Residents were well-acquainted with the young mayor’s cruel-and at times homicidal-mood swings. Photo from Cedar Key, where Mayor Billy Cottrell terrorized residents Cedar Key’s population peaked at less than 2,000 people, which makes it even more remarkable that the vile shenanigans of the town’s mayor reached the attention of the White House. Over the years the economy would be driven by the seafood, manufacturing and milling industries. In the latter half of the 19th century, nearby Atsena Otie Key was home to a large mill supplying cedar for pencils and employing many residents. The completion of a railroad linking the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico in 1860 boosted their value, making the Cedar Keys a hub for trade and transport before the completion of a railroad to larger Tampa. Despite their small size, the Keys’ location was considered strategic during the 19th century they housed a critical supply depot established by General Zachary Taylor in 1836 during the Second Seminole War and would later be occupied by Union troops during the Civil War. Only one of the Cedar Keys, Way Key, is inhabited today (a dozen nearby islands comprise the Cedar Keys National Wildlife Refuge). It was a big scandal at the heart of this small archipelago off of Florida’s Gulf Coast, located more than 130 miles north of Tampa. President Harrison would later note that it was “a very grim commentary upon the condition of social order at Cedar Keys, that only a woman…had the courage to file charges against. The “good Christian men” of the town were too “timid” to put a stop to his outrages, and she concluded her letter by saying she had “no son or husband for him to fuss with and shoot. Bell indignantly described Cottrell bullying locals, forcing a local black man to parade through the town in costume, and making his own sister a widow after a confrontation with his brother-in-law. Rose Bell, who wrote to the President on August 4, 1889, and called for an investigation into the “outrageous conduct” perpetrated by the “habitual drunkard” Cottrell. The first alert he received came from a local woman named Mrs. “Billy” Cottrell had imposed a reign of terror so mendacious that it could only be halted by a man with deep connections to the White House.īy the time President Harrison took action, the trouble in Cedar Key had been brewing for more than a year. This episode, however, did not take place on the shore of a distant nation, but instead off the waters of Florida in a small American town called Cedar Key, where mayor William W. President Benjamin Harrison defended the military intervention to Congress, saying it was justified and in the interest of the nation. He inflicted retribution on all who dared oppose him-and many who had not even tried. Under his rule, citizens lived in fear of capricious acts of violence. In the spring of 1890, the United States government sent a heavily armed vessel to dislodge a despot.
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