TheTLH 200: Gerald Ensley Memorial Bicentennial Projectis proud to announce the fifth installment of ourrolling list of 200people who laid the foundation for the growth of the civil society we find today in Tallahassee.
As the city commemorates the 200thanniversary of its founding, the Tallahassee Democrat and Real Talk 93.3 havecast a wide netto find artists, educators, civil rights leaders, politicians, athletes, builders, business titans and neighborhood icons who earned a place in the spotlight.
We need your help in identifying those individuals.
You can email your suggestions of candidates to be profiled and other suggestions tohistory@tallahassee.com. And listen toGreg Tish’s morning show on Real Talk 93.3where we'll discuss the legacy of these history makers.
The only condition is that those featured below must be deceased. Ten names will be added twice a month, so be sure to check back for updates.
Without further ado here is the fifth edition of 10 people who helped make Tallahassee someplace special ...
Read the full list online attallahassee.com/tlh200.
Fred Mahan (1886 - 1960)
On the east side of town where Hillcrest Avenue meets U.S. 90 there’s a 76-year-old marker that designates the highway from Tallahassee to Monticello as Fred Mahan Drive.
Fred Mahan was a horticulturist from Dodge City, Kansas, who had a passion for highway beautification.
He also created the Mahan Pecan, a pecan with a bigger nut and lighter shell, at his Monticello nursery.
In the 1920s, he would own the second-largest pecan and ornamental shrubs business in the southeast.
Coronet Magazine described him as a “strange philanthropist who bestows beauty instead of dollars" while "spreading scenic bounty across the state he loves.”
At the height of the Great Depression, Mahan donated thousands of plants to the county unemployment relief commissions for beautification projects to employ the jobless.
When a road company got a contract to remove tree stubs and make other road improvements along U.S. 90 between Tallahassee and Monticello, he contributed thousands of crepe myrtles, camellias, ligustrum, palms, and Pyracanthas to landscape the roadway as part of the project – creating 45 additional jobs.
The 26-mile long project from the east side of Tallahassee to the Monticello courthouse would take 15 years to complete.
When it was completed in 1948 and Mahan recognized with a marker then-state senator and future Gov. LeRoy Collins called Fred Mahan Drive “a corridor of goodwill" that connects the two cities.
It is said during his life Fred Mahan donated nearly 400,000 trees, shrubs, and flowers, to schools, churches, cemeteries, hospitals, parks, squares, and public thoroughfares.
Calvin Jones (1938 - 1998)
Calvin Jones would say, “The dirt don’t lie.” Jones would know. He made some of the most important discoveries of ancient humans in Florida during a 30-year career at the Florida Bureau of Archaeological Research.
Jones had an uncanny ability to look at a piece of land and predict whether artifacts would be found.
Working in advance of interstate construction near Tampa, Jones discovered the earliest tangible evidence of humans on the peninsula, dating to 12,000 years ago.
Across north Florida he uncovered a prehistoric site at Lake Lafayette, found the sites of nine Spanish era missions, and discovered the Apalachee burial mounds at Lake Jackson – which at the time was called the American pyramids.
Jones was a Texan, descendant of Creek and Cherokee natives.
“I can’t talk mythology, but I know what's in the ground,” Jones told the Tallahassee Democrat’s Gerald Ensley in 1997.
For years on his morning commute to work Jones had eyed a hillside opposite the State Capitol, suspecting it had a story to tell.
He got permission to poke around in 1987 and made his most heralded discovery – the 1539-40 winter encampment of Hernando de Soto.
Jones unearthed pottery, coins, and chain mail, to link the land to De Soto’s expedition – the first verified DeSoto camp from his exploration of the continent.
“You cannot disturb the earth without leaving imprints,” Jones said.
Daniel Dale Green (1955 -2002)
Tallahassee Police Department Sergeant Daniel Dale Green was shot and killed in an ambush while responding to a home-invasion on Melody Circle.
Green was a 13-year veteran with TPD, having served as an expert sniper, trainer, field supervisor, and a K-9 patrol officer.
As he approached the scene, Green observed a suspicious car with its engine running. He called in the vehicle’s description and tag number. The dispatcher then heard gunshots.
A second officer rushed to the scene; Green had been shot four times in the back of the head.
The suspect fled north, Green was rushed to the hospital, and law enforcement swarmed into the northwest sector where they sealed off Sharer Road near the Fun Station.
Gunfire was exchanged with the suspect who then surrendered.
At Tallahassee Memorial Hospital TPD officers, sheriff deputies, and Highway Patrol troopers stood watch. About 21 minutes after the suspect was taken into custody, Sgt. Dale Green’s death was announced.
Green left behind a wife and three children.
A Tallahassee native, Green was remembered as a “lover of music, fishing, and camping.”
“Everybody just loved him,” said then-city commissioner John Paul Bailey the night of the shooting.
Bailey, a retired police officer, had served with Green before Bailey's 1996 retirement.
In May 2014, Desoto Street was renamed Sgt. Dale Green Way
June Fouts Strauss (1930 - 2010)
June Fouts of Jacksonville arrived at the Florida State University campus in 1948 where she met Buddy Strauss,from a pioneer Tallahassee family.
The two married in 1950, raised six children, and June became Tallahassee’s volunteer extraordinaire.
A 1998 Tallahassee Democrat profile concluded no one had done as much to promote art and theater in Tallahassee or help as many abused children get a new start than June Fouts Strauss.
Businessman Mark Goldman said a photograph of Strauss should be listed in the dictionary with the definition for “superlative.”
“And I’m not prone to superlatives,” Goldman told the Democrat’s Dorothy Clifford.
Strauss served as a homeroom mother at Blessed Sacrament School (now Trinity Catholic) for 17 consecutive years (1957 – 1975).
And she helped organize iconic Tallahassee organizations and clubs.Strauss was a founding member of the boards for the LeMoyne Art Foundation, the Southern Shakespeare Festival, Florida State University School of Theatre’s Patrons Association, and the Governor’s Club.
In 1985, she established the first Boys Town USA campus outside of Omaha, Nebraska, where the 106-year-old residential care facility for youths was founded. She would serve on the organization’s National Board of Trustees for six years.
In 1986, Strauss played a key role in raising money to create the Tree House emergency shelter for abused and neglected children.
Strauss was the Tallahassee Democrat Volunteer of the Year for the Arts in 1980 and the Department of Children and Families nominee for the social services Volunteer of the Year in 1998.
She deflected any credit for accomplishments sent her way, saying the accolades belong to others.
“I'm a facilitator - someone else had the original idea," Strauss said.
The second Tree House site, established in 1989 is named the “June Strauss Tree House.”
Dr. Eva Wanton (1935 - 2014)
In remote west Africa you will find a library named for a Tallahassee language professor.
Dr. Eva Wanton of Thunderbolt, Ga., accepted a one-year appointment as a Florida A&M University foreign language teacher in 1964 and then decidedto makeTallahassee home.
At FAMU she would go on to become a full professor, a dean, an associate vice president, and a special assistant to interim president Castell Bryant.
She described her relationship with the school to Tallahassee Democrat columnist Gerald Ensley as a “love obsession.”
Students loved her back.
In 1997 when a university reorganization plan eliminated Wanton’s position, they launched a petition drive and held rallies on her behalf. Wanton was promoted to Vice President of Academic Affairs.
"I was kind of in awe of her brilliance," Eddie Jackson, the late FAMU communications director, said at her passing.
"Her control and mastery of English was so great and so graceful. It was a joy to hear her speak. Whenever I saw she was going to speak (at an event), I knew I was in for a treat.”
Wanton loved to travel. One trip took her to Ghana where she came across a village where animals and children shared the same water supply.
Back home she told her church what she had seen. The Africare Ministry at Bethel Missionary Baptist Church dug the village a well and adopted their school.
If you go to Mampong, Ghana and stop at the Bong Rong School you can visit the Dr. Eva C. Wanton Library and Computer Laboratory.
It was dedicated in 2017 to the professor who connected the village to a Tallahassee church that helped raise the money to build, equip and staff the school.
Judge Joseph Woodrow Hatchett (1933 - 2021)
Joseph Woodrow Hatchett of Daytona Beach came to Tallahassee to study at Florida A&M University and became a man of many firsts.
Hatchett was the first Black Florida Supreme Court Justice, the first and only Black man to win a statewide election, and the first Black federal appeals court judge in what was once the Confederacy.
He accomplished this after Jim Crow prevented him from having lunch or staying overnight in the hotel where the Florida Bar examination was administered.
Hatchett passed the bar and today the federal courthouse in Tallahassee is named in his honor.
A FAMU and Howard law school graduate, Hatchett was remembered by former clerks, and colleagues as a jurist who never lost faith in law as an instrument of justice.
A former clerk said in Hatchett’s 600 opinions you find a deep compassion for protecting the rights of people, especially the oppressed.
Gov. Reubin Askew appointed Hatchett to serve on the Florida Supreme Court in 1975. The next year he stood for reelection and became the first Black man since Reconstruction to win a statewide election in the South, and remains the only Floridian to do so.
“I wonder if Judge Hatchett could have imagined ..., the United States Courthouse in Tallahassee, Florida’s Capitol, just blocks from his alma mater, would be named the Joseph Woodrow Hatchett U.S. Courthouse and Federal Building,” former Hatchett clerk and now Eleventh Circuit Judge Charles R. Wilsonsaid at the courthouse designation ceremony in 2023.
Romulus Thompson (1906 - 1996)
After Leon schools decided to form a Leon High School Redcoats Marching Band in 1939 a statewide search found Romulus Thompson, the Crestview High School band director and a former assistant director at DeFuniak Spring schools.
The 34-year-old Thompson moved to Tallahassee, rallied the community to help outfit the unit and recruited 89 "students interested in learning how to play band instruments."
Thomas designed the Redcoats uniform in the style of the West Point Military Academy, substituting a rich red for West Point gray – and placed an order with the Fitchheimer Company, West Point’s supplier.
During the 1940s,under Thomas’ direction, the Leon High School Marching Redcoats became one of the highest rated and most well-traveled bands in the state.
“Of course, we had the finest students you ever saw, absolutely outstanding. There was no reason it couldn’t be a great success,” Thompson said at the 50th reunion/anniversary of Leon’s first band.
Thompson's leadership style, enthusiasm, and success both in Crestview and Tallahassee drew comparisons to Professor Harold Hill from the musical “The Music Man.”
At both locales, he had a band ready to march in parades and entertain at halftime of football games.
The Redcoats performance at the Northwest Florida Music Festival in the mid-1940s led a judge from Northwestern University to proclaim “I have never seen a more ingeniously planned performance on the field. This performance would be a sensation at any contest in the United States."
Thompson stayed at Leon until 1950 when he accepted the band director position for Jefferson County High.
In 2000, the state honored Thompson as a Great Floridian and installed a plaque at Leon High School at Meridian Road.
Lydia Smith (circa 1820- 1885)
Lydia Stout was the free, well-educated mulatto cousin of George Proctor son of Antonio, a scout on the mission to find a location for a state Capitol. Sometime in the 1840s, George persuaded Lydia to leave the Bahamas and come to Tallahassee and be the governess for six children.
John Proctor told the Federal Writers’ project his father George set off to California to look for gold and Lydia apparently came to town to help his mom Nancy.
Once here Lydia would marry the Rev. James Smith.
Lydia and James would embark on careers in teaching; they opened two schools. And the couple did missionary work through the Methodist Church in post-war Tallahassee.
Historian Lee Warner in "Free Men in the Age of Servitude," a three-generation account of the Proctor family, finds an 1850s Floridian editorial by Charles Dykes that praised Lydia's teaching skills and called on the community to encourage this “well-known colored lady” in her church work.
Warner is convinced that Lydia also was the subject of a Freedmen’s Bureau inspector’s 1865 report from Tallahassee that described a school of “interesting girls” with a “mulatto woman of education,” who announced she intended “to make ladies of these girls.”
The Smiths would open a school known as The Academy in post-war Tallahassee with about 100 students.
Their last known residence was 314 West Park Avenue.
Bill Peterson (1920 - 1993)
A Toronto, Ohio native, Bill Peterson coached FSU football from 1960 through 1970. He inherited a club that went 4 – 6 before his arrival and 3-6-1 in his first season.
Peterson then introduced the country to FSU football. He recorded the program's first victory over the University of Florida in 1964, beat an until-then-undefeated and top-ranked Kentucky, and had a breakthrough season in 1967 for a football program that began playing in 1948.
The Seminoles went 7-2-2 that year with stunning performances against Joe Paterno's Penn State University and blue-blood programs like Texas A&M, and the University of Florida – again.
Before the largest television audience the team had ever performed, the Seminoles fought the Nittany Lions to a 17 – 17 tie in the Gator Bowl.
Seminole faithful say that day on Dec. 30, 1967, FSU, the football team and the university, landed on the national stage.
TheSan Francisco 49ers offered Peterson a job.
He turned down the NFL, telling the Tallahassee Democrat his family liked Tallahassee and it was a good place to bring up children.
“I’m going to stay right here and work toward one more objective – a national championship for FSU,” Peterson said.
The newspaper responded with an editorial that “Coach Pete already is number one in the eyes of Tallahassee."
Will Peterson, a grandson, said the coach uncharacteristically clipped and saved the piece.
He also signed FSU's first Black football player. He hired Bobby Bowden as an assistant, he introduced a pro-type passing game to college football, and he posted a 60% winning percentage.
Twelve of his former assistants went on to become head coaches, including Super Bowl winners Joe Gibbs, and Bill Parcells – and two-time NCAA National Championship coach Bobby Bowden.
And there are the Petersonisms that delighted Tallahassee.
One day he told his players “to line up alphabetically by height” for photos. Another time he announced to friends that, “The greatest thing just happened. I got indicted into the Florida Sports Hall of Fame.”
Peterson's relationship with the city was such that when Will did a search of the Tallahassee Democrat 1960 archives Coach Bill Peterson was mentioned more times than governors Claude Kirk, Leroy Collins, and Farris Bryant.
At his passing, legendary sportswriter Steve Ellis wrote Peterson is “one of the single most significant contributors to the success of Florida State Athletics.”
Sharyn Heiland Shields (1946 - 2023)
Atlantic City native Sharyn Shields earned a Master of Arts in dance at Florida State University. She met her husband John, taught at Tallahassee Community College, the University of Florida and Hunter’s College in New York, and then returned to Tallahassee where she became a fervent scholar of archaeology.
Shields worked as a Historic Preservation Grants supervisor for the state of Florida, and as an exhibit manager for the Institute of World War II in the FSU history department.
While a FSU masters student, Shields began to research Benjamin Chaires' Verdura plantation, which was in east Leon County. Her thesis provided the first historical overview of the three-story, 15-room, 10 column mansion that sat on a 9,000 acres farm maintained by 300 enslaved people.
The thesis led to "Whispers from Verdura: The Lost Legacy of Benjamin Chaires," published in 2015.
Chaires had brought the railroad to Tallahassee, established the city’s first bank, and was a delegate to the Florida Constitution Convention. He died in 1838.
After the Civil War, through mismanagement and family scandal his heirs lost the plantation. The mansion burned in the 1880s; only rubble and a couple of columns remain today, along with Shields' account.
Tallahassee Community College history professor Bob Holladay said 20 years of research enabled Shields to illustrate “the grandeur of the Old South, the horror of slavery that accompanied it, and the ultimate tragedy of hubris that befell it.”
This list is part ofTLH 200: the Gerald Ensley Bicentennial Memorial Project. Throughout our city's 200th birthday, we'll be drawing on the Tallahassee Democrat columnist and historian's research as we re-examine Tallahassee history. Read more attallahassee.com/tlh200.
