We continue with the long narrative on one of the most racist clans in the country,the Duponts.This particular chapter focuses on the Florida part of the clan.One family should not have so much control over so much in one state...

[.....On a warm autumn day in September of 1970 a line of mourners quietly filed across the manicured grounds of Nemours, the Delaware estate of the late Alfred I. DuPont. Slowly they approached the tall stone bell tower that loomed overhead.

Beneath that carillon rested the remains of the man who, in his struggle with Pierre DuPont, had torn the DuPont clan asunder over five decades ago. The greatest “rebel” in DuPont history, Alfred I. DuPont, had died in Florida in 1935. Now his family and friends gathered to place next to him the remains of his third and last wife, Jessie.

While Jessie Ball DuPont was being entombed next to her husband in Delaware, mourners also gathered a thousand miles to the south, in the state of Florida. There, in Jacksonville, Florida’s busiest port, flags flew at half mast in her honor, and bankers and politicians by the score expressed their feelings of loss. Florida had lost not only its richest resident, with a personal estate valued at over $100 million; Florida had lost its queen. .....

......How this came about is the untold story of the Du Pont family’s hidden empire in the land of sun and sand. It is an epic that spans half a century, marking Florida’s long climb out of the murky swamps to the playland we now call the sunshine state. And above all, it is the story not only of a queen, but of a king and the regent who became what many Floridians called “the emperor.”

The DuPont empire in Florida was literally born under the shadow of ruin, ruin of Florida’s economy, and ruin of the personal fortune of Alfred I. DuPont.

In 1923 Alfred’s feud with his Wilmington brethren and his narrow escape from financial disaster prompted him to look for greener fields beyond the stone fences of Delaware. His search ended a thousand miles away, in the whirlwind of southern Florida’s land boom.

“In those days,” Jessie recalled of Alfred’s winter visits to Florida, “everyone dressed for dinner. We were staying at the Royal Palm. We would dine, then change to street clothes and go out to mingle with the crowds. My brother and I had been through the southern California booms, and it was exciting.

“Mr. DuPont and I would walk down to Flagler Street weaving through the crowds. The binder boys were busy on every hand. The air was electrified, charged and surcharged. It would take us ten minutes to walk two blocks.” 1

Alfred anticipated well enough the coming financial collapse during his visits to the Miami area, but he also knew northern Florida well enough to recognize the enormous potential fortune which was beckoning. While Jessie dabbled in her own real estate speculation, buying two Miami Beach lots for $33,000 in 1923 and selling them for $165,000 in 1925 just before the boom deflated, Alfred pursued more long-range interests. In 1924 he sent Jessie’s shrewd but “pigheaded” brother, Ed Ball, to inspect land values in northern Florida, in what is now called the panhandle.

Here was an area yet untouched by the boom, with land prices still bargain-rate. Once, great cotton plantations had flourished in this area, generating the warped old time southern culture of huge, white elegant mansions standing beside rows of miserable pens for human slaves. Fine towns had sprung up along the Old Spanish Trail then and the cotton and lumber trade made the Gulf port of St. Joseph one of the liveliest cities in Florida.

All this had long since passed, succumbing to the cause for human freedom and the ravages of the boll weevil. Now, as Ed Ball drove along the Old Spanish Trail and over rutted backwoods roads from Tallahassee to the Alabama line in his little battered Chevrolet, he saw only wilderness growing over decayed vestiges of the past. But it was in the wilderness that Ball saw gold, the gold of valuable pine timber and rich, fertile soil. After poring over technical volumes on lumbering and wood pulp industries, Alfred du Pont accepted Ball’s report as ample reason to buy 66,081 acres of western Florida’s vast timberland. That was in 1924....]
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2019/04/part-10dupont-dynasty-behind-nylon.html