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Nance Frank
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Front cover art: Better Than Ever
by Mario Sanchez
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The first settlers in Key West were from the Bahamas and began arriving after Spain ceded Florida to the United States in 1819. The Bahama
House, at 730 Eaton Street, and the Richard Tuggy Roberts House, just behind it on William (both shown here), are two of the Bahamian-built
houses in town. A ship’s captain at only 18 years of age, John Bartlum, who built the structure on Eaton Street, was a descendant of a loyalist
family. Both he and Roberts brought these houses over on a schooner in 1847 from Green Turtle Bay. Bartlum was famous as a ship builder, and
the houses are pegged with wood, not nailed with metal fastenings.
These houses were built before the streets of Key West had been laid out, and one of them sits on the street while the other flanks it on the
William Street side. Bartlum constructed his home in 1846, after the most devastating hurricane in Key West’s history substantially flattened the
town on October 11. In a scenario still familiar to hurricane victims everywhere in Florida and the Bahamas, no carpenters or other workmen
were readily available to repair or rebuild, except at outrageous prices. So Bartlum went home to the Bahamas, dismantled his house in Green
Turtle, loaded it aboard a ship, and reassembled it on a lot he had purchased in Key West from his brother, Joseph.
He wasn’t the only one from Green Turtle Cay to relocate lock, stock, and barrel. Roberts did the same, buying a piece of Bartlum’s land and
reassembling his own Green Turtle house. Like Bartlum, he was a wrecker, but as a Southern sympathizer and entrepreneur during the Civil War,
he also used his ships to run Union blockades.
Every schoolchild on the island was taken through this house for many years to learn Key West history. Today the owners open their house
once a year for the Old Island Days House & Garden Tours and show off the interior and its collection of local art.
The focus of this intaglio is not just the architecture, but also the people who serviced the neighborhood. The Pee-Roo-Lee Man from
Chicken Alley, a familiar character in Mario’s scenes, cries out to the children about his delicious homemade candies. A man carrying heavy buck-
ets of tripe approaches the star of the picture, Uncle Dave, who sports a salt-and-pepper goatee and sells thyme from Nassau, along with parsley
and flowers. Dave has copied the Cuban vendors’ signs: “No se Fia” means literally in Spanish “Don’t trust.” It’s another way of saying “Don’t ask
for credit.”
Set within a stone fence surrounding the house are a royal poinciana in full bloom, two heavily laden coconut palms, a hibiscus tree, and a
sapodilla. The electric lights and trolley tracks date the scene of this carving between 1918 and 1930.
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