Frank B. Butler
[1] He acquired land on Anastasia Island stretching between the Atlantic Ocean and the Matanzas River on which he established a beach area resort open to African Americans.
In the seaport town of Fernandina, Butler first worked as a bartender at a bar owned by Solicito Salvador, a Sicilian immigrant who later moved to St. Augustine and opened a fish market.
Selling grocery items such as butchered meat, flour, milk, and sugar, and giving out tokens for discounts on merchandise, he had primarily black customers, with some white clientele.
[4] Washington Street was in the heart of Lincolnville, the black community that had developed after the American Civil War on the western banks of Maria Sanchez Creek and its marshlands.
Some black men became ministers or ran small businesses, but most African Americans worked as domestic help or as common laborers.
By 1923 he was buying real estate in other areas, especially west of St. Augustine in the section he developed as the College Park subdivision, where numerous African Americans built their houses.
An amiable man, Butler was friends with some of the city's white leaders, who informed him of tax sales and other opportunities to buy land at a cheap price.
The organization became "one of the most lucrative real estate businesses involving property in the western section of St. Augustine, outside the city limits, during the 1920s", according to local historian David Nolan.
[9] In 1927, Butler began buying Edgar F. Pomar's undeveloped land between the Atlantic Ocean and the Matanzas River, about ten miles southeast of St. Augustine on Anastasia Island.
They asked the commission to deny any application that might lessen the value of their beach property by making it possible for an African American resort and dance hall to be built nearby.
[12][13] Through a series of real estate transactions over the course of a decade, Butler was eventually able to purchase the remainder of Pomar's land with the aid of realtor Frank E. Hale and Frank Upchurch, Sr. Upchurch held the mortgage on the property until 1949 so that the land could be deeded to the College Park Realty Company in October 1942—creating a strip fifteen hundred feet deep from the ocean to the river, with the mortgage satisfied in 1949.
He had improved the part of the beach property along the Matanzas River, providing access to its waters for boating and fishing, and space for picnics and cookouts on the waterfront.
[15] Beginning around 1948, after his property had been re-platted in 1947, black people from St. Augustine, Jacksonville, Georgia, and elsewhere purchased his lots in the area near the ocean and built homes.
This included acreage from the ocean beach area south of his community of small homes and businesses westward to the Matanzas river.
Minnie Mae Edwards said that the state had expressed an interest in acquiring a piece of property to provide a park for African Americans.
The county added around $50,000 in in-kind services and the oak-shaded park by the river was rehabilitated with covered picnic tables, barbecue grills, restrooms, and playground equipment.
[22] In 1964 Martin Luther King Jr. and his associates Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy and C. T. Vivian stayed in Butler's motel at the beach during his civil rights visit to St.
Martin Luther King was photographed at 5480 Atlantic View by a cottage where he was supposed to stay that was struck by rifle fire, leaving a bullet hole.
He was appointed to the first biracial committee to discuss racial problems following the civil rights protests in St. Augustine during the summer of 1964,[24] in which Martin Luther King Jr. had been arrested and held in jail.
[26] At the end of 1973, the St. Augustine Record ran a retrospective piece that mentioned the death of "Frank Butler, prominent civic leader" in June as one of the significant events of the past year.
