LaVilla Landowners - Francis L’Engle

Topic: Origins - Early Versions
In 1865, Francis L’Engle purchased the land west of Jacksonville, Florida, that had been owned by Baptist preachers. [1]  After the Civil War, he platted the LaVilla subdivision [2] where James Weldon Johnson was raised.

L’Engle was the son of Susan Philipa Fatio and John Nicole Claudius L’Engle.  Her family was from Switzerland and had owned land in Florida under the Spanish.  His was from France and had lived in Haiti.

Francis Philip Fatio was a Protestant [3] who had fought with the Swiss Guard against France in the War of Austrian Succession.  After he married Marie Madeleine Crispell, he developed land near Nice, France. [4]  In 1761, he moved to London [5] where his brothers were merchants. [6]  His son, Francis Phillipe, Jr., was born that year. [7]

Britain took control of Florida in 1763 as part of the settlement of the Seven Year’s War. [8]  Fatio and two partners invested in an indigo plantation in 1769.  Two years later he moved to the Saint John’s river to manage New Castle plantation. [9]

Fatio and his partners were granted 10,000 acres for a new plantation in 1774 called New Switzerland. [10]  He remained when the Spanish regained control of Florida in 1783. [11]  The next year he bought out his partners. [12]  By 1800, Fatio was growing cotton. [13]

His son, Francis, Jr., married in Greensboro, Georgia, in 1802, [14] and Susan was born in 1806 in Saint Augustine. [15]

The elder Fatio died in 1811.  During the War of 1812, Americans attempted to take Florida.  While there, they burned the Fatio plantation. [16]  The family fled over the international boundary to Saint Mary’s, Georgia.  By 1816, they had returned to Fernandina.  They moved back to the Saint Johns in 1822, and had returned to New Switzerland by 1824. [17]

L’Engle’s grandmother, Suzanne Guilman, was born in Haiti in 1775. [18]  She had married Jean L’Engle by 1796, when their daughter Marie Madeline was born. [19]  Neither were part of the planter class.  Suzanne’s father may have been an officer in the Free Masons, and Jean may have been a ship’s captain and Mason. [20]

The Haitian Revolution broke out in 1791 and the United Kingdom invaded in 1796.  After losing to yellow fever, the British troops retreated in 1798. [21]  L’Engle’s father, John, was born in South Carolina in 1801. [22]

John graduated from West Point in 1819, and immediately was sent to Fernandina’s Amelia Island. [23]  He married Susan Fatio in Saint Johns County, Florida, in 1830. [24]  Francis was born later that year. [25]  John remained in the army until 1838, when he resigned and settled in Florida. [26]

Their son Francis married Charlotte Johnston Porcher in 1853. [27]  A letter at the time said she was the daughter of Dr. Peter Porcher and that Francis worked on the Broad River and “mostly lives in Goldsboro, North Carolina.” [28]  While the immigrant Porcher is well known, her tie to the family has not been documented further. [29]

Francis was twenty-three years old when he married.  He entered business with his father, who traded in real estate, bonds, and notes.  He also rented slaves.  On the eve of the Civil War, he owned fifteen or sixteen. [30]

In 1855, Seymour Baldwin became president of a railroad, which had been chartered in 1851.  He convinced Jacksonville it should issue bonds to pay for construction. [31]  One can only guess John L’Engle subscribed.  The next year, Francis had the contract to survey the route from Jacksonville to Alligator Town, as Lake City then was called. [32]  That was the same year he bought land in LaVilla, which would have benefited from his proposed route.

John Pease Sanderson took over management of the railroad in 1857, [33] and the road commenced operations in March 1860.  Florida seceded from the Union in January 1861. [34]  Francis’ younger brothers joined the army, [35] while John oversaw the construction of fortifications. [36]  John died in 1864. [37]

At the end of the war, Francis faced reduced wealth.  His wife complained she had problems managing with just one servant. [38]  He and his brother Edward became involved with a society promoting immigration to Brazil.  He hoped “to buy just “two or three slaves in Brazil and hold them as long as the damnable abolition spirit of the age will permit me.” [39]

The L’Engles had not been planters before the war; much of their real estate was in or near Jacksonville.  Laura Jarnagin thought the brothers were less interested in leaving the country, than in establishing a business to handle the trade of those who did emigrate. [40]

Railroads were the only assets remaining in the state, and they were in poor condition.  Before the first Union invasion of Jacksonville in 1861, [41] Confederate leaders ordered men to remove iron spikes, bolts, and rails, and then burn the crossties. [42]  When Lake City became the transshipment point for food going north, parts of the original road were rebuilt. [43]  They were the object of the fourth invasion of Jacksonville in 1864. [44]

Getting railroads operational after the war was a high priority for everyone.  During the period when the Union was running the Pensacola and Georgia railroad that ran west from Lake City, Francis had a contract to produce crossties. [45]  One suspects the family may have done similar business before the war.  Later, his brother, Edward, and Sanderson tried to subvert attempts by outsiders to strip the railroad of its assets. [46]

Francis’ land in LaVilla was in equally poor condition.  In 1862, Confederate troops used the Baptist church as a training camp, that led to a skirmish with Union troops in March. [47]

The next year Thomas Wentworth Higginson arrived with Black troops to build defenses for Jacksonville.  To get materials and clear an area from invasion, they cut down “a large forest of pine and oak trees” and “destroyed about fifty dwellings, mostly of an inferior class.” [48]

In 1866, before the Freedmen’s Bureau was operational, Francis platted the land and gave 99-year leases to forty-one Freedmen.  The next year, his wife signed similar leases. [49]  Patricia Drozd Kenney says his motives are hard to discern.  She thought perhaps he was trying to make money on land whose value “was not expected to increase over time.” [50]

Francis remained a businessman.  When sixteen Blacks didn’t pay, he voided their contracts in 1869. [51]  That was the year Johnson’s father contracted for a lot with a “four- or five-room dwelling, old, rough, and unpainted, a typical ‘poor white’ house.” [52]  It may have been one of the repossessed lots.

Johnson was born in 1871 and believed his father bought his land for cash in 1869. [53]  In 1871, he built a new house in the center of the lot. [54]

The next year, 1872, Kenney says “L’Engle entered into a new leasing agreement with twenty-one blacks, five of whom were among the original lessees, stipulating an option to purchase the property in fee simple.” [55]

Francis, no doubt, sold land to Johnson’s father when he saw the money.  However, it would be interesting to know when, or if, he ever learned Johnson’s grandmother had left Haiti in 1802, [56] one year after Francis’ was born to Haitian refugees.

End Notes
1.  Patricia Drozd Kenney.  “LaVilla, Florida, 1866-1887: Reconstruction Dreams and the Formation of a Black Community.”  Masters thesis.  The University of Florida, 1990.  13.  This land is mentioned in the post for 12 March 2023.

2.  Kenney.  12.

3.  William Scott Willis.  “A Swiss Settler in East Florida: A Letter of Francis Philip Fatio.”  Florida Historical Quarterly 64(2):174-188:1985.  187.

4.  Willis.  174.
5.  Willis.  175.
6.  “Francis Philip Fatio.”  Wikipedia website, accessed 11 February 2023.

7.  Tommaso Valarani.  “Francis Phillipe Fatio, Jr.”  Geni website; last updated 20 September 2022.

8.  “East Florida.”  Wikipedia website, accessed 10 March 2023.
9.  “Francis Philip Fatio.”
10.  “Francis Philip Fatio.”
11.  “East Florida.”
12.  “Francis Philip Fatio.”
13.  Willis.  183, 184.

14.  Louise Ingersoll Lanier.  A Genealogy of the Family Who Came to Virginia and Their French Ancestors in London.  Washington, DC: Goetz Printing Company, 1965; reprinted 1970.  262.

15.  “Susan Philippa L'Engle (Fatio).”  Geni website; last updated 20 September 2022.
16.  Willis.  187.

17.  Samantha Williams.  “Spotlight on Louisa Fatio.”  St Augustine website, 8 January 2012.

18.  “Marie Madeleine L'Engle.”  Ancestry website.

19.  Johnny.  “Marie Madeleine “Aunt Leonis” L'Engle.”  Find a Grave website, 13 January 2017.

20.  Oliver Gliech.  “Settlers from St.-Domingue without Landed Property.  Domingino website, 2021.

21.  “Haitian Revolution.”  Wikipedia website, accessed 10 March 2023.
22.  “John Claudius L’Engle.”  Ancestry website.
23.  Bill Thayer.  “Class of 1819.”  University of Chicago website.

24.  “John Claudius L’Engle (1800 - 1864).”  Wiki Tree website; last updated 24 July 2014.

25.  “Francis Fatio “Frank” L’Engle.”  Geni website; last updated 12 June 2018.
26.  Thayer.
27.  Lanier.  262.

28.  Quoted by Towles, p183 - Louise Palmer Towles.  A World Turned Upside Down: The Palmers of South Santee, 1818–1881.  Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.

29.  Isaac Porcher immigrated to the French Santee in 1695. [57]

30.  “John Claudius L'Engle account book (1858-1864).”  University of Michigan, Clement Library website.

31.  Edward A. Mueller.  “The Florida Atlantic and Gulf Central Railroad.”  Railway and Locomotive Historical Society, Southeast Chapter, Newsletter, February 2012.  Additional material from Don Hensley. 1.

32.  Mueller.  2
33.  Mueller.  2.
34.  Mueller.  3.

35.  William Johnson L’Engle was born in 1833. [58]  He died “suddenly” in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1861 while awaiting his commission as a surgeon. [59]  Edward McCrady L’Engle was born in 1834, [60] and served was a quartermaster.  He was wounded in 1862. [61]  John Claudius L’Engle was born in 1840, [62] and rose to be a surgeon. [63]

36.  Thomas Frederick Davis.  History of Early Jacksonville.  Jacksonville, Florida: The H. and W. B. Drew Company, 1911.  156.

37.  “John Claudius L’Engle (1800 - 1864).”

38.  Jerrell H. Shofner.  Nor Is It Over Yet.  Gainesville: The University Presses of Florida, 1974.  21-22.

39.  Laura Jarnagin.  “The Edgefield Southern Immigration Society.”  37-45 in A Confluence of Transatlantic Networks.  Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008.

40.  Jarnagin.
41.  The post for 19 February 2023 discusses Jacksonville in the Civil War.

42.  Samuel Proctor.  “Jacksonville During the Civil War.”  The Florida Historical Quarterly 41(4):343–355:1962.  459.  Proctor thought: “it is questionable that this order was fully carried out.”

43.  Mueller.  4.

44.  “Florida Central and Western Railroad.”  Wikipedia website; accessed 11 March 2023.

45.  Shofner.  30.

46.  Paul E. Fenlon.  “The Notorious Swepson-Littlefield Fraud: Railroad Financing in Florida (1868-1871).”  The Florida Historical Quarterly 32(4):231-261:April 1954.

47.  “Skirmish of the Brick Church.”  Wikipedia website, accessed 11 February 2023.

48.  Davis.  180.
49.  Kenney.  12.
50.  Kenney.  49.
51.  Kenney.  49.

52.  James Weldon Johnson.  Along This Way.  New York: The Viking Press, 1933.  129–604 in James Weldon Johnson, edited by William L. Andrews.  New York: Library Classics of the United States, 2004.  139.

53.  Johnson.  139.
54.  Johnson.  140-141.
55.  Kenney.  50.
56.  Johnson. 135.

57.  “Porcher Family Papers, 1740–1967.”  South Carolina Historical Society website.

58.  Cousins by the Dozens.  “William Johnson L'Engle.”  Find a Grave website, 14 August 2010.
 
59.  “William Johnson L’Engle Book, 1843-1863.”  University of North Carolina, Wilson Special Collections Library website.

60.  Kristy Thomas.  “Edward McCrady L’Engle.”  Find a Grave website.  23 July 2002.

61.  Genealogy Trails Team.  “Civil War Infantry Rosters.”  Genealogy Trails website.  Its source is: Fred L. Robertson.  Soldiers of Florida in the Seminole Indian--Civil and Spanish-American Wars.  Tallahassee, Florida: Board of State Institutions, 1903.

62.  “John Claudius L’Engle.”  Ancestry website.
63.  Genealogy Trails.