I took the photograph on the left the other day of the Captain Henry E. Sewall House, currently located in Jensen Beach, Florida's Indian Riverside Park. The house was built by Sewall back in 1889 at the tip of Sewall's Point, which is now a very upscale town located on a peninsula between Stuart, Florida and Hutchinson Island. It was all wilderness when Sewall built this home, located next to a freight dock and which also served as a post office. In 1910 Sewall and his wife Abby moved to a larger house higher up on the property, which people in Sewall's Point have been doing ever since. And then in 1913 Sewall's nephew moved the house across the St. Lucie River to a waterfront lot in Port Sewall, a town also founded by you know who. But what I like about this house is what happened after it was moved to its new location.
While the house was situated on that waterfront lot in Port Sewall, the cupola seen in the previous photo was added to the roof, and during Prohibition, green or red lanterns were hung in that cupola to let bootleggers know whether it was safe or not to offload their cargos of alcohol. And so at least the house was put to good use. The architectural style of the house, by the way, is "Florida Cracker Vernacular." God knows a place like that would never be allowed in Sewall's Point today. In any case, the house was moved to Indian Riverside Park in 2007, and docent tours of the building are held on the first and third Wednesday of the month from November 1st through May 15th. I wonder if those docents know whether or not it was that nephew of Captain Sewall who was behind the bootlegging operation? And if so, did the old boy cut him out of the will? Or was he in on it? Questions, questions. So many questions.
No comments:
Post a Comment