Category Archives: History

Henry J. DeForest and Ephraim DeForest

Henry J. DeForest was a little known Canadian landscape painter who I first became aware of when I bought one of his paintings back in 1980. I could find out very little about his life or art at that time so embarked on an “on again off again” project to learn more about him. Whenever I travelled to cities across Canada where he had lived or worked I visited galleries, museums or libraries seeking information from their files (much of this research was conducted before the days of the Internet). Fortunately, my profession afforded me a number of such opportunities. The items I assembled, which included newspaper articles, journals and images of his paintings, were stuffed into a few file folders at home waiting for a time when they could be properly assessed.

This year I reopened the files and again took to the Internet to see what else I could find. Historical newspaper databases were invaluable, as was Ancestry and the connections that network provided to some DeForest family members. I expanded my knowledge of this painter and decided to share my findings with others by writing about him.

I was intrigued to also learn that Henry’s two times great grandfather Ephraim DeForest had been a United Empire Loyalist so decided to extend my research to him.  The results of all this digging were the following three articles and two ancillary projects:

Henry Josiah DeForest (1855-1924): A Largely Forgotten New Brunswick Born Artist published in the Fall 2019 issue of Generations, the Quarterly Journal of the New Brunswick Genealogical Society. Click on this link to access article.

Ephraim DeForest: The Shoemakers Ultimate Fate is a post for the Atlantic Loyalist Connections blog of the University of New Brunswick. It was posted on October 2, 2019 and describes the Loyalist experience of Ephraim (1742-1827) and his son Nathan (1765-1840) both of whom arrived in New Brunswick from the newly formed USA in 1783. This link will take you to the Blog.

1892 H. J. DeForest Travel Journal is a transcription and annotation of a hand-written journal compiled by Henry J. DeForest between December 1892 and early January 1893. I discovered the journal many years ago in an H.J. DeForest artist’s file at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary.

H. J. DeForest’s 18th Century Paintings of the Whanganui River, is an article written for the 2019 Annual Journal of the Friends of the Whanganui River Inc. published in March 2020. The full colour magazine is produced annually by this New Zealand not for profit group to help fulfil its aims of documenting life and activities on and around the river, and historical events in the river’s past.

Also included in the Friends of the Whanganui River 2019 Annual is a transcription of a newspaper article written by Henry DeForest and published in the Wanganui Herald of December 28, 1889.

H.J. DeForest Paintings Database is a work in progress compilation of images and / or descriptions of all known H.J. DeForest paintings. I currently have records of over 225 paintings and actual images of over 90, of which one third are in the public domain.

Robert E. Lee visits Charlotte Harbor in 1849

Some may consider it insensitive to post an article about Robert E. Lee in this time when his role in US history is often challenged. There are citizens in Lee County, Florida, where I spend time in the winter, who would like to have the large portrait of him in Confederate uniform removed from the County Chambers. This article deals with a little known early contact Lee had with his namesake county in between his service with the US Army in the Mexican-American War and his later leadership role with the Confederacy. At the time he was a US Army Captain of Engineers and a Brevet Colonel.

Below is a link to the guest blog which I prepared for the Punta Gorda History Center to mark the 170th anniversary of Robert E. Lee’s 1849 visit to Charlotte Harbor with a U.S. Army Board of Engineers survey team.

http://puntagordahistorycenterblog.blogspot.com/2019/03/170th-anniversary-of-robert-e-lees.html

New Florida Presentations

This winter I will be delivering at least three new presentations in the Punta Gorda area.

  • I have updated my Burnt Store Road material for the Burnt Store Golf & Activity Club. The title for this November 2018 talk is Fifty Fun Facts About Burnt Store Road.
  • In January Butch Coward and I are co-presenting to the Burnt Store Lakes Property Owners Association on the topic of the early flower growing operations in the area. We will screen two short films shot in the early 1960s describing the floriculture of the Coward & Hobbs company and I will also use a series of historical maps to outline the history of the property before this commercial operation.
  • In February I will be delivering a new history presentation to the Renaissance Academy of Florida Gulf Coast University at their Herald Court location. This session will draw upon a series of published and unpublished accounts from surveyors, trading post operators, military officers, customs officials and other adventurers to describe conditions in the Charlotte Harbor / Peace River area prior to the end of the Civil War in 1865.

Kilimanjaro, Kurelek and the War of 1812

You may wonder what these three topics have in common. As it turns out, nothing at all other than they were all topics of presentations I was involved in over the last year.

In October 2017 Loretta Phinney and I did a combined presentation at St. Stephen’s on the Hill, Mississauga which described our ascents of a very different “hill”. My presentation focused on a self-directed five day budget-rate climb of Africa’s largest mountain which I did with three friends in the early 1970s (see photo of the February 1973 Kilimanjaro ice cap below).

Loretta’s presentation, very well illustrated by a large number of excellent photos, summarized her eight day climb to the summit of Kilimanjaro with an organized tour group in the spring of 2017.

In February 2018 I presented another in my series of history based lectures at Florida Gulf Coast University’s Renaissance Academy in Punta Gorda. This one was titled “Unique Perspectives on the War of 1812”.  I had a lot of fun providing the primarily American audience with a balanced take on that war which turned out to be quite different from what is generally taught in US schools.

In June 2018, again at St. Stephens on-the-Hill in Mississauga, I delivered a presentation on the Canadian artist William Kurelek who, in 1965, had created a painting depicting the story of Zacchaeus in the tree surrounded by the St. Stephens church and its congregation.

Burnt Store Road Book – Print Copy Published

On November 1, 2016 a print version of Graham’s eBook Where Do We Live? Research by a Seasonal Resident of Burnt Store Road (aka The Burnt Store Road Book) was published by the Burnt Store-PPYC Charitable Boating Foundation. Graham had previously granted the rights to the book to this charity.

It is available at a variety of book stores and other outlets around Charlotte and Lee Counties including Sandman Book Company, Copperfish Books, Burnt Store Marina Trading Post, CHEC and the Cape Coral Historical Society. The Library of Congress Control Number is 2016915567 and the ISBN  is 978-0-692-78351-1.

The eBook was freely distributed for the first 15 months and was downloaded over 750 times. In the summer of 2017 the eBook was made available for download in exchange for a US$9.50 contribution to the same charity which has published the print version. Download instructions are now available on the book launch website – www.wheredowelive.com.

The Burnt Store-PPYC Charitable Boating Foundation is a non-profit 501(c)3 organization established in 2014 by a group of residents of the Burnt Store area. The 2017 directors are Jeff Hawley, Carole Lick, Graham Segger, Bill Southworth, Kay Ackerson, Carmen Comite, Lon Acheson, and John Vanderslice. The mission of the organization is to provide educational and outreach opportunities related to boating and marine topics for the community. Examples of sponsored activities are cruises with members and staff of local children’s groups such as the Boys and Girls Club of Charlotte County and participation in the Wounded American Veterans (WAVE) day on the water program. Other activities include the publishing of Graham’s book and printing of boating safety material. The Foundation’s Florida Solicitation of Funds registration number CH45066.

Update – As of December 2017 all of the initial print run has been sold or consigned to book stores. The Foundation has printed a Second Edition available January 1, 2018. The Second Edition has some updated and new material and has been printed in black & white to allow the Foundation to reduce the selling price to $25.

Where Do We Live? book launch day

The eBook version of Where Do We Live? Research by a Seasonal Resident of Burnt Store Road, Florida was self-published on January 12, 2016 after eighteen months of rewarding and enjoyable effort. Other than participation in technical writing in my former career, this is my first publicly available book. Writing it has been a fascinating project and a great learning experience.

The book is a compilation of research essays about Burnt Store Road which runs for twenty miles between the Florida towns of Punta Gorda and Cape Coral. It is an historic route which has many interesting stories to tell. It explores a wide range of subjects of interest to local residents, including the location of the likely Burnt Store, the development history of the area, the conservation lands which border the road, the hurricane history of the region and early commercial activities around and in Charlotte Harbor.