A public comment by a western promoter has led to more than 100 emails to commissioners and clarification at Monday's City Commission meeting.

   "There will be no running of the bulls down St. George Street," 450 Development Director Dana Ste. Claire said as he explained it as one of numerous ideas brought to him but not acted on.

   The promoter apparently announced such a plan on radio in Arizona, and it was picked up by a northeast Florida station.

    Lt. Col. (Ret) Greg Moore, the Florida National Guard Command Historian, has for years been conducting tours and by extension researching the lives of soldiers buried at St. Augustine's National Cemetery.

   He'll share some of their stories Thursday at 7 pm at Flagler College's Ringhaver Center. He's at work on a book that will make the cemetery and those at rest part of the city's written history.

A Halloween weekend

Paint your pet

   A novel idea to raise funds for the Humane Society, Paint your Pet, is planned Saturday at recently opened Painting with a Twist, in the Hobby Lobby shopping center at US 1 and S.R. 312. 

   Make a reservation and send or bring a pet photo to the business ahead of time. "Studio artists will prepare an outline on canvas before the event. You simply show up and have fun. Bring your own refreshments, everything else is supplied." 

   Half the $45 fee goes to the Humane Society. Visit www.paintingwithatwist.com/ 386.965.7066

 

 

Ducky Derby

   Junior sailors challenge "parents and old guys" in the Ducky Derby Saturday 5-9 at the St. Augustine Yacht Club. 

   Cookout, silent auction, $2 draft beers are all part of the $20 donation to benefit the St. Augustine Maritime Heritage Foundation and yacht club Junior Sailing Program.

 

 

Farmers market

Lincolnville Farmers Market will ring in Halloween Sunday with a Harvest & Halloween Festival, complete with Kids Parade and Pet Costume Contest noon to 1 and Sparky the Clown magic show at 1.

The market is open 11 am to 3 pm at Vickers Field adjacent to the Galimore Center, south end of Riberia Street.

Look for food tasting, live music, trick or treating, face painting, and more in addition to the great variety of food, produce, and crafts vendors.

 

Video: Florida's Underground Railroad

Florida Crossroads has produced an extraordinary video - Florida's Underground Railroad: Southern Route to Freedom, the stories of Spain's La Florida as a haven for escaped slaves as early as 1587, and the unique group of African descendants called Gullah Geechee, who are still fighting to preserve their identity in America today.

Residents Derek Hankerson and James Bullock are included in the telling of the stories; they've worked to get the Gullah Geechee Heritage Corridor and National Underground Railroad extended to St. Augustine to recognize the city's role long before the popular notion of post-Civil War flight to the north.

   Find the video at http://thefloridachannel.org/ in the video library.

It's a great template to create a video on the founding and early years of St. Augustine.

 

Carnegie vision is being continued

   A strategic plan completed in 2009 as the University of Florida took over management of 34 state-owned historic properties in St. Augustine included expanding a proposed $4 million Castillo Orientation Center into a $10 million Interpretive Center representing the city's full history.

   The center is planned for the Mary Peck and de Mesa lots of the former Colonial Spanish Quarter, where work is under way to create a Colonial Quarter representing St. Augustine's 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.

   The center awaits National Park Service funding, while the Colonial Quarter hopes to open in January.

   Both efforts represent a continuation of the vision of the Carnegie and Smithsonian institutions in 1937, a vision cut short by World War Two.

 

   

Continuing a 1937 report on plans by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, with the Smithsonian Institution, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, for a historical restoration of St. Augustine, the opening text refers to a variety of buildings representing the context of its history.

These monuments might be called the body of the picture. The work of giving it color, richness and life will be in the studies of folk-lore, traditions, religious observances, to the end of staging historical plays, pantomimes, pageants, festivals, fiestas and pilgrimages in order that those traditions which are the heritage of the people may again become part of their consciousness.

Verne Chatelain

   Creative activity and the desire to preserve folk skills, home manufacture of handicrafts, such as linen and lace making, traditional domestic food and dishes, stories and literature will all contribute.

   In order that the scene may achieve a harmonious and esthetic whole the city has been replanned for the construction of boulevards, promenades and parks; traffic will be rerouted out of the historic areas and parking lots will be developed.

   Anachronistic buildings will be razed; overhead wires, signs, poles and other disfiguring objects will be removed.

   The Historical Museum will be the final achievement of this project, the thing which will tie the completed venture into a perfect whole, a depository of culture presenting in objective fashion the complete story of St. Augustine by means of period rooms, each containing dioramas, models, pictures, charts of explanation, and artifacts relating to single stages in this history.

   With these objective realities the visitor may then go out to intelligently visit the actual sites.

   The philosophy of the project is to achieve the thing beyond research; the educational use of this site. To quote Dr. (Verne) Chatelain's report of the preliminary survey which was completed in March, 1937, the plan will "result in making St. Augustine a great laboratory of history, as well as in the fine arts and social democracy, useful not only in understanding more fully how life progresses, but effective because of its objective realism, far more than books and classrooms can be, in educating all classes of citizens in what may be termed `historical mindedness.'"

 

Photo: Dr. Verne E. Chatelain, member of Carnegie staff and first chief historian of the National Park Service