A Jeffersonian Legacy in Central Florida: Francis Wayles Eppes

Francis Wayles Eppes, the grandson of President Thomas Jefferson, was a Florida cotton planter, slaveholder, and civic leader who helped elevate Tallahassee during his tenure as mayor. After the Civil War, he moved to Orlando, established a citrus farm, and played a pivotal role in establishing the Cathedral Church of Saint Luke. 

Born on September 20, 1801, to Maria Jefferson Eppes, daughter of President Thomas Jefferson, and John Wayles Eppes, a U.S. Congressman from Virginia and Jefferson's nephew by marriage, Francis Eppes inherited his family’s intertwined legacies of civic leadership and slaveholding.¹ He spent parts of his youth living with Jefferson at Monticello and in the White House. Jefferson took an active role in Francis’s upbringing, after the death of Francis’s mother, Maria, in 1804, and the two developed a close personal bond.² Francis’s father, John Wayles Eppes—a lawyer and U.S. Congressman (later Senator)—was frequently called away on business. Hence, Francis divided his time between Monticello, Jefferson’s plantation, and Millbrook, his father’s plantation in Brunswick County.³ One of Francis’s caretakers was an enslaved woman named Betsy Hemmings, whose grave in the Eppes family burial ground, marked with a stone slab that reads: “Sacred to the Memory of our Mammy, Betsey Hemmings who was Mother, Sister & Friend to all who knew her.”⁴ 

 Eppes attended several elite private schools, most notably Georgetown College (today’s Georgetown University) and South Carolina College (today’s University of South Carolina). He studied to become a lawyer but was never admitted to the bar.⁵ In 1822, he returned from South Carolina to Virginia to marry his third cousin, Mary Elizabeth Cleland Randolph.⁶ Upon the death of his grandfather in 1826, Eppes inherited Jefferson’s Poplar Forest planation and its octagonal house (designed by Jefferson) in Bedford, Virginia.⁷ Eppes took some of Besty Hemming’s enslaved children to Poplar Forest, causing great distress to their mother.⁸ 

In 1828, Eppes decided to leave Virginia for new opportunities in the deep South. In 1828 he sold Poplar Forest and moved to Leon County, Florida, where he established a cotton plantation called L’eau Noir, meaning Black Creek.⁹ Like other planters, Eppes relied on enslaved labor for his rising wealth and stature. He quickly involved himself in the business of his community, founding St. John’s Episcopal Church in 1829, and serving as the secretary of the diocese for many years.¹⁰ In 1833, Florida Governor William P. DuVal selected Eppes to be a justice of the peace, an office he held for over six years, helping bring order and peace to the frontier.¹¹  

 Eppes’s wife’s death, during the birth of their sixth child in 1835, shook him greatly. He sold L’eau Noir and bought another plantation on Lake Lafayette, in eastern Tallahassee.¹² He married his second wife, Susan Margaret Ware Crouch, in 1837 and eventually fathered seven more children by her for a total of thirteen.¹³ In 1841, Eppes became mayor of Tallahassee, serving for four consecutive one-year terms as well as holding the office in 1856 through 1857 and again in 1866.¹⁴ 

 Eppes is perhaps best known for his work to further education in Florida. In 1851, the Florida Legislature passed an act authorizing the establishment of two learning institutes, with one to be located east and the other west of the Suwanee River.¹⁵ Having petitioned nearly two decades earlier for such an establishment, Eppes quickly acted to bring the West Florida Seminary to Tallahassee. After a failed proposal in 1854, he presented a second proposal in 1856 to the Florida Legislature that included “a new building, ten thousand dollars in cash, and an annual endowment of two thousand dollars a year to the school.”¹⁶ Eppes served for eleven years, eight as the president, on the institute’s Board of Education.¹⁷ In 1901, after a series of name changes and the adoption of a liberal arts curriculum, the school became the four-year institution known as Florida State University.¹⁸ Efforts to honor Eppes for his role in the school’s founding have met with fierce controversy in recent years, with critics citing his unapologetic embrace of slavery as unworthy of honor.¹⁹ 

As a Southern planter and slaveholder, Eppes wholeheartedly supported the Confederacy and its defense of the “peculiar institution.” According to family tradition, so convinced was Eppes of the South’s ultimate victory that—toward the end of the war—he sold his plantation for Confederate money “which in a few weeks was worthless.”²⁰ Eppes remained in Tallahassee for several years after the war and served a final one-year term as mayor during Reconstruction.  

In 1869, Eppes moved to Orlando—then a small, sparsely populated community—and established a citrus farm at his home, Pine Hill on Lake Pineloch.²¹ As he had in previous locales, Eppes quickly established himself as a civic and church leader. Orlando’s Cathedral Church of Saint Luke originated in his home, with pioneer settlers gathering there for morning and evening prayer. Today, a stain glass window in the narthex of the church honors his memory.²²  

Eppes died on May 30, 1881, and is buried in the Eppes-Shine plot of Greenwood Cemetery.²³ In 2004, the City of Orlando and the Florida Department of State erected a two-sided historical marker at the grave site, highlighting the Eppes-Shine family’s connections to Thomas Jefferson and their local contributions as civic and business leaders.²⁴ 

1. “Francis Wayles Eppes,” Monticello, n.d., https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/francis-wayles-eppes/.

2. Eppes, Nicholas Ware. “Francis Eppes (1801-1881), Pioneer of Florida.” The Florida Historical Society Quarterly 5, no. 2 (1926): 94–102. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30149650.

3. “Pioneer led town through epidemic, fire,” Tallahassee Democrat, 27 April 2000, Page 4.

4. “Betsy Hemmings,” Monticello, accessed January 1, 2023, https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/betsy-hemmings/  

5. “Eppes,” Monticello.

6. Eppes, Nicholas Ware. “Francis Eppes (1801-1881), Pioneer of Florida.” The Florida Historical Society Quarterly 5, no. 2 (1926): 94–102. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30149650.

7. Poplar Forest, Monticello, n.d., https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/poplar-forest/

8. “Jefferson, Thomas, and Norma B. Cuthbert. “Poplar Forest: Jefferson’s Legacy to His Grandson.” Huntington Library Quarterly 6, no. 3 (1943): 333–56. https://doi.org/10.2307/3815767.

9. “Eppes,” Monticello.

10. “Eppes,” Monticello.

11. “Eppes,” Monticello.

12. “Eppes,” Monticello.

13. “Thomas Jefferson’s Family: A Genealogical Chart | Jefferson Quotes & Family Letters,” n.d., https://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/44.

14. “Eppes,” Monticello.

15. “Eppes,” Monticello.

16. “Eppes,” Monticello.

17. “Eppes,” Monticello.

18. “History of Florida State University,” Florida State University Office of Institutional Research, n.d., https://ir.fsu.edu/factbooks/2021-22/history.pdf 

19. In 2002, a bronze statue of Eppes, commissioned by FSU president Sandy D’Alemberte, was unveiled on the Florida State campus. In 2020, FSU President John Thrasher announced plans to remove the statue permanently. “We have a long history of addressing difficult racism and inclusion issues on this campus, and we know there is still much to work to do. As the nation faces great unrest and an urgent call for change, we, as a university, will continue to listen, learn and evolve,” Thrasher said in a press release. “FSU Removing Eppes Statue for 2nd Time in 3 Years,” New4Jax, July 23, 2020, https://www.news4jax.com/news/florida/2020/07/23/fsu-removing-francis-eppes-statue-for-2nd-time-in-3-years/

20. “United States Census (Slave Schedule), 1860,” database with images, Family Search, entry for Francis Eppes, accessed Oct 3, 2023. On Eppes family tradition, see Susan Bradford Eppes, "Francis Eppes (1801-1881), Pioneer of Florida," Florida Historical Quarterly 5, no. 2 (1926): 101-102, accessed April 16, 2024, https://stars.library.ucf.edu/fhq/vol5/iss2/7 

21. “Eppes,” Monticello.

22. “Our History,” Cathedral Church of St. Luke’s, Orlando, n.d., https://www.ccslorlando.org/history 

23. “In Memory of Francis Eppes,” The Weekly Floridian, June 21, 1881, 2.

24. “Eppes-Shine Plot Greenwood Cemetery,” Historical Marker Database, n.d., https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=93096