The Donaldsons: St. Pete’s First Black Settlers

In 1868, John Donaldson joined a handful of other hardy souls trying to plant roots in the Lower Pinellas Peninsula. Soon after his arrival, he married Anna Germain. For two decades, the couple and their children were the only African-American family settled in present-day St. Petersburg. Life on the isolated, undeveloped lower peninsula was tough. Success was rare, but by all available accounts, the Donaldsons lived a full, and relatively unrestricted, life. This feat is all the more remarkable given the widespread racial discrimination that shaped post-Civil War America.

Reconstruction Undone

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the formerly enslaved black population embraced the possibilities of Reconstruction Era efforts to reshape society and politics. Throughout the South, African-Americans endeavored to expand the Constitutional ban on slavery into the lived freedom and actual opportunity promised by federal Reconstruction efforts. Black Americans registered to vote, ran for office, established churches, opened businesses, and purchased land. Unfortunately, Jim Crow segregation laws, widespread disenfranchisement, and discriminatory social norms negated many efforts for black Americans to achieve real civil, legal, or social equality. By the turn of the century, two decades of relentless, violent white pushback against change meant that black hopes of a changed and equitable South were largely gone. Despite that bitter reality, Donaldson and his family established a successful life in Pinellas County.

Moving For Hope

We likely will never know what ultimately led the teenage John Donaldson to relocate from Alabama to Florida. Like many former enslaved people, he was working for his former owner as a paid laborer. When Louis Bell, Jr. decided to move, the power dynamics of their situation may have compelled Donaldson to join him. Or Donaldson may have seen the move as a chance to improve his situation. Either way, he and a young housekeeper (and former enslaved woman) named Anna Germain accompanied Bell and his family on the 30-day ox-cart journey from Alabama. Upon arrival, Bell purchased 3 acres of land, determined to produce a profitable sugar-cane crop. Isolation, lack of transportation options, and an untimely freeze proved too challenging, and Bell eventually left the peninsula. This time, however, Donaldson did not follow. In 1871, he took his carefully saved wages and purchased 40 acres of land one mile north of Salt Lake (present-day Lake Maggiore) and set out to do what Bell had failed to: successfully settle on the Lower Pinellas Peninsula.

Success On the Fringes

To say that the lower peninsula was remote and isolated is no exaggeration. When the Civil War ended in 1865, only one family remained of the handful that had tried to make a go of it in the years before and during the war. Over the next decade, hopeful pioneers arrived, but most of them failed and moved on. In 1876, only about 25 intrepid settlers, including Donaldson, remained. That same year, the lower peninsula got its first post office (at Big Bayou) followed two years later by the first store, but the nearest railroad depot was still 90 miles north in Cedar Key. Despite this isolation, the Donaldsons made their farm work for them. They cleared 5 acres of land and grew sugar cane and sweet potatoes, eventually adding a small orange grove to their crops. They also bought some hogs and cattle, and years later, Donaldson’s son Edward reminisced that his father’s homemade sausages and sugar-cured hams “were the talk of the country.”

Isolation as Protection

Like the rest of the South, in the decades after the Civil War, Florida embraced a racially discriminatory path, outlawing interracial marriage, mandating legally separate schools, segregating public facilities, and instituting poll taxes, literacy tests, and whites-only primaries. But until 1888, the Donaldsons were the only African-American family on the sparsely settled Lower Pinellas Peninsula. The physical isolation of the fringe settlement meant that the usual strictures of race and class played a lesser role than they did in places with a more organized social life, meaning that the family had greater opportunities than did many other African-American families in the South. For example, Donaldson worked as a postmaster and signed the 1897 petition to separate Lower Pinellas from Hillsborough County. Several of the 11 Donaldson children went to the Disston City School along with white children. As Donaldson’s son Edward recalled, “Nobody thought a thing about it.” And when John Donaldson died from tuberculosis in 1901, he was buried alongside 300 of his white pioneer neighbors in the Glen Oak Cemetery (as was his wife, Anna).

This dynamic did not last. When the Orange Belt Railroad arrived in 1888, it spurred a population rise that included black laborers. Discriminatory policies, laws, and social norms followed, and by the turn of the century, St. Petersburg’s racial dynamics echoed those of the rest of Florida and the South. Despite that reality, in which African-Americans in St. Petersburg were being subjected to active and sometimes violent discrimination, a white man and former neighbor recalled in 1914 that Donaldson had been “universally respected.” Given all the Donaldsons accomplished, that description seems inadequate, so in honor of Black History Month we celebrate John and Anna Donaldson, St. Pete’s first black settlers.

Sources available on request and include the research and writings of Ray Arsenault, Valerie Kasper, and Scott Taylor Hartzell.