida with enough money to avoid default on the interest due on state bonds. Dunne took his attorney's fee in the form of an option to develop a tract of one hundred thousand acres. Remembering the discrimination which Roman Catholics had experienced in Ireland and many parts of the United States in the nineteenth century and still smarting from the anti-Catholicism he had experienced in Arizona, Dunne envisioned the land as a "Catholic Colony", a settlement dominated by Roman Catholics, a center of Catholic civilization in Florida.

Judge Dunne placed the center of his colony a short distance to the southwest of Lake Jovita. There he carefully planned a town, named "San Antonio" to honor St. Anthony of Padua in acknowledgment of an answered prayer. For the City of San Antonio he reserved a full section of land, plotted streets and residential lots and set aside property for schools, a monastery, a convent and an orphan's asylum. In the middle of town he laid out a public square in the European style.

By 1883, the town of San Antonio was well established with several stores, a barn-like church with a resident priest (Father O'Boyle) and a school taught by Mrs. Cecelia Moore. In 1884, Dunne started publication of a newspaper, The San Antonio Herald. The early settlers of the colony included the McCabe, Gailmard, Hand, Carroll, Bischoff, Freese, O'Neal, Weaver, Liles, Quigley, Flannigan and Corrigan families. Most of the early settlers were of Irish decent, as was Judge Dunne himself, a papal knight and heir to ancient Irish titles of nobility.

The colony's medical doctor was Dr. Joseph Corrigan, a wealthy and well educated man, brother of Archbishop Michael Corrigan of New York. The doctor acquired a large tract along the east side of Lake Jovita and built a palatial three story home. The house, with its private chapel, burned in 1913 but some of the palm trees which lined roads on the Corrigan estate and on the Jovita golf course which occupied the property in the 1920's and 30's can still be seen. The colony's Justice of the Peace, Judge John Flannigan, lived in town in an elegant Victorian structure (now the Arnade home) . Judge Dunne himself resided in a book-filled cabin on the hilltop where St. Leo Abbey now stands. His wife, Josephine, who played an important role in organization of the colony, died in 1883.

Before the arrival of the Catholic Colony, the San Antonio area was largely uninhabited, save by the Osburn, Tucker, Wells, Kersey, Ryals and Wischers families. Before 1882, the Wischers were the only Catholics in Southern Hernando County. The small groups of protestant "crackers" in the area generally accepted the arrival of Catholic neighbors and even attended church with them on occasion. A French visitor to San Antonio in 1885 counted some sixty non-Catholics at the Easter Mass.

Until the late 1880's San Antonio, like the rest of Hernando County, was quite isolated. Long journeys by wagon or ox cart were required to reach the nearest port (Tampa) or railroad station (Wildwood) . After 1887, when the South Florida Railroad passed through Dade City, things changed rapidly. Pasco County was formed out of the southern end of Hernando. The Orange Belt Railroad was constructed, passing through San Antonio on its way to St. Petersburg. Crops could now be shipped quickly and efficiently to northern markets. Many new settlers arrived and, to accommodate the prosperity which followed the railroads, the Bank of Pasco County was established in Dade City in 1889.

During this period the Order of St. Benedict began to make its mark on the developing community. Father Gerald Pilz, O. S. B., succeeded Father O'Boyle as parish priest and a group of Benedictine sisters arrived to manage St. Anthony's School and found a private girl's school at their convent, Holy Name, then located in the former Sultenfuss Hotel at the north end of the square. The building was moved in 1911, by an elaborate system of ox-powered pulleys and winches, to the hilltop where Holy Name Monastery now stands.

In 1889, Judge Dunne conveyed his own lands to the order of St. Benedict and a small party of monks led by Father Charles Mohr, O. S. B., arrived to establish a monastery and Catholic school and to found the town of St. Leo. The monks added to the groves planted by Judge Dunne and built a large frame structure to contain monastery, school and church. In the early days, St. Leo provided instruction which would now be considered at both high school and junior college level and granted a degree called "Master of Accounts." It was a military school at first but the military aspects were slowly abandoned during the early part of the twentieth century. The monastery was elevated to an Abbey in 1902 and Father Charles became its first Abbot.

In addition to providing priests for the churches of the Catholic Colony, the monks established Catholic parishes in Dade City, Zephyrhills, New Port Richey, Brooksville and Crystal River. St. Leo continued to supply priests for Catholic congregations throughout Pasco, Hernando and Citrus counties until the last decade of the 20th Century.

Beginning in 1883, the Barthle family led a number of Catholic immigrants from the German Empire into the area (by way of Minnesota) and founded St. Joseph, the last and only survivor of Dunne's planned villages. A little board-and-batten church was built there in 1888 and dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

The whole area was permanently affected by the steadily increasing number of German settlers. By 1896 San Antonio's Newspaper was no longer The Herald but the Florida Staats Zeitung. Undaunted by the great freeze of 1895, which severely damaged the citrus industry and caused the demise of many Florida towns, German families experimented with a wide variety of crops and, for a time, made the Catholic Colony a center of the strawberry industry.

San Antonio and the surrounding area maintained a distinctly Germanic character until the era of the First World War when Florida was convulsed with an unprecedented wave of Anti-German feeling combined with a strong Anti-Catholic movement led by the state's governor, Sidney J. Catts. Governor Catts was widely quoted (and widely believed) to the effect that the "German" monks at St. Leo had an arsenal and were planning to arm Florida Negroes for an insurrection in favor of Kaiser Wilhelm II, after which the Pope would take over Florida and move the Vatican to San Antonio (and, of course, close all protestant churches) . A number of German settlers moved away to friendlier parts of the country. Others stayed and took the pressure. Abbot Charles of St. Leo published several dignified responses to the extravagant claims about Catholic "plots" and many local protestants made a point of appearing in public with their Catholic neighbors. When Catts visited the Pasco County area, he generally omitted the anti-Catholic portions of his speeches.

During the first two decades of the century, the Benedictines constructed the f irst concrete block building in Pasco County. St. Leo Hall at St. Leo was begun in 1906 and completed at the end of World War I. St. Scholastica Hall at Holy Name was completed in 1912. The architect for these structures was Brother Anthony Poiger, O. S. B. He designed the buildings and, using a mailorder kit, worked out the process for making the "Palmer" blocks used in their construction. St. Scholastic Hall was pulled down in 1978, but St. Leo Hall still stands, a monument to the industry of Florida's Benedictine pioneers.

In 1926, during the Florida land boom, San Antonio was reorganized as the "City of Lake Jovita" and its boundaries extended a considerable distance. In an effort to "modernize," Judge Dunne's street names were changed: Sacred Heart Street becoming Rhode Island Avenue, Pius IX Avenue becoming Curley Street, etc. The land boom ended abruptly in the same year, causing bank failures throughout the state. The Bank of Pasco County was the only local bank and one of the few in Florida to survive the "bust" of 1926 and the stock market crash which followed in 1929. When the Great Depression made it clear that the "boom" would not revive, the town changed its name back to San Antonio and withdrew the city limits to the section lines where Judge Dunne had put them in 1882 and where they largely remain. The secularized street names are about the only remnants of San Antonio's "boom-time" modernism.

In the 1920's, the Jovita golf course, built on the former Corrigan property, attracted internationally known golfers, including Gene Sarazen. The golf course did not survive the Great Depression but has been rebuilt and expanded in the 1990's with the development of the Lake Jovita Golf and Country Club.

St. Leo functioned as a college preparatory school for boys into the 1960's. Holy Name Academy functioned as a private girl's school during the same period. By 1965 St. Leo and Holy Name had closed the secondary schools in order to make their facilities available for St. Leo Junior College, later a four year college and now a university with a graduate degree program.

A community with deep roots in the past and strong agricultural ties, Judge Dunne's Catholic Colony is now comprised of the Cities of San Antonio and St. Leo, the unincorporated village of St. Joseph and miles of orange trees and pasture lands. The central role played by the Catholic church in the life of the community and the deep commitment to agriculture by generations of residents are, like San Antonio's town square, reminders of what Judge Dunne envisioned in 1882.

Centennial of the Incorporation of San Antonio

What we are commemorating today is the centennial of the incorporation of the town of San Antonio. But the founding occurred ten years earlier. What happened 100 years ago August 7 was that the voters of this community went to the city hall and voted to incorporate formally as a town, and also had an election to choose a mayor and a board of aldermen for the first time.

There were 36 people who voted in that election. The incorporation was not unanimous. They voted 28-8 in favor of it, and they chose G. S. Bowen as mayor and five aldermen, including Pat McCabe, the patriarch of the family that still continues with many members in San Antonio today.

This, evidently, was the first election that was ever held here -- because for its first ten years San Antonio was something of a monarchy.

This was a very unusual community. It was settled in systematic fashion under the direction of Judge Edmund Dunne, who was a former federal judge from Arizona, who had a vision to found a colony for his fellow Catholics, as something of a cultural refuge.

In the summer of 1881 he got an opportunity to do so through an unusual set of circumstances.

The State of Florida was going bankrupt and, in order to raise funds, the State decided to sell much of its only asset, its public domain, its land. So the State of Florida sold 4,000,000 acres to an entrepreneur from Philadelphia named Hamilton Disston for $1,000,000 -- 25 cents an acre.

Judge Edmund Dunne handled the legal arrangements for that sale in the summer of 1881, the sale of what's called the "Disston Purchase." As a result, Dunne was given by the Disston Company the control of eventually 100,000 acres of land. He didn't own it. But Judge Dunne had a right to control the disposition of this 100,000 acres of land that he selected from the Disston Purchase , and he used it to found what was formally called the "Catholic Colony of San Antonio."

Let me read you a description of Dunne's account that he gave to a newspaper reporter in 1885 of how he came to found the Catholic Colony of San Antonio and the circumstances of his arrival here. The colony was established in 1881; Dunne himself arrived on February 15, 1882. Here is Judge Edmund Dunne speaking to a newspaper reporter from the Baltimore Catholic Mirror in August of 1885:

The great Disston purchase of 4,000,000 acres in Florida was made about June 1, 1881. I was selected by Mr. Disston as his attorney to go to Florida and to assist in the selection and to supervise the taking out of the title deeds. I obtained, as part of this arrangement, the right to have the first selection, out of the purchase, 50,000 acres of land for a Catholic colony, with the privilege that when I had sold a certain amount I should have the further privilege of taking another 50,000 acres for the same purpose.

This contract was made August 10, 1881. On August 19 I was in Florida and began the work of this selection. On February 15, 1882. I made my selection of the first 50,000 acres and had established the initial point of the settlement at a place now know as San Antonio, on the southwest shore of Lake Jovita.

Dunne went on to describe how he came to choose this particular area, which was selected after many weeks of searching, and chosen for particular reasons. He contacted his cousin Captain Hugh Dunne, who had served in the Union army during the Civil War and was a resident of Atlanta, and who was familiar with Florida from a previous trip:

I telegraphed him to come and help me select the site for our first settlement. He met me at Jacksonville and we examined the country together. After examining everything from Sumterville to Tuckertown, a distance of thirty miles from north to south and crossing the reservation repeatedly from ten to fifteen miles from east to west, we chose this place on Clear Lake as by all odds the place to start the settlement, with a view to health, and orange and grape culture.

and he continues:

The colony reservation is on a plateau of high land, considerable higher than the Fort Dade region. The selection was made after many weeks tramping on foot through the country, with the particular object of trying to find a high, dry country, free from malaria. The town of San Antonio is on the very apex of all the high land of that region.

So he laid out his plan in the summer of 1881, and arrived here on February 15, 1882. That happened to be St. Jovita's Day, and since Judge Dunne was a serious Catholic, that's the reason why he changed the name of the lake from its traditional name Clear Lake to Lake Jovita -- because he arrived here on St. Jovita's February 15, 1882.

He chose the name San Antonio for this community because St. Anthony of Padua is a saint Catholics often pray to when they have lost something. Judge Dunne himself, as he later said, had been lost in the desert some years earlier when he was prospecting for silver, and he prayed to Saint Anthony in the hope that he would find his way. And suddenly he noticed a camp fire off in the distance and thus was rescued. And so with his long-term plan to found a Catholic colony, this name "San Antonio" had been continuously in his mind.

He began the actual settlement in the summer of 1882. As he was promoting the colony in Catholic newspapers, especially throughout the Northeast, he would send descriptions of life in San Antonio in the hope of attracting settlers. Here's a description Dunne wrote of what life in San Antonio was like at its very beginning in the summer of 1882. It appeared in a letter he wrote to the Catholic Review of Brooklyn, New York in August of 1882:

...our colonists all came in the most trying season of the year, the beginning of summer, with no accommodations prepared, no conveniences attainable, no wells dug, nothing in general but lake and pond water to drink: sleeping on the ground with or without bedding: all very trying to health.

Then there was a planting season coming in July, and a feverish haste to get some orange trees in the ground immediately, in consequence of which our colonists worked long and hard, late and early, in sun and rain, felling trees and grubbing ground, heavy work even for the cool of winter.

The women had to cook outdoors without shelter from the sun or rain, and with but little to cook and small variety to eat. We have had 40 persons here of ages ranging from 1 to 70 years.

So San Antonio in its first few months had 40 settlers. The peak of its population in this period of the 1880s was 400 people in 1885.

Judge Dunne remarked at this time how, from his perspective, life had advanced in that three years from the very first settlement to the summer of 1885 when, by his standards, things were flourishing. He told this to a newspaper reporter:

...there are about three hundred people in the colony, with a Catholic church built, free of debt, a resident Catholic priest, a parochial school, a post-office, three stores and a number of residences. Also another town is established three and a half miles northwest of San Antonio, named St. Thomas with a post-office.

Four miles south of San Antonio the town of Carmel is established, a colony store being erected and application for a post-office made.

Dunne envisioned that San Antonio proper would be the hub surrounded by a ring of satellite communities.

Carmel was laid out about five miles to the south. Villa Maria was planned for one mile to the south. Saint Thomas would be some five miles to the northwest, and St. Philip five miles to the northeast.

And as part of his regulations in those years, all the settlers had to be Catholic, and not only that, they had to have a letter from a priest certifying that they were in good standing. In his sales of land through the Disston Company, Dunne could control who the settlers would be. Land was very cheap: $1.25 an acre to as much as $5 or $10 an acre, depending on its location.

In his effort to attract people he wrote these accounts of colony life throughout that time. In fact, this town is noted for still having descendants from some of those early settlers, who called themselves "colonists." Madaline Beaumont's parents, for example -- Mary Hand and Louis Govreau -- read Judge Dunne's letters while living in Missouri in the mid 1880s and moved down here to this Catholic Colony of San Antonio because they found appealing the descriptions that he gave.

The Catholics-only regulation was something of a controversy and only lasted about six years. Here's a commentary from a visitor from Pittsburgh, who came through here in the summer of 1884 and was very impressed with Judge Dunne, but who disagreed with Dunne's idea that the settlement should be for Catholics only. This was an interview he gave to the newspaper the Pittsburgh Leader in June of 1884. His name was W. B. McCaffrey:

San Antonio is the town of Judge Dunne's colony, situated on a beautiful lake in Hernando county. You will not find the name on the maps, as yet, but it is located near Fort Dade. The colony is in a flourishing condition and numbers at present 256 souls.

The judge controls 100,000 acres of the best land in the state, and is a most noble gentleman. To know him is to like him, but I think he is too hard on the sinners. He will only sell land to the catholics who show a certificate from a priest that they are practical Catholics.

I asked the judge if he wouldn't take a few of the lax Catholics and show then a good example with the idea of making them practical. He answered, no; that the colony was not a missionary society: that his idea was a community leading a life of virtue as Christians should.

I would not live in his colony for two reasons: First, I would not purchase a home where a Protestant friend could not purchase beside me; secondly, I don't wish to rest with the saints before my time.

The last reason and the name of Saint's Rest, which I gave to the colony, amused the judge highly. I do not wish to convey the impression that the judge is a narrow bigot or hates Protestants, but he has an idea, and he is determined to carry it out. He is the only man in Florida who sells good lands at low prices.

So, one major issue of colony life at that time was the homogeneity of Catholicism, which was the vision that Dunne had and the reason San Antonio was founded.

Another major issue of the 1880s was the conflict between the Irish Catholics and the German Catholics. There were about 400 people here at its peak of settlement in the mid-1880s, and about half of them were German, a little less than half were Irish, and then there were some French Catholics as well.

The Germans were unhappy with the Irish priest, John O'Boyle. They wanted a German-speaking priest to present religious services in their own language. So Judge Dunne, of Irish background himself, in order to appeal to the interest of his people, arranged to have a German-speaking priest sent here to provide bilingual services.

Such a priest arrived --a man named Gerard Pilz -- in May of 1886. This is how the Benedictines happened to come to Florida, how Holy Name Priory come to be established, and how Saint Leo Abbey and Saint Leo college come to be founded; because of the conflict between the German and the Irish Catholics in the Catholic Colony in the summer of 1886.

Gerard Pilz was a Benedictine priest from St. Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, Pa., and his arrival settled this conflict between the English-speakers and the German-speakers because he was able to present services in both languages.

Dunne himself is to me a very interesting man. He was imperious in many ways, but he was a visionary. He had a lot of conflicts., toward the end, with his colonists, but he was well respected throughout the early years of San Antonio.

Madaline Beaumont told me that when she was growing up in San Antonio, Judge Dunne's name was regarded heroically. Dunne himself left here in 1890 in the midst of a number of troubles, largely because he had overextended himself financially. So Judge Dunne was not here when the municipality incorporated, the centennial of which we are commemorating today.

Finally, let me read you a description of San Antonio on the eve of the incorporation whose centennial we are now commemorating. This is an account from the Tampa Journal, a newspaper which ran a series of profiles about the towns along the Orange Belt Railway. The article is from November of 1889, and it describes the very place where we are standing now:

The streets are all broad at least 80 feet, and there are plazas and plazas. The convent

-- which used to be located just to the north of the park --

which is a handsome building, is in a large lot, while before it is a four acre baseball ground, said to be the largest in the country.

That's where we're standing now: a four-acre baseball ground in 1889.

It is perfectly flat and almost as smooth as a floor. The church and parsonage stand in another four acre lot, planted with orange trees. Indeed the center of the town is one immense court.

There can never be sickness on this account. By no possibility can the houses crowd each other. The building lots themselves are twice as large as in other towns. Judge Dunne in laying out the town worked on the principle that where land is so plenty, plenty can be spared. Another innovation is that the town is so platted that the houses all face either east or west, thus allowing the trade winds in sweep through them, insuring always fresh air.

There are five stores in the town and a most excellent hotel, the Pasco House. The house itself is plain and neat, the table fine, everything being cleanly and as far as possible home made.

A most excellent sign is that ones sees no loafers anywhere around.

And finally the report concludes:

Although a Catholic community there are many Protestant settlers, and everything moves on harmoniously.

I suppose that might be a theme we could pick up on for our commemoration today -- that life is San Antonio, from its beginnings, has been reasonable harmonious. And I might say also, has been reasonable harmonious. And I might say also, it seems to me that this community in the past century has changed little. At its peak in population in the "colonial" period, there were 400 people who lived here. There are only a few hundred more today. What we are really remembering is this distinctive feature of our community: the close knit sense of harmony that many people feel.

And in our centennial commemoration, that is a persistent value we can keep in mind.

This was the centennial address Dr. Horgan presented in the San Antonio city park on August 11. He has done extensive research on the history of San Antonio and Saint Leo and is the author of "Pioneer College: The Centennial History of Saint Leo College, Saint Leo Abbey, and Holy Name Priory." The book is available for $24.95 from the Saint Leo College Press, P.O. Box 2247, Saint Leo. Fl. 33574 also at the Saint Leo College Bookstore.

Notes