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The following is excerpted from an article by Dan DeWitt published in the St. Petersburg Times on Aug. 8, 2004.
The Bayport Hotel was built on the island in 1842, the same year as passage of the Armed Occupation Act, which opened Central Florida to settlement. Traffic at the port was especially vigorous during the Civil War, when large quantities of cotton produced in Central Florida were exported, said Virginia Jackson of the Hernando Historical Museum Association. "Other Southern states were not producing goods because their fields had been destroyed, and Florida became a premier cotton-producing state," Jackson said. The port was protected by three cannons that shot grapefruit-sized balls from what residents still call "the battery" - the western edge of Bayport, where Fagan plans to build the boardwalk. The cannons, however, failed to prevent the escape of Union soldiers who met their ship at Bayport after burning barns and killing livestock during the Brooksville Raid in July 1864.
Frances Goethe was the dominant figure in Bayport in the years after the Civil War, when Bayport was a popular resort - in the winter for Northerners and in the summer for families from Brooksville. Goethe, who moved to Bayport in the 1870s, took over management of the hotel after the death of her husband, George, in 1909, said Glenna Goethe, 82, her granddaughter-in-law. [See note below.] "She probably wasn't 5 feet tall, but she was independent," Glenna Goethe said. "You didn't pull any wool over her eyes. ... You walked a straight line around Fanny."
She was the central figure in an obscure chapter of Hernando history when in 1897 she gave birth to stillborn quintuplets. And she was at least an observer during the notorious Prohibition years, when Bayport was a major destination for liquor imported from Cuba
Richard Cofer, a Hernando High School history teacher, and a descendant of Frances Goethe said his grandfather once told him that rum runners "stacked bottles of liquor as high as a small house" near the Bayport Cemetery. It was shipped to Brooksville in peanut trucks and then sent north on freight cars with forged manifests identifying the cargo as Irish potatoes. Soon after a local trapper was suspected of telling federal agents of the smuggling, a mysterious Cuban man checked into the hotel, Cofer said. "They brought in this Cuban assassin, and he killed (the trapper) and then left in a rum boat." 2,100 acres or nothing The hotel burned down in 1942, Glenna Goethe said, in a spectacular blaze that could be seen from downtown Brooksville.
That Bayport didn't change much in the aftermath may have been, as Kilby said, because the Whitehurst family scared off potential buyers by insisting that all of its 2,100 acres, including marshland, be purchased as a package. Or maybe it was because the land "was never marketed that aggressively," said family member George Whitehurst of Brooksville.
NOTE: A reader of this page has pointed out an error in the above article. The husband of Frances Virginia Goethe was Joseph Lawton Goethe, called Joe. George was Glenna Goethe's husband.
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