Island Chronicles, vol. 2: The Diary of Henry Patterson
Welcome to “Island Chronicles,” the Florida Keys History Center’s monthly feature dedicated to investigating and sharing events from the history of Monroe County, Florida. These pieces draw from a variety of sources, but our primary well is the FKHC’s archive of documents, photographs, diaries, newspapers, maps, and other historical materials.
By Corey Malcom, PhD
Lead Historian, Florida Keys History Center
The mission of the Florida Keys History Center is “To explore, preserve, promote, and make accessible the history of Monroe County, Florida.” To those ends, we are debuting the first in what will be a series of occasional research papers. Sometimes there are subjects that are too big or too important to simply write a blog post about, and they deserve fuller treatment, and having this outlet will allow us to dig in and flesh out those stories. Please note that our purpose is to make Monroe County history accessible to everyone, so the papers in this series will be available for free download in PDF form here at Island Chronicles, or for reading in print form at the Florida Keys History Center.
The first occasional paper, presented here, “The Diary of Henry A. Patterson, recording a Visit to Key West, Florida in 1843,” is an annotated transcript of a journal kept by a young business clerk from New York City during a four-month stay at Key West. This diary is an extraordinary document that offers important, never-before-seen details about the circumstances and lifestyles in the Lower Florida Keys in the territorial period.
The writer of the diary, Henry A. Patterson, was sent to Key West by his employer to resolve a business account that had fallen into arrears. Patterson had family in Key West, which allowed him to spend four months on the island while he slowly took care of business. With the island being so different than New York, Patterson was very good about documenting the details of all the things that were new to him. He wrote descriptively, almost as if for an audience, which makes his chronicle not only informative, but entertaining and enjoyable.
The diary opens with Patterson preparing for his voyage and sharing his experiences as a passenger sailing from New York to Florida. Once at Key West, he connected with family, made new friends, and quickly developed a rich social life filled with visits to peoples’ homes, playing games, going to parties, and drinking copious amounts of tea. Wrecking – the salvage of ships that had collided with the Florida Reef – was the leading business at Key West in 1843, and Patterson’s words give us rare, firsthand glimpses into wrecking court proceedings and the auction of rescued goods. He also spent time exploring the Key West hinterlands, which were then wild places, fringed by unspoiled beaches, with only a lighthouse, salt works, and abandoned Army barracks standing as outposts of civilization. The diary also details some of the difficult times he experienced during his stay: a terrible fire, the escape of enslaved islanders, and instances of illness, death, and burial.
Patterson also traveled to other Keys, and he wrote of Sand Key and its lighthouse, the mostly mangrove islands in and around the harbor, Boca Chica, and Big Pine Key, all supplemented with details of boating, hunting, and exploring. At Boca Chica, he saw evidence of Key Deer and had an encounter with a flock of flamingos, important evidence of their historic, natural range. One of the more remarkable series of Patterson’s entries is when he traveled with a small group of friends to Big Pine Key and spent time with pioneers there who were living in the barest of means. Certainly, it is the earliest description of settlement on that island.
Patterson kept diaries for many years, both before and after he traveled to the Keys, and the full set is housed at the New-York Historical Society. In 1966, the NYHS microfilmed this excerpt for Betty Bruce, then the historian for the Key West Library. The film was badly underexposed, though, and later torn, making it essentially unreadable. It then sat for many years in the FKHC archives, before being recently rediscovered and found worthy of study. To work with it, though, and create this transcript, the film first had to be digitally scanned and restored to make the writing (relatively) clear and legible. Then, to add to Patterson’s writing, and bring an even fuller understanding to it, the transcript was supplemented with illustrations from other contemporary sources, and footnotes added to further describe events, phrases, ships, and people.
All in all, we find Henry Patterson’s 1843 diary to be one of the richest and most informative firsthand accounts from the early days of the Florida Keys. We hope you do, too. As we find other interesting documents and materials in our collection that deserve similar treatment, we will bring them to you here, as additional installments in the occasional papers series. Research will continue, so please subscribe to our Island Chronicles newsletter and stay tuned!
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Looking to catch up on other volumes of Island Chronicles? You can find them here.