“It looked like the world on wheels was coming to Florida,” Orlando developer Carl Dann wrote about the 1920s boom. Thanks to Barry Revels of Longwood and the diary his great-grandmother Mattie Cook kept on such a journey, we can glimpse the grit and spirit of adventure it took to make such a move.
Mattie, husband Jesse Sr., and their family left New Harmony, Indiana, on June 18, 1922, and arrived July 6 in Sanford. Their 18-day trip began inauspiciously when they passed a crowd gathered by the Wabash River to see a truck hauled up out of the water. It had fallen from a ferryboat the day before, laden with part of their Florida-bound furniture.
Camping and Cracker Jacks
The Cooks traveled in caravan with another family, the Wests. They stopped in a little Illinois town where they “bought a supply of pork chops, milk, candy, Cracker Jacks, and other things,” and made friends with all the folks who came out to talk with the auto travelers.
The locals wanted to know “where we came from, and where we were going, and just how long we thought we would be in getting there,” Mattie Cook wrote.
They spent their first night camped “in a little grove in a country school yard” and bought eggs from a farmer for their breakfast the next day.
Soon, encounters with “rocky roads and young mountains” meant that one of the cars, a Ford that was low on gas, couldn’t make it up a hill — so they hitched it to the other vehicle, an old Studebaker that pulled it up the slope. The whole group pitched in to put rocks under the Ford’s wheels to steady it while it was being tied to the Studebaker.
No to Mr. Red Nose
That night, the group camped again in a school yard, turning down the overtures of a man who suggested they camp in his yard. “Mrs. West and I didn’t want to be too close to him,” Mattie Cook reports, “as his nose was too red” — I assume from imbibing spirits.
Throughout her diary and with good humor, Mattie Cook notes the woes caused by hot engines, lost exhaust pipes and the perpetual tire blowouts along the route that took them through Caruthersville, Missouri, and Memphis, Tennessee, where they camped in Overton Park (later the site of early Elvis Presley concerts, by the way).
In Detroit, Alabama, they found a general store “that had everything in it from a toothpick to a Ford automobile.” During one stop, daughter Ruth picked blackberries while Mattie looked out for rattlesnakes.
‘A world of Spanish moss’
On Monday, July 3, they hit Florida. “We are all very favorably impressed with it so far,” Mattie Cook wrote, adding, “We see a world of Spanish moss.” On July 6, they arrived in Sanford, where they stayed at the Pico Hotel and then found a house to rent.
Barry Revels remembers his great-grandmother as a “very smart lady” who loved to cook German food. She and her family helped to build Sanford, literally in the case of Jesse Sr., a carpenter and architect. He died in 1939, but Mattie lived until 1971, almost 50 years after their car trip of a lifetime.
They’re both buried in Sanford’s Evergreen Municipal Cemetery. Revels, their great-grandson, and his wife, Iris, are the proud owners of a large, carved desk that made it from New Harmony in a truck that did not take a dip in the Wabash River.
Not long before the Cooks reached Sanford, the Studebaker got stuck in a big mud hole. When the group got it free, “we all laughed, even if we did have muddy feet,” Mattie Cook wrote. Soon, they saw citrus groves. “It would be impossible to describe either the beauty” of the land or their feelings toward it, she wrote. “Somehow we all felt like we had gotten home.”
Joy Wallace Dickinson can be reached at jwdickinson@earthlink.net, FindingJoyinFlorida.com, or by good old-fashioned letter at the Sentinel, 633 N. Orange Ave., Orlando, FL 32801.
