Laurel Grove sign

The original artist rendition of our "Merchant" house D

Laurel Grove promotional brochure from the University of Florida Bob Broward archives

The TREE...what to do?
Robert C. Broward was known for his ORGANIC approach to architecture and designed this house to accommodate this grand, majestic old Oak tree. I am a firm environmentalist and one of my most favorite things is to be anywhere out in nature appreciating the delicate and awesome beauty of flora and fauna. Also, knowing how much shade is valued in sunny and hot Florida, we would love to be able to keep this beauty, draped in Spanish Moss embracing our new home. Unfortunately, with insurance liability such as it is, we have simply been unable to find any reputable insurance company in the Jacksonville area willing to insure our new home with this huge tree overhead. We thought perhaps we could just have it trimmed but even that did not satisfy the insurance powers that be and are resigned to sadly have this stately tree removed just so we can acquire the necessary home owners insurance in order to qualify for a loan.

THE McCAIN CONNECTION: His family moved to Orange Park in 1966.

It was a different time and a different John McCain.
Jessie-Lynne Kerr

It was a different time and a different John McCain.
There were no spotlights, no three-piece suits, no standing before voters asking them to elect him president.
Just McCain, a garbage can for a seat, directing movers along Fatio Lane in Orange Park where to put the furniture in his family's new home.
Mae Ogden remembers. ( The former owner, evidently a well respected and loved resident of our new home )
"He was a real personable person and we'd chat out in the street," said Ogden, who lived across the street. "The kids were so little, but they were really darling."
McCain, his first wife, Carol, and their children moved there in 1966 and spent about a dozen years during a time that saw some of the heights and depths of his life: His plane being shot down during Vietnam, his spending 5? years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi, his joyful return home.
It just might have marked the start of the future senator and presidential candidate's passion for politics.
Ralph Lake, who with his wife, Dulce, has owned the McCains' house since 1996, recalled stripping off wallpaper around the kitchen phone and finding numbers scribbled on the wall beneath.
"Including one for Ronald and Nancy Reagan in California," he said.
John and Carol McCain became friends of the Reagans when Ronald Reagan was governor of California. In 1979, Carol McCain was Reagan's Clay County director for his presidential campaign. After Reagan was elected president in 1980, Carol McCain was director of the inaugural balls and then in charge of the White House Visitors Office.
"I thought that was pretty neat," Lake said of the Reagans' number, "but then I painted over them."
Now there are few physical reminders of the McCains' time here.
But there are plenty of memories.
Watching and waiting
Retired Navy Lt. Cmdr. George Nichols saw his military action in wars before McCain's times. But he knew the family - his daughter, Nancy, baby-sat the McCain children - and he like many other neighbors watched and waited for word when McCain was being held prisoner.
When he was released, it was a cause for celebration throughout the neighborhood, which held a block party in his honor.
"He was as skinny as hell when he got back, but his mind was fully functioning," Nichols recalled. "I was proud of his guts."
McCain has called his Orange Park neighbors the mainstay of support for his wife and children, sons Doug and Andy and daughter Sidney, while he was captured.
Neighbors help family
Doug was 7, Andy was 5 and Sidney was just 6 months old when their father left for Vietnam. He was shot down Oct. 26, 1967.
Neighbors "helped with the maintenance of our home, took my children to sporting events, offered whatever counsel and support was needed and generally helped keep my family together, body and soul, until I could get back to them," McCain recalled during a campaign stop here in April.
Because many of those who lived in the neighborhood had Navy ties, they also had a sense of the realities of life during wartime.
"I can still remember sitting in class at Orange Park Elementary with Todd Crumpler when his mother came to tell him his father was alive and a POW. 'He's on the list,' she shouted to us," Doug McCain remembered.
Air Force Col. Carl Crumpler had been shot down and captured July 5, 1968, eight months after John McCain. Because John McCain's father was a top Navy admiral, the North Vietnamese had shared his fate within months of his capture. But the Crumpler family, who lived across the street, had to wait nearly two years before learning their loved one was alive and a POW.
School days
The McCain children attended Orange Park Elementary School with the boys going on to Jacksonville Episcopal High School starting in the seventh grade.
There, Doug McCain played soccer and spent a lot of time surfing and water skiing.
"He was always fun to be with," said classmate Lon Walton, who recalled that the John McCain POW bracelet was a popular adornment at Episcopal.
McCain returned to Orange Park in 1973. Walton recalled that John McCain was a graduation speaker at Episcopal High School in 1977 when he and Doug graduated, although he couldn't remember the subject of the speech.
Walton, who is in the real estate business, has kept in touch with Doug McCain over the years.
"We ... talk every couple of weeks," he said.
Prelude to politics
Tom Slade, a former state senator and GOP state chairman, remembers how when McCain was still a POW, Carol McCain and the children would go to the Club Continental in Orange Park. After John McCain's homecoming, Slade said he joined the family in their visits.
"John told me he wanted to run for Congress," Slade recalled. "I remember telling him he'd have a hard fight because no one could beat [popular Democratic incumbent] Charlie Bennett."
He didn't challenge Bennett. But about six years later - and three years after the McCains sold their Orange Park home - John McCain the Navy hero became John McCain the politican, winning a seat in Congress representing Arizona.
jessie-lynne.kerr@jacksonville.com,
(904) 359-4374

John McCain: From Orange Park to White House?

Alex Leary, Times Staff WriterIn Print: Sunday, July 20, 2008


"It was a quiet place, much as it is now, situated along the St. Johns River in the shadow of Jacksonville. The 13 homes on Fatio Lane were decidedly hip — low-slung with A-frame living rooms and glass walls."

Photo by Thomas J. O’Halloran, courtesy of Library of Congress When John McCain returned from Vietnam in 1973, he had been away from his wife twice as long as they had been together. At top, he and Carol are seen in Orange Park with Doug, Andy and Sidney. John and Carol divorced in 1980. He remarried that same year.

Previous PhotoNext Photo Related Links Download: McCain divorce file (PDF)

ORANGE PARK

She hadn't thought of him in years. Like so many other pilots in this Navy town, he was fighting in Vietnam.Now he was on TV, looking nothing like the 30-year-old family man who walked her home after a night of babysitting, past the Ogdens, the Thomases and other families on Fatio Lane."It was his hair," Nancy Moyes said, recalling her shock. "It turned white."Moyes and others here were the earliest observers of the metamorphosis of John McCain, one that transcended his physical appearance as a prisoner of war.McCain left this small town, his wife and three children in 1967 as the underachieving scion of a great military family. He returned on crutches in 1973, a portrait of American resolve at age 36. It was Orange Park, outside Jacksonville, that first witnessed the budding power of his war-hero story line. It was where McCain, however unwittingly, built the foundation of a political career that could land him the presidency.He began with appearances at VFW halls, high schools and restaurants, cultivating his public speaking voice and an improvisational wit that remains one of his strongest assets. Ronald Reagan, the governor of California, was among his first visitors.Just two months after his return, still recovering from 5½ years in Hoa Lo Prison — the infamous "Hanoi Hilton" — Lt. Cmdr. McCain raised his profile with a first-person analysis of Vietnam inU.S. News & World Report. The 13-page article ended on a prescient note:"I had a lot of time to think over there, and came to the conclusion that one of the most important things in life — along with a man's family — is to make some contribution to his country."Like her husband, Carol McCain was not the same person after the war. McCain came home to find her with a permanent limp from a near-fatal car accident. She was no longer the tall beauty he fell in love with. McCain sued for divorce in 1980 and married a woman 18 years younger.It's a story neither he nor his campaign wants to revisit. McCain's former neighbors remember it well.

• • •Orange Park seemed the perfect place for McCain to settle, to put his wild reputation to bed. While at flight school in Pensa­cola, he reconnected with Carol Shepp, who had gone through a divorce. They married in 1965 and a year later had a daughter, Sidney.The clan, including Carol's sons Doug and Andy, arrived in Orange Park in 1967, the Summer of Love. It was a quiet place, much as it is now, situated along the St. Johns River in the shadow of Jacksonville. The 13 homes on Fatio Lane were decidedly hip — low-slung with A-frame living rooms and glass walls. The McCains had a pool with a diving board.John and Carol, a former model from Philadelphia, were young and attractive, natural peers to the neighborhood's other military families."They were partiers like everyone else. It was the '60s and everyone's parents drank and smoked," said Nancy Moyes, who often babysat the McCain children, including the night before their father went to Vietnam. He paid her 50 cents an hour.In late September, just a few months after they arrived, McCain got his orders for Vietnam. The kids were 8, 5 and 1. He expected to be home the following summer.

• • •On Oct. 26, 1967, McCain's A-4E Skyhawk was shot down. He landed in a lake and was captured.Not long after, a French TV reporter interviewed McCain in a Hanoi hospital and asked if he wanted to say anything. "I would just like to tell my wife," McCain said, cigarette in hand, his voice trembling, "that I will get well and I love her and hope to see her soon."Back in Orange Park, 29-year-old Carol McCain was raising three children with the help of the tight-knit Navy community.When something broke, a friend would come over to fix it. When her kids needed a ride to a sporting event, a neighbor would stop by.Mrs. McCain could be seen at Club Continental, a private resort on the St. Johns, or cruising antique shops with Mary Anne Fuller, whose husband also was a POW in Vietnam.They formed a social group with other wives, visiting one another's homes for coffee. When the Vietnamese new year arrived, they threw a "Tet luncheon," hoping it would bring good news.They discussed what items their husbands' captors would allow in care packages: candy, instant soup, warm socks and baby formula for nourishment. The formula called for mixing with milk but lacking any, McCain used water. "The result was so unpalatable that despite my chronic hunger, I simply couldn't stomach the stuff," he wrote in his memoir, Faith of My Fathers.Across Orange Park, people wore metal bracelets with McCain's name and the date he was captured.

• ••While her husband was being tortured 9,000 miles away, Carol McCain endured her own crisis in 1969. For the holidays, she took the kids home to Philadelphia. While driving home alone on Christmas Eve, she lost control of the car on an icy road. It hit a telephone pole and she went through the windshield. Scores of operations later, one of her legs was shorter, leaving a permanent limp.Carol McCain felt the absence of her husband in the smallest ways, fretting over not knowing what position her son Doug should play in pickup football games. Worrying about Andy, who was smaller than the other boys.Christmas, she told a CBS Evening News reporter in 1970, had no meaning without her husband, but she celebrated anyway for the children.Six times a week she went to the mailbox, looking for a letter from Vietnam. She read one on the TV broadcast."He sounds kind of depressed to me when he says, 'I hope you can still think of the really good times we had together.' It sounds like he's worried that I might forget or something. That bothers me. It makes me feel very badly because there isn't any way I could possibly forget," Mrs. McCain said in her living room.By the time of his release in 1973, McCain had been gone twice as long as he had lived with his wife. She had not written him about the accident, not wanting to burden him more.When they reunited, 6-year-old Sidney's reaction captured the family's emotional distance. Ruth Carr, who lived next door, was there when McCain stepped off the plane at Jacksonville Naval Air Station on St. Patrick's Day."I said, 'Sidney, that's your daddy.' She said, 'Where's he going to sleep? What's he going to eat?' "

• • •POWs were welcomed back as heroes, a stark contrast to the stories of disgust that greeted other soldiers. Orange Park threw a parade, and McCain and his family rode in a convertible along U.S. 17, the main north-south road through town. The mayor of Jacksonville hung the key to the city around McCain's neck. Rose Powell, who lived down the street, brought him an apple strudel.Groups sought him as a speaker. "We (ex-POWs) don't hold any animosity for Americans who opposed the war, for that's what it's all about: being able as a free people to express our views," McCain told 120 people at Strickland's Town House restaurant in Jacksonville, according to a report carried the next day in the Florida Times-Union."Nobody worked a crowd better than John," said fellow POW Carl Crumpler, whose family lived across from the McCains. "John had great political skills from the beginning."The McCains bought a beach getaway in nearby South Ponte Vedra, and friends say it brought the couple much joy. But life was hectic.McCain was flying across the country to be with the Reagans and to meet President Richard Nixon. He attended the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., then assumed command of the Navy's largest squadron, Replacement Air Group 174 in Jacksonville.It was a plum assignment that brought claims of favoritism, but McCain left in 1977 with high accolades.Amid the ascent, however, trouble festered. "Off duty, usually on routine cross-country flights to Yuma and El Centro, John started carousing and running around with women," author Robert Timberg wrote in The Nightingale's Song, a book about the rise of several Annapolis graduates after the Vietnam War.McCain has admitted his failings. His former wife told Timberg she did not think her accident or the war was to blame."I attribute it more to John turning 40 and wanting to be 25 again," Carol McCain said. She did not respond to three attempts to reach her for this story. The McCain campaign did not make his children available for comment.In 1980, about a month after his divorce was finalized, McCain married Cindy Hensley and moved to Arizona, launching his political career with a successful run for Congress.Carol McCain still has friends in the Jacksonville area, including a woman who moved in with her while she recovered from the accident. But several declined to discuss where things went wrong, hard feelings evident in talks with a reporter.Others painted a more complex picture than one of McCain simply dumping his damaged wife."War changes relationships," said Mary Jane Crumpler, wife of Carl Crumpler. "The women became more independent being the head of the family and that added to the stress when the men returned home. I often heard from the younger ones that they felt like they were owed something — you know, 'I waited all this time for you.' "There were problems with authority — children pitting their parents against each other. Even the kids' long hair was a shock. There were issues over family finances. Some POWs returned home thinking there would be a pile of money waiting. But their paychecks had gone to the mortgage, car payments and food for growing children."You felt so sorry for all those families," said Mae Ogden, 91, who still lives across the street from the old McCain house. "They married young and were so happy and then the war came. Just being apart for that long did things, one going one way and one going another."

• • •Riding in his campaign bus after a visit to the Everglades in June, McCain got misty eyed when a reporter asked about his past life. He recalled parading down U.S. 17 in the convertible, the mayor hanging the key to the city around his neck. He recalled the block party his neighbors on Fatio Lane gave him on his return.From that experience McCain extracted the essence of America."I no longer think of the country's character in abstract terms," he wrote in Faith of My Fathers. "Now when I think about Americans, and how fortunate I am to be in their number, I see the faces of our neighbors in Orange Park, and give thanks that by a lucky accident of birth, I was born an American."Florida has certainly been good to McCain. His victory in the January primary solidified him as the Republican front-runner, capping a remarkable turnaround for a campaign once near death.Whatever his fate in November — possibly the 71-year-old's last election — McCain's journey to this point was born out of his experience in Vietnam and what began to take shape in this small town.Dick Stratton, who shared a cell with McCain in Hanoi and now lives in Jacksonville, vividly recalls him answering the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"Sitting in his skivvies on a wooden bunk thousands of miles from Carol, Doug, Andy and Sidney, McCain replied: "I am going to be president of the United States."

Times researchers Shirl Kennedy and Caryn Baird contributed to this report. Times staff writer Alex Leary can be reached at aleary@sptimes.com or (850) 224-7263.

John McCain the early years1964-66: John McCain reconnects with a friend, Carol Shepp, while at flight school in Pensacola. They are married in 1965 and he adopts her two sons from a past marriage, Doug and Andy. Daughter Sidney is born in 1966.1967: The McCains move to Orange Park at 553 Fatio Lane. McCain gets his orders to leave for Vietnam in September. His plane is shot down over Hanoi on Oct. 26 and he is imprisoned for nearly six years.1969: While visiting family in Philadelphia, Carol McCain is involved in a near-fatal car accident. Multiple surgeries leave one of her legs shorter.1973: McCain and other POWs arrive home in March. They are welcomed as heroes. Ronald Reagan, governor of California, visits Orange Park to meet the McCains.1974: McCain takes command of the Navy's largest squadron, Replacement Air Group 174, in Jacksonville. McCain leads with distinction but stories start circulating about him carousing with other women.1977: McCain takes a job in Washington in the Navy's Senate liaison office.1979: While at a military reception in Hawaii, McCain meets Cindy Hensley, daughter of a prominent Arizona businessman.1980: McCain divorces Carol and marries Cindy. They have two sons and two daughters (one adopted).

Fast FactsOrange Park, then and now

Population1970: 7,6192006: 9,106Single-family home median value1970: $19,5002006: $229,900Median family income1970: $10,0212006: $64,621Sources: U.S. census, U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics, Money magazine

The REAL Orange Park

Laurel Grove was 'real' Orange Park

By Mary Jo McTammany
County Line correspondent, 

Laurel Grove has been a popular name with developers in the Orange Park area for over two centuries.

In 1803, slave trader Zephania Kingsley sailed a small fleet into Doctors Lake and began development of over 1,000 acres purchased from Rebecca Pengree in the northeast corner of what is today Clay County. He named the plantation Laurel Grove, a tribute perhaps to the stands of laurel oak abundant in the region.

Kingsley's development of the property over the decade-and-a-half he was in residence was extensive considering that all Florida was the prize in a ragged game of keep away between England, Spain and the still-wet-behind-the-ears United States.

Entrance to the plantation was from a wharf on Doctors Lake. On the shore to the west stood the shipyard where highly skilled slaves constructed the large vessels to support Kingsley's vast trading enterprise. To the east, stood a huge storehouse and cabins for slaves newly arrived from Africa.

Laurel Grove was self-sustaining and produced large quantities for export. A sawmill, a water-powered gristmill, blacksmith and carpentry shops and cotton gin were part of the complex. Along with buildings for warehousing products for transport to northern markets were chicken coops, equipment storage sheds, barns and stables.

Exported crops included Mandarin oranges from a grove of over 700 trees, Sea Island cotton planted on close to 200 acres, corn and field peas. Separate fields were set aside for production of potatoes, corn, peas, okra and other crops for consumption by residents of the plantation and sale to neighbors.

Kingsley later left Laurel Grove in ruin and shambles for his plantation on Fort George Island. Repeated attacks from Indians and so-called patriots, actually opportunistic, renegade slave-catchers out of Georgia, left only burned-out shells for buildings. Even these remains lasted only a few years in Florida's moist climate and were soon reclaimed by wild vegetation.

Until Orange Park was incorporated in 1879, the area continued to be referred to as Laurel Grove, both in everyday conversation and official records. Some say Orange Park's founder, Washington Benedict, considered using the name, but one of his partners pointed out that their potential customers for land were already infected with the notion of getting rich selling oranges - not laurels.

In the 1950s, Laurel Grove was revived by developer-builder William Hall and architect Robert Broward along Plainfield Avenue between Milwaukee Avenue and the curve that marks the beginning of East Holly Point. Things in Orange Park and the county were still slow in those days, just winding up to the building frenzy that continues to the present.

In fact, Laurel Grove was Orange Park's first real introduction to a housing development or subdivision. Before then, folks had no recollection of two houses under construction in Orange Park at the same time. It really caused quite a stir because these were not traditional houses that the sleepy little town was accustomed to. The designs were different, cutting edge, with carports in front. Actually, a carport anywhere was a radical concept because most people had garages - detached from the house not hooked on, right at the front door. But add to that serpentine brick walls, decorative cut-out concrete block, steeply pitched roofs and totally flat roofs, and put them all on the same house. They were radical structures indeed.

People were amazed but also intrigued. Come the weekend, cars slowly cruised up and down Laurel Grove and Fatio lanes, their occupants staring and commenting. Visiting relatives would be loaded up and taken to see ''the houses.'' Even the street signs, the sign proclaiming ''Laurel Grove,'' and the little sales office with a tiny porch and steep roof on Plainfield Avenue, were designed to conform to the unifying yet subtle color scheme.

Now there is another Laurel Grove in Orange Park on Gano Avenue. But it has not been there long enough to be history.

Acknowledgements: Jack Araneo, George Hambrick, Gretchen Murray and ''Anna Kingsley'' by Daniel L. Schafer.

Clay County resident Mary Jo McTammany writes an occasional column for The County Line.

Spotlight On Robert C. BrowardPosted on April 3, 2012by Jennifer HoesingRobert C. Broward

The work of architect and Florida Artists Hall of Fame inductee Robert C. Broward has literally changed the face of Florida.He began his career in 1949 as an apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright during the construction of Florida Southern College, and his work as an author continues to this day. In sixty-one years of architectural practice in Florida, Broward has produced diverse designs including small homes and chapels, as well as large warehouses, office buildings, churches museums, movie theaters, high-rise buildings, oceanfront residences and corporate headquarters.

His love of nature, particularly in Florida (where has been a lifelong resident), inspired his organic architectural methods. In his work, design and sustainability parallel a commitment to environmental stewardship. Methods of building, materials, site conditions, orientation to the sun, rain and other natural phenomena were major considerations in Broward’s work. In just one example, he often designed rainwater collection to create spilling effects as a decorative and sonic element, celebrating frequent rainstorms in Florida.

Unitarian Church, Jacksonville, 1965. Image courtesy/used by permission of Robert C. Broward.

As a teacher, mentor and author, Broward contributed to architectural scholarship by influencing the careers of two generations of architects. He taught for four decades in academia as Adjunct Professor of Design at the University of Florida. He wrote the definitive scholarly work on Henry John Klutho’s Jacksonville structures. Now in its second edition, the book features of 500 photographs of the early twentieth century architecture that revived a city ravaged by fire. Broward published in numerous magazines, books and newspapers, and an entire issue of a national architectural journal was devoted to his work.

In 2011, Broward was elevated to the prestigious American Institute of Architects (AIA) College of Fellows, the highest designation in the architectural profession. In February 2012, he was inducted info the Florida Artists Hall of Fame during a ceremony at the Jacksonville Historical Society. His prolific career has produced a legacy of outstanding architecture throughout Florida and beyond.

Pictures of the vintage Mid-Century Modern house

Front of the house 

Side/Back yard

Guest bath

Bedroom two

Bedroom three

Bedroom one

Dining area

DIning area

House profile from side/back yard

Entry walk with tree ( sadly now removed )

Foyer entry

Foyer entry

Vintage kitchen pantry

Vintage kitchen

Vintage kitchen

Living room

Living room

Living room

Master bath

Master bedroom

Front courtyard

Master bedroom

Front courtyard