The Boys' Brass Band of Jacksonville, Florida

 The first postcards
were a medium made for tourism.
After arriving at an exotic vacation destination
travelers always felt a need to write to the folks back home.
"Weather is too wet/dry/cold/hot as Hades."
"Place is incredibly beautiful/horrible/dull as dirt."
"Having a wonderful/okay/miserable time."
"Here's a picture of something funny/pretty/unusual that we saw!"

 

 

 

For many far-off places its local street musicians
served as suitable scenic subjects for a vacation postcard.
Musicians like the Italian bagpiper player on an 1898 card,
or the postcard set of Parisian ballad singers from 1901.

And on the streets of Jacksonville, Florida in 1913
it was a brass band of twelve African-American boys.

They may have had their picture taken
for a holiday visitor's postcard
but it's quite possible they were tourists too.

This is a story about a postcard photo puzzle.

 

 

The group of young black musicians stand outside the veranda of a large stuccoed house or hotel. Behind them are a few white children and adults partly hidden in the shade from the porch. It's a typical 12 piece brass band with cornets, slide trombones, alto horns, and tubas and two drummers. The boys' ages range from around 8 to 16. An older man, perhaps 30ish and wearing a bowler hat, stands at the back along with a younger man in cap and bow tie who holds a cornet. The boys are dressed in blousey knee pants, and most have uniform coats trimmed with fancy button braid. All wear either caps or cadet hats. The people on the veranda are smiling but the boys in the band mostly show a serious expression.

 

 

It's a small photo printed on standard postcard stock with a wide border where someone has written a caption in ink.

Scott's Dixie Band  Jacksonville Fla

 

In the upper right in faded ink is Mr & Mrs Scott with a slash directed into the photo. In the upper left corner is a date 1913 written with a ballpoint pen, probably by the dealer I bought it from. The back of the card shows that it is correct as the postmark is from Jacksonville, Fl on February 11, 1913 at 5:30 PM.  The card is addressed to Mr. Frank Longman of Packard St., Ann Arbor, Mich.

 

 

Still on deck
but waiting for
the clouds to
roll by.  Best wishes
to your wife & Mr
& Mrs. Eberbach in
which Mrs Scott joins
Yours  Evart

 

With so many dates, names, and places this postcard doesn't seem like much of a puzzle. Except the writer has given the boys' group a name, Scott's Dixie Band, that was actually not their real name. To prove that will require some photo detective analysis.   

 

I'll begin with the recipient of the postcard.

 

In the 1910 US Census, Frank C. Longman, age 27, was living with his wife Edythe N. Longman, 28, on Packard Street in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was the home of Edythe's parents, Edward H. Eberbach, age 61, and his wife, Mattie Eberbach, 60. Mr. Eberbach's occupation was listed as Retail Merchant in Hardware. In the Ann Arbor city directory this proved to be a large firm dealing with brass, copper, and galvanized iron sheet metal work. His son-in-law, Frank Longman, worked as an Attorney-at-law in General Practice.

 

1910 US Census, Ann Arbor, Michigan

Ordinarily that might be all the research needed, but postcards like this get saved for a reason so I was curious if there was anything more to connect Frank to this postcard. It turned out that there was. 

 

Football.

 

 

Frank Chandler "Shorty" Longman
(December 7, 1882 – April 4, 1928)
1903 Michigan Wolverines football team photo
 Source: Wikipedia

Frank Chandler "Shorty" Longman was born 7 December 1882 in rural Kalamazoo County, Michigan. In 1903 he entered the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and became a star fullback with the  Wolverines football team for three seasons. Following his graduation in 1906 Longman took up coaching, first at the University of Arkansas, then at the College of Wooster, Ohio where he accomplished the supposedly impossible by defeating Ohio State. In 1909 he became head coach at Notre Dame and in his two seasons there set a winning record which included an 11 to 3 victory by the Fighting Irish over his alma mater, the Michigan Wolverines, which was still led by his former coach, the celebrated Fielding H. Yost. The legendary Notre Dame football star Knute Rockne played as a freshman on Longman's 1910 team. Rockne would go on to coach the Fighting Irish from 1918 to 1930.

 

It seems unlikely that Frank Longman found time to get a law degree while at Notre Dame, so I suspect his occupation recorded in the 1910 census is an error. In later documents, like his 1918 draft card and the 1920 census, under employment he listed paving contractor which in this era probably paid much more than football coaching did. Tragically, Longman died in April 1928 of tuberculosis at the young age of 45.

 

 

 

1913 Ann Arbor, Michigan city directory

The sender of the postcard was a bit more challenging to identify, mainly due to bits of old black album paper stuck on the postcard covered his signature which required careful removal. The reason it was sent to someone in Ann Arbor was because he lived in Ann Arbor too. Evart Henry Scott was born in Ohio in August 1850 and married to Sarah E. Scott. In February 1913, Evart, not yet age 63, ran his own fruit farm in Ann Arbor. His name was associated with the local agricultural association, and in 1910 he may have even visited or spent time in Tampa, Florida acting as a representative for Michigan's fruit growers. In the 1913 city directory for Ann Arbor his business is listed as Real Estate, but his occupation in the census was Farmer. Evidently his fruit did alright as his name appeared in reports on civic activities in Ann Arbor and at the University of Michigan.

 

 

Detroit Free Press
3 November 1902

 

 

 

 

 

 

The reason Mr. Scott was sending a postcard to Frank Longman was that Evart was a BIG fan of football. Specifically his hometown team, the Michigan Wolverines.  In November 1902, the year before Frank started his freshman year at the University of Michigan, Evart captured some unexpected fame reported in newspapers around the country from Los Angeles to Boston. 

 

Following an important game with Michigan's rival, the Wisconsin Badgers, Evart was celebrating the Michigan victory at swank Chicago hotel. Challenged or inspired by his companions, Evart suddenly dove into a large Italianate water fountain. After a futile effort to swim in the three-foot deep pool and catch goldfish in his hat, he began to sing "Oh, ain't it great, just simply great. To wipe Wisconsin off the slate."  Pulled from the water by his brother and several friends, he was promptly taken off to bed.

 

 

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With that level of enthusiasm for football, it's no surprise that Evart would have a friendship with a college football star like Frank Longman. I bet after returning to Ann Arbor he even brought back a couple cases of oranges for Frank and his wife. And the story also suggests Evart Scott enjoyed a good joke on himself which I think explains his fanciful caption on the postcard, Scott's Dixie Band. In the context of a traveler writing to a close friend, it's clear he was using an old minstrel show phrase to make a little jest and show friends back home a bit of Florida's peculiar attractions.

 

 

 

My collection has dozens of postcards and photographs of boys' brass bands. Most are from the United States but many come from around the world too. Beginning from the 1870s teaching boys a musical instrument was promoted as a way to focus their attention, keep them pointed toward a positive lifestyle, and give them training at a useful trade—music making. Many communities considered it a valuable social assistance for disadvantaged youth. However for orphaned or abandoned children membership in a band was beneficial as a refuge from hardship and as a pathway to an education and a better life. This was especially true for African-American children in the shameful Jim Crow era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.   

The boys pictured in this small postcard from Jacksonville were clearly not from rich families if they had any family at all. Their deadpan demeanor is, I think, the result of living at a time when American society, particularly in a southern state like Florida, operated under racist rules and oppressive laws that were very different than those applied to the white folk standing behind them. These boys were not allowed to come onto the porch. No one gave them a glass of lemonade or snack from the hotel's kitchen. After their concert, Evart Scott got a souvenir picture of them, but the boys in the band likely never saw a copy of their photo.  They were very aware of that invisible red line that bigotry and discrimination drew between their performance on the pavement and the white folk listening on the shady veranda.

 

It is because of this harsh history and much more that photographs of African-American culture from this period are very rare. Mr. Scott made up a name for the boys' band probably because he never learned what they called themselves, so even with a date and location they remain anonymous. 

 

Or do they?

 

 

 

 

The postcard photo was taken in February 1913. In the following summer of 1914, I believe that a few of these boys were members of a larger band that traveled from Charleston, South Carolina to London, England. A century later I featured their postcard in my story entitled The Jenkins Orphanage Band.

  

 

 

 

This was not a British navy band but an American boys' band from Charleston, South Carolina. They were all inmates, as the census labeled them, of the Jenkins Orphanage. It was founded by the Reverend Daniel J. Jenkins (1862-1937), a Baptist preacher and native of South Carolina. One cold winter in 1891 while collecting wood at the train yard in Charleston, he encountered a group of destitute boys huddled in a boxcar. Hungry and homeless, these small orphans inspired Jenkins to take them into his own family. His simple act of charity became his calling in life and brought forth such a boundless compassion for the homeless black children of his community that it led him to create an institution that could provide for their welfare and education.

According to census records, by 1900 there were nearly 70 negro boys and girls in Rev. Jenkins' orphanage. Like many children's homes of this era there was a school band, as music was considered a standard requirement for a proper education and learning a musical instrument offered a practical trade skill. An orphans' band also proved very helpful in soliciting donations for an institution so very low on Charleston's list of charitable organizations in the 1890s. Rev. Jenkins was a tireless fundraiser, making countless speeches and appeals for funds to support his work. He recognized that patrons outside of Charleston enjoyed hearing his talented charges, so he shrewdly arranged for the band to accompany him on his campaigns around the country, particularly in the North where there were many more sympathetic benefactors for negro charities than in the South.

 

 

In 1914 Rev. Jenkins arranged for his orphanage's boys' band, called "The Famous Piccaninny Band", to perform in London at the Anglo-American Exposition. In May 1914 Rev. Jenkins, his wife, and a band of 23 young men and boys booked 3rd class passage to Liverpool and arrived just in time for the exposition's opening on May 14th. The show promised spectacular exhibits about the Grand Canyon, the new Panama Canal, and a "six acre realistic replica of Greater New York City with its hundreds of skyscrapers". There was also the 101 Ranch Wild West Show from Oklahoma and "hordes of other startling novelties" of which the Jenkins Orphanage Band would play a small part. The exposition was expected to run all summer and draw large crowds at its park located in Shepard's Bush. 

 

Unfortunately, a war intervened. At the beginning of August, when Austria mobilized its army against Serbia, which mobilized Russia's military, which set Germany to invade Belgium , which activated the allied forces of France and Britain, the public's attention shifted away from world fairs to warfare. Rev. Jenkins and his family managed to quickly secure a return ticket, but his boys' band was stuck and was unable to get back to Charleston until mid-September. My full story about them is at The Jenkins Orphanage Band so I won't repeat it here.

 

 

 

What's important to this story on the Jacksonville boys' band is that by 1913 the Jenkins Orphanage Band was already a veteran touring act. For many years, mainly during the summer months, the boys band regularly traveled to events at large cities like New York, Washington, and Philadelphia. They appeared at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, NY; the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, also known as the St. Louis World's Fair; and supposedly marched in President Taft's 1909 inauguration parade. The proceeds from their band concerts became a major source of income for the orphanage, so Rev. Jenkins soon hired another band leader for a second band. Eventually there would be as many as four musical groups on tour. They would often stay at the YMCA, the Young Men's Christian Association, like the one pictured above in St. Petersburg, Florida - The Sunshine City which date from the 1920s.

For much of the early 20th century, St. Petersburg was the most popular tourist destination in Florida, and the height of its season was during the wintertime when people from up north, like Michigan, traveled south for the relative warmer climate. Since the Jenkins Orphanage had a connection with Florida, I wondered if I could find any reference to a tour in February 1913.

 

 

Miami FL News
28 February 1913

The Daytona Beach Daily News reported that the Jenkins Orphanage Band was in the city on 13 February 1913. This is only 90 miles south from Jacksonville. Then in the 28 February edition of the Miami News, a society column from the Hotel Halcyon made note that "A band of youngsters from the Jenkins Orphanage in Charleston, S.C., entertained the guests of the Halcyon for a time last evening, the program consisting of instrumental music, negro melodies and dancing." Mr. and Mrs. Scott are not mentioned in the list of guests, but everyone is identified with their hometown and there are several people from Massachusetts, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. Miami was, of course, the shipping port used for travelers going to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and other tropical places in the Caribbean. What went unmentioned in the report is that the colored boys of the Jenkins Orphanage Band were not allowed to stay at the Hotel Halcyon.

 

 

Indianapolis IN Freeman
30 August 1913

Later that year in August 1913, the The Freeman, an Illustrated Colored Newspaper, published in Indianapolis for a national African-American readership, ran a short notice about a vaudeville trio called the Whitman Sisters. The report mentioned "Prof. Eugene Mikell formerly leader of the Globe Theater orchestra in Jacksonville, Florida and his band of thirty-five orphan boys ... known as (the) Jenkins Orphan Band." This was an exciting connection because Eugene Mikell was once the star musician of the first band organized by Rev. Jenkins.

 

 

1913 Jacksonville FL city directory

The 1913 city directory for Jacksonville, FL lists a "*Eugene F. Mikell (m), musician, h 1218 E Duval". {The asterisk* before his name denotes "colored" and was applied not just to names but to all the businesses, churches, societies, and city parks in Jacksonville.}

 

 

New York Age
30 January 1932

 

 

 

Francis Eugene Mikell, (1880-1932) was a very talented musician who played both violin and cornet. In 1917 he was appointed bandmaster to the 15th New York National Guard and later lead the 369th Infantry Regiment Band during and after World War One. He and his fellow bandleader,  James Reese Europe (1881–1919) are credited with helping to first introduce America's jazz music to Europe through this extraordinary band which was made up of the best black musicians in America. Lt. Eugene Mikell died in 1932 at age 51.

Mikell's background is not yet in Wikipedia, though it deserves to be, as he organized or played in dozens of bands for vaudeville theaters, minstrel shows, schools, and most importantly in the Jenkins Orphanage Band as both a young musician and later as a leader. Since he was living and working in Jacksonville, Florida in 1913 it seems very likely that a traveling unit of Rev. Jenkins' orphan band would stop there to play and maybe collect donations from the nice people of Michigan. 

 

 

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Jenkins Orphanage Band
circa 1930s
Source: The Internet

 

After Rev. Jenkins' death in 1937 his orphanage closed the facility at 20 Franklin Street in Charleston in 1939 and moved to North Charleston where his work continues today as the Jenkins Institute for Children. Recently I discovered a photo taken in the 1930s which shows the band in sharp modern band uniforms. On the left is a pastor, not Rev. Daniel Jenkins but a different man, who looks very like the man in the bowler hat in Mr. Scott's postcard. On the right another man holds a dark banner that reads "Jenkins Orphanage Band representing a Worthy Home for Children". 

 

 

 

Until a day ago I had not noticed that the man in the bowler hat is holding a furled banner which has lettering. Could this be a banner of the Jenkins Orphanage Band?

 

It's all very circumstantial evidence. At this distance in time there is no one alive who was there that day. All we have is Mr. Scott's wiseguy caption, and I think I've proved Evart was making a joke. I won't belabor this story with how many false trails I've followed searching for a black man in Jacksonville named Scott who might have led a boys' brass band. Suffice it to say, there isn't one.

 

Maybe the band's banner was not opened when Mr. Scott first heard the boys play. Maybe it says something else. Maybe I have it wrong and this is another boys' band unconnected to either Rev. Daniel Jenkins or Prof. Eugene Mikell. Maybe it's all just conjecture.

 

 

But then again maybe it's right. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Over the many years Rev. Jenkins that campaigned for his foster children, boys and girls, he developed the talents of thousands of young musicians, both amateur and professional. In 1913 the term "Jazz" or "Jass" was not yet recognized as a musical term. However the music that the Jenkins Orphan Band played was a Charleston synthesis of ragtime, blues, and older African forms that had a strong influence on other centers of African-American music like New Orleans and Chicago. Many scholars of music believe Charleston's Jenkins Orphanage deserves a place as one of the originators of jazz music. Several of its "alumni", like trumpeters William "Cat" Anderson and Jabbo Smith; pianist and singer, Tom Delaney; and guitarist, Freddie Green, became celebrated jazz artists.

In November 1928 Fox Movietone News produced a short sound film of the Jenkins Orphanage Band to play at its movie theaters. The Moving Image Research Collection at the University of South Carolina has restored the film as the Jenkins Orphanage Band - Outtakes . The full 11 minute video has several out-takes of the band repeating one tune. Skip to about 3:07 and the camera moves for some great closeups of the individual musicians. There is even some dancing at the end to demonstrate the origins of the Charleston dance craze. It's not sophisticated or even polished music, just raw youthful energy, but it's still authentic entertainment. It's a band worthy enough to be on a picture postcard to send to the folks back home.

 

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This is my contribution to Sepia Saturday
where the street fair is on all weekend.