Flora Woodring Morris with her three-month-old son Robert







Tropicalia: Old Sanibel Memories: Pioneers’ grandson recalls island’s humble past
A story of a family's undying devotion to sanibel

Jeri Magg • Special to news-press.com • August 3, 2008

As a warm summer breeze rustles through the Australian pines, Bob Morris enters the old schoolhouse at the Sanibel Historical Museum and Village.

Gazing around the tiny building, Morris chuckles and tells his wife, son and daughter-in-law, “My mother went to school here more than 100 years ago.”

The 94-year-old eases into one of the student desks and starts to reminisce about his mother, Flora Sanibel Woodring, the first European child born in the island. “She was so proud that her father was one of the earliest landowners.”

Morris’ maternal grandfather was Samuel Barber Woodring, a blacksmith from Allentown, Penn., who claimed 160 Sanibel acres — now called Woodring’s Point — in the summer of 1888. He built a large frame house there and that’s where Morris’ mother was born.
Advertisement

Following Sam’s death in 1899, his wife, Anna, renowned for her superb cooking, began taking in boarders from “up North,” and the Woodring home became the first hotel on Sanibel.

“My mother was a terrific baker,” Morris says. “She learned from her mother, who made the best pies I ever ate.”

Flora often spoke about growing up on Sanibel, where going to school was a challenge. The only way around the island was on foot, so the young girl traipsed through sawgrass and across sandflats to get to class. After graduating from high school, she helped her mother run the boarding house.

Flora’s brothers spent their days fishing. Between all the fish and the vegetables and chickens from the farm, the Woodrings had plenty to eat.

Living on Sanibel could be dangerous during hurricane season. When the storm of 1910 hit the island, Flora and her sister-in-law were alone in the house caring for two nieces. Accustomed to bad weather, neither woman worried too much until they noticed that all the water had been sucked out of San Carlos Bay.

Terrified, Flora evacuated to the neighbor’s newly built house next door, convinced they wouldn’t survive the night. When the water rushed back the next morning, the Woodring house was destroyed. It was later rebuilt.

Morris’ father, John, came from Georgia with his first wife, Etta, in 1904 to farm on Sanibel but Etta died two years later.

John and a partner bought more property on the mainland, near the island. The land is now an RV park on the road that bears his name: John Morris Road.

When John Morris met Flora, he was 20 years older than the island beauty. They married in 1911 and moved to a house on Monroe Street in Fort Myers, where Bob was born in 1914.

As a young boy, Morris often accompanied his mother to Sanibel. He particularly liked to hike to Lighthouse Point with her to pick sea grapes.

“My mother made the best sea grape jelly. We’d put it on everything,” he recalls.
Summers were spent fishing, playing baseball or visiting the Shanahan children, whose father was the island’s lighthouse keeper. Morris and his sister loved to play with the family’s deer.

“My grandmother gave up the boarding house and moved to Monroe Street with my mother and father in 1915. Uncle Sam and his wife, Esperanza, were the only family left (on the island),” he says.

Sam and Esperanza stayed on the homestead to work as fishing guides, although Sam branched out a bit during Prohibition, Morris says, before telling a
story about his Uncle Sam the bootlegger.

“Three of us were out on the beach on Sanibel and we decided to sail a small boat out to Redfish Point to look for clams. We didn’t find any, and started back. It was getting dark, so we pulled onto a small island but the mosquitoes were so bad we jumped back in the boat and floated around all night. The next morning, we pulled into Tarpon Bay and up to Uncle Sam’s place. He didn’t recognize us at first, but then invited us in and gave us each a bottle of booze.”

Morris has fond memories of Fort Myers High School, where he was president of the 1932 senior class and on the football team. He still chuckles about some of his extracurricular activities.

“The thing to do was run home, eat lunch quickly and then hook up with your girlfriend. We’d stroll arm-in-arm down Fowler Street to the river. It was a time to show off your girlfriend. Those boys who didn’t have one wished they did.”

At that time, the town had an afternoon newspaper, which Morris delivered to Thomas Edison. He recalls watching the nearly deaf inventor and his wife, Mina, at the Presbyterian church, using Morse code; she’d tap his hand to tell Edison what the preacher was saying.

After graduating from high school, Morris worked for the Kress department store and moved to Tampa to become an assistant manager. There, he met his wife, Hortense. They settled in Georgia and Morris spent later years managing resorts on Jekyll Island.

His mother, Flora, stayed on Monroe Street for 15 years after her husband’s death and remained active in her community and church until Morris brought her to live with him in Georgia in the 1970s. Although she died there, “She always loved Sanibel,” Morris says.

Morris now lives in a retirement community in Jacksonville and reminisces fondly about his time in Florida. On a recent visit, he returned to Sanibel and visited its museum, where a portrait of his mother is prominent in the Burnap Cottage, once part of the family homestead.

For Morris, it was a day full of memories. He’s certain that his mother would be delighted to know that her children and grandchildren still enjoy visiting the island she loved so much.