Oleta Brown Oesterreicher - (1908-1986). Section D, block 3, lot 1A, grave 3.

Oleta Oesterreicher née Brown was born in 1908 to Tom and Annie Brown. She grew up on their family dairy farm and lived there until her marriage to Hugher "Hugie" Oesterreicher. The two married at Holy Rosary Catholic Church in 1927.

In 1929, they each lost their life savings to bank failures, those of Jacksonville Beach and St. Augustine banks, two of many in a steep economic decline that culminated in the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression.

Oleta and Hugie managed to live off the profits of Hugie's hunting, trapping, and foraging until summer 1932. Between then and the end of Prohibition in 1933, the couple turned to bootlegging to make ends meet while Oleta was pregnant with her third child.

When World War II began in 1939, Oleta, who celebrated the first Armistice Day as a child and had never known anyone on the front lines of the first World War, saw family, friends, and acquaintances enlist and leave the Beaches.

Mere months before the end of the war in 1945, she and Hugie opened Oesterreicher's Grocery on the corner of First Street and Sixteenth Avenue South. She ran the grocery store until 1954, when it was leased and eventually sold.

Oleta passed in 1986 after a period of illness.

"She seized life in her later years with enthusiasm; everything she did, she loved." - Michel Oesterreicher.

Oleta married Hugie Oesterreicher in Holy Rosary Catholic Church on Laura Street. The property, which was built in 1923 and dedicated in 1924, is one of Jacksonville's few standing Romanesque Revival buildings. It was designed by architect James R. Walsh, and is on the National Registry of Historic Places. As of March 2023, traditional ecclesiastically-accurate restoration of the church building is underway. Funding has been provided by the congregation of St. Michael the Archangel Catholic Church.

In 1929, Oleta lost her savings to the bank failure of Jacksonville Beach Bank. Small banks were the first to suspend operations during the onset of the economic downswing that would become the Great Depression. Like Oleta, many irretrievably lost their savings in bank failures during this time.

During the depression, Oleta's small family bootlegging operation was only one of many. While figures like Elizabeth "Betty" Hill and Ethel Evans paint a perilous and glamorous picture of women in bootlegging, the typical female bootlegger was much more like Oleta, a working-class woman with multiple children.

During the second World War, Oleta opened and ran a grocery store. At this time, many women who had never worked professionally entered the workforce to compensate for the labor shortage left by men who went to war. Oleta's particular venture was spurred by wartime restlessness following grief for loved ones lost in the war. One such loved one, Oleta's nephew Bob Brown, was declared missing, but returned home safely after the war's end.

Oesterreicher, Michel. Pioneer Family: Life on Florida's Twentieth-Century Frontier. Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The University of Alabama Press, 1996.

Tanya Marie Sanchez. “The Feminine Side of Bootlegging.” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, vol. 41, no. 4, 2000, pp. 403–33. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4233697. Accessed 26 July 2023.

Self, Bob. “Photos: Historic Holy Rosary Catholic Church in Springfield to Get New Life.” The Florida Times-Union, 2 Aug. 2022, www.jacksonville.com/picture-gallery/news/2022/08/02/holy-rosary-catholic-church-being-restored-new-congregation/10217770002/. 

“Social Security History: The Bank.” SSA.gov, www.ssa.gov/history/bank.html. Accessed 26 July 2023. 

“New Church Project.” www.stmichaelcatholic.org, 29 Mar. 2023, www.stmichaelcatholic.org/expansion-project. 

“Our History.” Holy Rosary Catholic Church, holyrosaryjax.org/our-history/. Accessed 26 July 2023.