Keystone Genealogical Library

02/05/2026

Ever since our beloved Dee Counts passed away, we have been going through boxes and boxes of what her family donated. Mary Frances has shouldered most of the work, and we are beginning to see a light at the end of what was a very long tunnel. With only one visitor today, a lot of filing got done.

I just released a new book about Jefferson County during Civil War and Reconstruction. Below is a blog post explaining more about its storyline.

The courthouse on its cover is the one built before the Civil War. It was torn down in 1904 to make way for our current courthouse.

Yankees in the Courthouse, the final installment of the Palmetto Pioneers series, explores Florida during the Civil War and Reconstruction. It highlights themes of resilience, forgiveness, and comm…

01/21/2026

Esther Haile Connolly

There are few of us in my generation who have lived in Monticello for many years that do not remember Ms. Esther. To put it mildly, she was a force.

Esther Haile Connolly was born in Monticello, Florida, on October 4, 1897, the daughter of William Edward Haile and Addie Lawrence Tatum Haile. Her maternal great-grandparents Andrew and Adaline Denham were married in Monticello in 1836.

Mrs. Connolly attended private and public schools in Jefferson County, graduating in 1914 from the Jefferson Collegiate Institute in 1915. She entered Florida State College for Women (now Florida State University) graduating in 1919 with a LI degree from the normal school and a BA from the college.

After teaching English and history several years in Monticello and Quincy, Mrs. Connolly moved to Washington, DC in 1922 where she served as a teacher and assistant librarian in the Department of Occupational Therapy at Walter Reed Army Hospital. In 1926 she married Frederick Connolly, and after his death in 1947 carried on his insurance business in Washington until she retired. Mr. Connolly was raised in Gainesville, Florida.

During Mrs. Connolly‘s years in Washington, she was an active member of the Garden Club of Chevy Chase, Maryland, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Georgetown Citizens Association, the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the District of Columbia, the Board of the Washington City Orphan Asylum (later called Hillcrest children’s village), and the women’s board of the Washington Symphony Orchestra

Mrs. Connolly’s hobbies over the years were history, old houses, historic preservation, gardening, and travel. She was a member of the Monticello Presbyterian Church.

When she returned to Monticello in 1963, she had been active in many local civic organizations. She was a charter member of the Jefferson County Historical Association and had been its president over a period of 10 years. She was active in helping produce the annual tour of homes. She also assisted in the survey of Jefferson County resulting in the establishment of a historic district in Monticello and the listing of many buildings in the national register. She obtained funds to repair graves in the Old Monticello Cemetery, the Palmer family cemetery and the old Bailey/Bellamy cemetery.

As a member of the Monticello Woman’s Club Civic Committee, Mrs. Connolly headed the drive to secure a regional library for Jefferson County. As a member of the Monticello Garden Club, she was active in the planning and preservation of trees on our city streets. —Info from a Watermelon Festival program dated before 1994

I have a personal memory of her—one handed down by my father. In the early 1970s, while I was away at college and Dad was trimming trees to help keep me there, he ran into Mrs. Connolly one afternoon. She stopped to ask who had given him permission to take down a particular tree. Dad explained that it was diseased and had been dropping limbs onto Mrs. Winans’s house.

Mrs. Connolly ordered him to stop at once and come down. Moments later, Mrs. Winans came out of her house, and the two women launched into a heated argument beneath the oak tree on West Washington Street.

Dad recounted the incident to Mom later that day, and I remember her asking where he had been during the dispute. “I stayed in the tree,” he said. “There was no way I was getting between those two headstrong women.”

Ms. Esther died in 1994 at the age of 97, and she is buried next to her husband in Arlington National Cemetery.

01/14/2026

We run across many pictures of Monticello and Jefferson County citizens from long ago, and thought we should share a couple today.

12/24/2025

Merry Christmas!

Don’t forget! We are closed for Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve!

12/17/2025

The Keystone Genealogical Library will be closed next Wednesday on Christmas Eve!

12/10/2025

This is the last post on the history of watermelon production in the Jefferson County, Florida

Watermelons are cucurbits, members of the same plant class as cucumbers, pumpkins, cantaloupes, honeydew, melons, citron, squashes, and gourds. Cucurbits are easily identified by their prostrate, sprawling vines. Usually with tendrils and leaves shaped like a palm leaf. The botanical name for the watermelon fruit is a pepo.

Florida has maintained its number one status for shipping melons in the United States for decades. Jefferson County was part of that statistics until the 1990s when refrigerator varieties began to rule the watermelon market. Also known as ice box melons, the refrigerator varieties weigh 5-15 pounds, bred to fit in one’s refrigerator.

My mother’s cousin, who lived in Vero Beach, recently sent me a newspaper clipping dated 1952. It was an article about Monticello’s watermelon festival along with photos. My mother was the watermelon queen that year. In one photo, she held a small watermelon, a brand new USDA variety, called an ice box melon.

By the 1960s there was no longer a market for watermelon seeds. These refrigerator varieties are seedless, a propagated variety done through asexual reproduction.

As refrigerator varieties dominated, Jefferson County, because of its location, missed the market window for shipping melons north. Plus growing refrigerator varieties required irrigation, whereas Jefferson counties earlier varieties required no irrigation.

Farmers down south always had to irrigate and built their infrastructures for irrigation when it was still cheap to do so. By the time our farmers realized their need for irrigation, the market had changed. The irrigation infrastructure costs (including permitting, wells, and pivots) were too expensive. It meant our watermelon growers could never recoup their costs.

It used to be that when everyone around here, who didn’t grow melons, was downtown having fun at the festival, our farmers were up to ten miles away in a field loading melons. Today, all of us celebrate the watermelon festival to commemorate the economic impact watermelons, their seeds, and our farming community had on this county. Many of our beautiful buildings and homes, including our courthouse, were built using money made through their industry.

Captions: Johnelle Hamrick, 1952 Jefferson County Watermelon Queen and her daughter Cindy Roe Littlejohn, 1982 Watermelon Festival Chairman

12/03/2025

Jefferson County’s Watermelon History (continued)

By the 1900s, a big name in watermelon seed production was Gilbert. By 1909, D.H. Gilbert built a two-story brick building across the street from the Presbyterian church to house his Gilbert Seed Company. Simpson’s Nursery shipped many train loads from the county, using the railroad spur that went south to Drifton to connect with the main line.

Another seed company Bloomfield Nursery & Seed Company owned by William Haile built a three-story building on the courthouse square where the newspaper office sits today.

In a 1937 a newspaper article entitled “Large Shipments to Distant Lands” Gilbert reported that he was sending vast-quantity shipments to Egypt, in boatloads. This is ironic, because watermelons are not native to the Americas, and Egyptian hieroglyphs show that the Egyptians ate watermelons.

The article reported that Jefferson County supplied 75% of the world’s watermelon seeds by the 1930s.

11/26/2025

As in the past, the Keystone Genealogical Library is closed tomorrow, Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving! See you next Wednesday!

11/12/2025

Jefferson County Watermelon History (continued)

In Monticello, William Girardeau’s watermelon seeding invention changed everything. Now melon producers were not only making money on the melons they produced, they were making even more money on the seed production.

By 1890, Girardeau employed about 100 field hands to gather watermelon seeds, after his choice melons had been shipped to market. The seeds came from the culls in his fields. Culls are melons that are overripe, damaged, or have blemishes that grocery store shoppers won’t buy. The cull’s seeds though have value.

By 1892, Girardeau sold about 75,000 pounds of seeds annually.

Early on Jefferson County became a national center, not just for the production of watermelons, but even more importantly, it was the national center for watermelon seeds. We would become the top watermelon seed supplier for the world. Seed producers sent our seeds all over to places like Egypt.

His Girardeau Seed Company was later run for 50 years by his son-in-law R. L. Eaton. William M Girardeau was the son of William Oglethorpe Girardeau, the principal of Jefferson Academy when the new school was built in 1852, before the civil war.

Next week, we’ll reach the 1920s, after which several two and three-story buildings were built to aide the shipping of watermelon seeds. One three-story building was built on the courthouse square.

10/29/2025

History of Jefferson County Watermelons (continued)

William Girardeau led the way when he invented a machine which separated the seeds from the melons. Before his machine, it was done by hand, and it had to be done for a following year’s harvest. The farmer would haul the melons for seeding, including the rotten ones, using a mule-drawn wagon. It was better to do this work in the shade, so the melons were hauled to a nearby shade tree near a stream.

At the tree, the contents of every melon was scraped into a barrel or later a steel drum. The seeds had to be washed by hand, and this was done at local springs. It has been said that at the bottom of every hill in Jefferson County is a spring though this is a slight exaggeration. If you ask some of the farmers, cattlemen, and outdoorsmen how many springs or creeks there are in this county, though, you will be surprised.

After the seeds were washed in a nearby stream, they were dried. The process had a terrible odor to it, especially because it had to be done in June in 100 degree weather.

Nothing assaults our olfactory glands like rotted watermelons. That smell is right up there with rotten eggs, pole cats, and an open sewer. Just picture this—a hot Florida field with temperatures hovering at a hundred degrees with no breeze, gnats, and those stinking melons.

Girardeau’s machine allowed the field workers to keep more distance from the rotted melons using a pitchfork to pitch the melons into the machine, which did the rest of the work. Plus, the process went faster.

Girardeau’s imvention became a game changer!

The two photos help describe the seeding operation.

10/22/2025

Monticello Woman’s Club

Initially, the Woman’s Club house was a residential home and erected soon after 1830 by Darius Williams, one of Jefferson County’s earliest settlers. Mr. Williams established and operated William’s Mercantile at the corner of North Jefferson and East Pearl, where Vintage Treasures is housed today.

Williams’ house was updated to a Queen Anne style between 1880 and 1885. It originally sat where the post office sits today at the southwest corner of Pearl and Jefferson Streets. The Queen Anne addition may have been added to an earlier two-room structure of either logs or planed wood. Later, it would have the first Venetian blinds and door bell in Monticello.

In 1919, after two other families made it their home, the Monticello Woman’s Club, which formed in 1918, made it their headquarters. They bought the house and property from the Partridge family for $2,500.

The newly-formed Monticello Woman’s Club had joined the Florida Federation of Women’s Clubs, which first met in January of 1895 in Green Cove Springs. By the federation’s twelfth year in 1906, it saw a need for public libraries in Florida’s rural towns and ran four traveling libraries containing 263 books. They sent them to various towns where club women assumed their care, housed them in their homes, and acted as librarians. By 1926, there were 26 libraries and over a thousand volumes throughout the state. Monticello’s Woman’s Club had joined this effort.

The local club completely remodeled the house transforming it into a community center, complete with a section for a library. This was Monticello’s only library for many years.

The 4-H clubs of Monticello used the house as a meeting space, as well as Jefferson County’s Home Demonstration Council. They outfitted the kitchen and added storage space.

The club grounds, under the care of Mrs. John Henry, had a small space in front , a sunken garden with a border of boxwoods and a birdbath. There were ornamental shrubs planted against the building. In the back were large live oak shade trees and a place for outdoor parties. The formal garden was designed and constructed under the personal supervision of Mr. & Mrs. D. A. Finlayson.

The Monticello Woman’s Club was one of the most attractive sites in Monticello. Remember, this house was still directly across Jefferson Street from the Wirick-Simmons Home.

The Library

In an undated document, the local Woman’s Club said that their greatest asset was their library. They hired a paid librarian to open the library several hours a day for four days a week. She originally was hired by the WPA library project, but the Woman’s Club continued her employment. The library had 1200 books.

Moved to Pearl Street

The house was moved from its original location on North Jefferson Street in three pieces to make way for Monticello’s new post office. The preparation mandatory for the move required much tree cutting and removal of power lines. They moved it to its current site on Pearl Street, had the house in place, and remodeled it by September, 1951 for a grand re-opening. There was a picture of the move in the Monticello News.

Over the years since, the clubhouse has been the site of many community events, including high school dances, Christmas parties, wedding and baby showers, wedding receptions, class reunions, and wedding anniversary events to name a few.

The pictures below were taken on Pearl Street.

10/15/2025

More History of Watermelons in Jefferson County, Florida

We talked about the harvest and loading of melons and the effect it had on the county. Now, let’s talk about the earlier history of melons in the county.

In 1882, only seventeen years after the Civil War, a newspaper article shows that William M. Girardeau of Monticello purchased $50 worth of watermelon seeds and planted 60 acres of watermelons. That June, he shipped his first crop. He would become the father of Jefferson County watermelons.

The following year the local paper reported that there were 300 acres of watermelons within sight of the courthouse and that local growers had shipped over 30 railroad carloads of the product.

A year later in 1884, they reported that in addition to shipping many more carloads of melons, local growers had produced more than 20,000 pounds of watermelon seeds and sold them at prices ranging from one to five dollars per pound.

Harvesting seeds was done by hand, but Girardeau would soon change that.