Study for a mural of Alice May Webb, a founding resident of St Andrews, FL, which is now a neighborhood in Panama city. Alice and her husband owned a grocery, stocked a pond with fish for customers and ran a snow cone hut in the summers. Alice was an avid gardener and quilter.
One of Alice's granddaughters, Elaine, gave me the reference photo for this painting. The photograph shows her in the garden in front of her house wearing a large brooch. She represents a quintessential American grandmother in her element in the first part of the 20th Century.
The study was part of a grouping of portraits, quilt designs and textile samples that I created for
These People Are My People at Gadsden Art Center on the fall of 2019.Alice May Boynton was born on January 17, 1886. Her father was Stephen Creech Boynton.
She married Leslie Everett Webb and they had a daughter Audrey in 1911. Audrey was born in St. Andrews, FL. Alice died in St. Andrews at age 61 in 1947.
What amazing years to have lived through, especially in Florida which was not heavily populated and frontier like during that time. After the Civil War, Florida was restored to the Union on June 25, 1868. St. Andrews was not incorporated until 1908. For a long time it was a small beach town with few full-time residents. Alice and her family were part of the small community of full-time residents. Panama City annexed St. Andrews and three other small towns in 1927.
Native peoples inhabited the Panama City area from at least 13,000 years ago. The Spanish arrived in 1500. St. Andrews being a port and Confederate stronghold was attacked repeatedly by Federal troops and destroyed in 1863.
The town was described by the St. Andrews Bay Railroad and Mining Company which was selling real estate there as:
“The loveliest location in all Florida. In a land where the genial climate of a winterless round of years will reward your every effort with the most bountiful harvests; where the summers are joyous seasons of refreshing breezes and invigorating nights of cool and healthful slumber; and where the winters are but bewitching contrasts to the summers in heightening and intensifying the delicious pleasure of a life in the fairest land the sun ever blessed with it’s genial kiss. There is but one Florida, and St. Andrews Bay is it’s brightest jewel.”
St. Andrews neighborhood was designated as a redevelopment area in 1989 by the Panama City.
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