Black Gold and Silver Sands:: A Pictorial History of Agriculture in Palm Beach County.

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Chapter 1

Lake Worth: The ‘Garden of Eden’

By 1840 East Florida’s population had zoomed to 19,535 – up 123 percent from the census ten years before. But the seemingly impenetrable southernmost third of the territory counted absolutely no one. No doubt a few desperate souls dwelled therein – army deserters, debtors, Seminoles – who’d rather not be noticed or counted. Almost as reluctant were some sixty mosquito-swatting soldiers who Gen. Thomas Jesup left behind in Fort Jupiter, a crude wooden stockade on the Loxahatchee River whose mission was to keep the renegade Indians in their swampy Everglades refuge and punish anyone desperate enough to show himself.

In 1842 Congress decided to fill its southern population void by passing the Armed Occupation Act. In the Territory of East Florida it offered a quarter section of land to men who would settle south of a line running roughly from Palatka to Gainesville. They had to be able to bear arms because the law required them to settle at least two miles from a military fort. If they survived five years, they’d get title to the land.

Within a year 242 permits were issued from St. Augustine, the territorial capital. The 150-mile stretch from Fort Pierce to Biscayne Bay accounted for about 120 of the claims, many of which were never acted upon. ¹

But it was a start.

In 1845 Florida became a state. And because one could find more wildcats than voters way down south, the legislature in faroff Tallahassee engulfed today’s Palm Beach County first, within barely-known Brevard County, and later within an even murkier mass called Dade County. The latter, encompassing today’s Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Martin counties and with 7,800 square miles, was six times the size of Rhode Island and bigger than 3 of the original 13 colonies.

Settling the east coast meant being able to bring supply ships into ports, but the shoreline off upper Dade County was rife with reefs. If a ship cracked up, which was far too frequent, sailors were as good as dead unless they could stumble onto a freshwater spring and comb the beach for washed-up fish that could pass the smell test.

In 1849 the military decided to aid shipping and spur settlement by sending a young lieutenant colonel by the name of Robert E. Lee on a mission to chart the coastline of Florida and recommend likely spots for lighthouses. Jupiter was a priority because its coastline came closer to the Gulf Stream than anywhere else in Florida, and because treacherous reefs surrounded its narrow, silt-prone inlet.

A small steamboat nestles in a bend in the upper Loxahatchee, probably not far from where boats are rented today in Jonathan Dickinson State Park. (Historical Society of Palm Beach County)

In 1871 Jupiter Lighthouse (and Fort Jupiter two miles upriver) were the only outposts of ‘civilization’ in south Florida except for Cape Florida Lighthouse on Key Biscayne. In 1880 the U.S. Census counted only 527 souls in a Dade County that encompassed 7,800 square miles. (Historical Society of Palm Beach County)

In 1853, when Congress created a U.S. Lighthouse Service, it also appropriated $35,000 to erect a light tower at Jupiter. The project called for a two-year timetable using a twenty-man crew, but Mother Nature had her own ideas. A sandbar had blocked the inlet at the time and the crew was forced to load some fifty shipments of bricks and equipment on shallow-draft barges at Fort Pierce. From there they would meander for some forty miles down the often-narrow, twisting Indian River to Jupiter.

Before long, the work crew had come down with a debilitating illness they knew only as Jupiter Fever. The soldiers at Fort Jupiter had it, too. This malaise, later known as malaria, combined with the fickle sandbar and periodic harassment by Indian forays from the Everglades to stretch the construction project to seven years. And almost as soon as the tower beamed its first light in 1860, the Civil War erupted and it went dark again for five more years.

Who was Palm Beach County’s first farmer? Probably the three lighthouse families, to the extent that they kept backyard gardens. But the story of serious commercial farming would begin in Lake Worth with Hannibal Dillingham Pierce and a hardy group of pioneers who soon joined him. In 1871 this romantic adventurer, living in Chicago, decided to follow his brother-in-law Will Moore to sunny Florida. He’d buy a small sloop and sail with his wife and seven-year-old son down the Mississippi and around to Florida’s west coast. His timing turned out to be fortuitous indeed. In October, just as the Pierces finished provisioning the sailboat, the Great Chicago Fire broke out and burned every ship in the marina to the waterline. Flames were literally licking at their stern as the family fled south towards the Mississippi.

Once they rounded the Gulf Coast into Florida’s Cedar Key, the Pierces sold the boat and rode to Jacksonville on a train nicknamed The Mullet Special because its main passengers were thousands of mullets netted, barreled and shipped north. After drifting down to Sand Point (soon to be named Titusville) in search of work, the family had just built a homestead along the Indian River when their own Great Fire broke out, destroying everything from their palmetto shack to the clothing hung up inside. The Pierces’ only good luck was that when they sailed south to Jupiter in search of refuge, they found that lighthouse Capt. James Armour could use an assistant.

So there Hannibal stayed, while he learned the demanding drudgeries of lighthouse maintenance, tried to rebuild his family’s rudimentary assets and regain a vision for their future.

Both happened quickly. In October 1872, the three keepers and their families experienced the bounty of Divine Providence, albeit in the form of someone else’s misfortune. A large merchant ship named Victor broke her prop in a storm. It fell back against the rudder, locking it in place and robbing the navigator of all control. Passengers and crew reeled on deck as the large ship drifted into the reefs outside Jupiter Inlet and began to break up. Although the lighthouse crew helped bring all survivors to shore, they were quick to jump back in their skiffs and begin snaring a flotilla of salvage that was washing over the bar and into the Jupiter (Loxahatchee) River. ²

Within a few hours, the Pierce family had a new start on life. One crate yielded fifty men’s suits. Another contained bolts of muslin. Hannibal proudly presented his wife Margretta with a Wilson and Wheeler sewing machine that had floated up in a large crate. Kegs of butter, rum and other supplies the families all divided – and all at a time when their twice-a-year shipments from the Lighthouse Service had been running low.

All this must have allowed Hannibal Pierce to dream ambitiously once again. Before and after the Victor adventure the lighthouse had played host to occasional travelers on their way to and from Lake Worth, seven and a half miles south of Jupiter Inlet. One could barely see its northern shore when standing on the platform atop the 105-foot tower, and reports reaching Hannibal’s ears were that it was the beginning of Eden.

Bands of hunters and fishermen camped along Jupiter Inlet where condos stand today. This group hunted sharks for sport. (Historical Society of Palm Beach County)

Back then they called it Lake Worth country. William Lanehart had journeyed there to cut crab wood (used for making ornate walking canes) and he extolled its beauty. Pierce’s brother-in-law Will Moore had decided to accompany William Butler, a Virginian who’d been hired by a University of Rochester professor to collect skeletons of native birds and animals. Jesse Malden, a hunter from Georgia, had passed through with his wife and child, intent on a few weeks of hunting, and was supposedly camping somewhere on the lake.

Then came one Hiram F. Hammon, an Ohioan on a mission in search of his personal paradise. Well, when Hammon stopped by the lighthouse on his return, his ebullience must have been too much for Hannibal. As reported by his son Charles Pierce, who wrote the priceless Pioneer Life in Southeast Florida, Hammon announced he was going to stop in Gainesville, where the U. S. Land Office was headquartered, and stake a claim on Lake Worth.

Indeed, his was the first homestead claim filed in today’s Palm Beach County. As Charles Pierce noted:

All the talk about the beauties and wonders of Lake Worth, and of its rich hammock lands open to the homesteader, caused Father to change his mind about locating a new home. He was afraid if he waited too long all the best homesteads would be taken, so sometime in midsummer [1873] he announced his intention of giving up the lighthouse job in October and moving to Lake Worth. ³

By October, Pierce was ready to go. He had salvaged a lifeboat from the Victor and rigged it with two sails. And from the white pine that had washed up after the reef tore open its hull, he built a 12-foot tender that would tow behind the converted lifeboat.

But Pierce had no specific plan for dealing with a challenge that would vex Lake Worth settlers for the next twenty years. While the beautiful body of water beckoned like an awaiting bride, the aisle that led to the altar – the shallow, twisting Lake Worth Creek – simply petered out a thousand or so feet short of it. Indians were known to have tramped down a haulover for their canoes over many years, but finding it was a white man’s crapshoot.

To prove the point, it took Hannibal, Margretta and nine-year-old Charlie Pierce a week of probing dead-end creeks before they finally found the Indian trail. But any jubilance was quickly doused when a hurricane came howling that night. The three spent it huddled in an alligator crawl, lying on a spread of wet palmetto fans, trying to use the turned-over sloop as a shield from the battering wind. Food had all but run out, and that night, recalled Charlie, Mother cooked our supper of fat pork with syrup and a cup of tea. ⁴

The next day, amidst clear skies when all nature seemed to be smiling and basking in bright sunlight, Hannibal Pierce went out scouting and quickly returned with good news that he had reached the lakeshore. But hauling the sloop, with its heavy load of supplies and equipment, over the 300-yard trail would be impossible.

There was nothing to use for rollers and skids. The Indians used the stalks of the wild pawpaw as skids on which to slide their canoes. The very thin, hard, outer bark of the pawpaw stalk peels off, leaving a juicy undersurface over which the boat or canoe glides easily. At this haulover, however, there were no pawpaws. ⁵

The only option available to Hannibal Pierce was to leave the sailboat on the trail, hope to find brother-in-law Will somewhere in his specimen-collecting expedition, and have the two of them return to lug the sloop across. Meanwhile, he’d have to drag the 12-foot tender across on his own. Like a mule, he’d pull on the rope for twenty feet, sit until his heart stopped pounding, then pull again. As son Charlie wrote: This violent exertion was particularly hard on him since he had very little to eat in the past twenty-four hours and not a wink of sleep.

Mother and son went on ahead, and at last the tip of Eden appeared through the sawgrass.

We were at once struck by the peculiar color of the lake water. At first sight we thought it muddy; it seemed to be naturally opaque. Some years later it was found that this particular coloring was caused by the small amount of salt water that was mixed with the fresh water of the lake. The inlet was small and admitted only a small quantity of ocean water each day. As there was no fresh water emptying into the lake, only a seepage from the west shore from the swamps, the mixture of fresh and salt water was kept at even grade, hence the color. ⁶

When Copper and Brass Were ‘Crops’

The lake was nearly 23 miles long, and its 50 miles of shoreline had been scarcely trod by man. In 1866 one Michael Sears and his son George had sailed a schooner from Biscayne Bay to the Indian River and had found inlets only at Boca Raton and Jupiter. But on the way back, after a prolonged period of rain, they were some ten miles south of Jupiter and saw a swift, broad stream of dark fresh water pouring from an opening in the beach ridge.

When the tide changed, they decided to explore inside and found themselves on a lake with no end in sight from north to south. After a couple of miles southward they passed a log cabin on the eastern shore and met its occupant, who introduced himself with a thick German accent only as Lang.

Mr. Lang was correct and courteous, but no fount of information. As the sailors departed, he asked how the war was coming along.

What war? asked Michael Sears.

Vy the Var Between the States, said Lang.

When told it had been over for a year, the settler seemed astonished.

What Lake Worth’s first pioneer hadn’t volunteered is that he had come from Saxony, had been an assistant Jupiter lighthouse keeper at one point, and had been farming on the Indian River when the war broke out. When lighthouse keeper Joseph Papy had refused to darken the light so that Confederate supply boats could sneak up Jupiter Inlet undetected, Lang had been one of three men who had kidnapped Papy and stolen the lighthouse lens. As the war turned in the Union’s favor, Lang fled to the most remote place he could imagine.

Hannibal Pierce’s first home, on Hypoluxo Island, was built from beached lumber and topped with a palmetto frond roof. That’s Pierce at right, leaning on one of the foundation posts. (Historical Society of Palm Beach County)

Valorous Spencer’s home along Lake Worth (1876) looks almost modern except for the fact that the walls were made entirely from canvas sails that had washed up on the beach. (Historical Society of Palm Beach County)

Now, with this liberating news, it wasn’t too long before Lang packed up and moved north, but not without bequeathing a small legacy. Lake Worth’s first settler just happened to be a horticulturist, and the carefully cultivated rows of plants and trees he left behind would give the first farmers an important jump-start.

By mid-day, after the bone-tired, hungry Pierces had sailed past Lang’s old cabin, they were thrilled to see a crude palmetto shack in the distance with people walking about. It turned out to be the Maldens from Georgia, and when Mrs. Malden heard how famished the bedraggled band was, she soon had a good meal set out before us, wrote Charles Pierce. ⁷

The next day the three Pierces headed another three miles downstream and easily spotted the high hammock on a large island in the lake where Uncle Will and the specimen seeker Butler had set up camp. Within two weeks, Hannibal and Will had returned with the still intact supply sloop and the Pierces had cleared a piece of hammock a half mile down the island from Butler’s nine-by-twelve shack.

Because Hannibal Pierce had vowed that his house would be built to withstand any hurricane, father, mother and son were soon spending their days combing the beach for stout timbers. Wrote Charlie: This part of the job took some time and plenty of hard work, for the timbers had to be hauled over the beach ridge to the lake, then rafted across to the homestead.

By December 1873 the Pierces had themselves a home with ten-by-twelve-inch corner posts sunk two feet into holes cut out of solid rock. They’d even found enough wood for a second- story floor, with palmetto fans to cover the cracks.

And their island now had a name. A group of Indians had visited that fall on a hunting trip and one of the squaws told Mrs. Pierce they called the island Hypoluxo, meaning water all around, no get out.

They even had a neighbor up the lake. Charlie Moore, an old sailor, had moved into the Lang house, and invited the three Pierces for their first Christmas dinner on the lake. Charlie was already fattening a large possum on sweet potatoes and he asked Mrs. Pierce to bring her Dutch oven and bake some biscuits.

Making Cane Syrup – the Hard Way

In the summer of 1879, as Lake Worth settlers were watching their new pineapples bursting forth, all decided they should also raise their own sugarcane and make syrup. Once the cane was ripening in the field they set about building a mill of sorts.

Will Moore, Charlie Pierce’s uncle, found a mahogany log on the beach that could be cut up and smoothed with a hand ax to make rollers for crushing the stalks. From the same log he carved cogwheels. Cap Dimick’s mule was hitched to the drive log, which was attached to the gears and wooden rollers. As Charlie Pierce reported: When the mule strained ahead, the wooden cogs did their job equal to iron, the rollers rotated against each other, stalks were crushed, and cane juice squirted into a tub below.

Still needed: a large kettle for boiling the cane juice into syrup. Word was that a man named Hunt in Biscayne Bay had an iron kettle that he’d trade for several young coconut plants. So off went Hannibal Pierce and his son in their sailboat full of coconut shoots – a round trip of 140 miles and six overnights.

By the time they had returned, neighbors had built a rock furnace at Will Lanehart’s place to hold the iron kettle. Loads of sugar cane were hauled to the mill and once again Cap Dimick hitched up his old mule to the rollers. Buckets of cane juice squirted forth and a fire was lit under the kettle. Everyone buzzed about waiting for the first taste of fine quality syrup.

It was awful. Salty. The more the cauldron boiled, the saltier the syrup became.

What went wrong? The farmers went back to the east side of the lake, where all of the cane had been grown. They dug and sniffed at the silvery soil and concluded that salt from sea spray had been blown over by years of storms and had worked its way into the ground. The manufacture had to be given up and was never again attempted, wrote Charlie sadly. ⁸

The crude cane syrup mill used on Lake Worth probably looked a lot like this one, photographed on the Frank Bowers property on W. Indiantown Road in 1916. (Lynn Bensel Jones Collection)

We were not disappointed when called to sit at the table. There were many good things, such as Mother’s biscuits and the finest cane syrup one ever ate [made by a man in Cape Canaveral]. For dessert we had prickly pear pie. Perhaps other types of pie might taste better, but most certainly none could compare in appearance with this pie’s gorgeous color. The piéce de resistance, of course, was the roasted possum, and all agreed it had a fine flavor, not unlike young pig. ⁹

Like Lang, the man who now occupied his cabin was another fugitive of sorts. Charlie Moore had been in a fight – perhaps a barroom brawl – where a man was killed and thought himself to be wanted for murder. Only after his death did word come that he’d been found not guilty in absentia. Meanwhile, this lifelong sailor lived out his days as heir to Lake Worth’s first semblance of a commercial farm.

When Moore stumbled onto the Lang’s abandoned cabin, where the Old Episcopal Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea would later stand, he had found a hedge of oleander around it. Surrounding that were two acres of limes, lemons, oranges, guavas and the area’s first geiger and plumbago trees. Lang had also planted Palm Beach County’s first grove of coconut trees and Charlie Moore would soon be selling nuts to early settlers for their own homesteads. ¹⁰

The Pierces had brought some contributions of their own, mostly hibiscus and bryophyllum plants, for there were very few native flowers beyond the colorful moonvines and morning glories that stretched along the shoreline. ¹¹

Like nearly all Lake Worth pioneers, Benjamin Lanehart (at left with shotgun) built the frame of his first house with whatever lumber he could find on the beach, then covered it with palmetto leaves. (Historical Society of Palm Beach County)

George Gale, perhaps the first pineapple farmer, planted all around his lakefront house in what is now Mangonia, a subdivision of West Palm Beach. (Historical Society of Palm Beach)

But first came food. The Pierce’s first crops were pumpkins and potatoes – maybe more than they wanted. Small, orange Indian pumpkins (named for their Seminole origins) were planted the first spring. As Charlie Pierce reports: Ten years later pumpkins were gathered from vines that were growing in this same field of morning glories; the pumpkins had never been replanted. They had seeded themselves and just kept on growing from year to year. ¹²

The same for sweet potatoes. Even after the first harvest, the fields kept growing from the rooted vines and sprouts of potatoes too small to use, wrote Charlie.

They became very plentiful, and since there was no way to ship them, we had to eat what we could. They were baked, mashed and mixed with flour; and baked again they were used as bread. Sometimes the potatoes were grated when raw, then mixed with a little salt and baked. This was called potato pone. Of course, in season we had turtle eggs as another important addition to our menu. ¹³

People would come and go in the first years – usually wanderers who would stay with the first families for a few months. Some helped with chores, some didn’t. The next serious farmers were a retired Methodist minister who had spent his life’s savings to provision his son, wife and their three-year-old daughter. The Dwight family arrived with a large schooner full of real lumberyard wood for a quality house. They also brought, says Charlie Pierce, a large quantity of citrus trees, flowering shrubs, plants and vines. Even before the Dwights built their house, they cut trails through the hammock to plant their fruit trees.

It was Reverend Dwight’s son Mason who gathered the settlers and suggested they form an agricultural society. Wrote Charlie:

He said the Department of Agriculture in Washington would send free seeds for experimental plantings and thus a society might be of great benefit to the settlers. A meeting was held that organized the Lake Worth Agricultural and Horticultural Society. A notice of the group’s founding was sent to [USDA]. Some weeks later seeds were sent that were quite useful. But then for more than a year all we received were two-pound bags of wheat, rye, barley, oats and clover seeds. These seeds were useless to the members of the society since these crops would not grow in south Florida. ¹⁴

The society’s second meeting was all about another topic. After a couple of years, the 300-yard haulover from the tip of Lake Worth to the lowest navigable part of the creek leading to Jupiter was getting mighty old – and downright impossible if one had any idea of bringing a perishable crop for sale in Titusville (then called Sand Point). Moreover, people still lost their way even though they’d made the trip often. As a result, Hannibal Pierce and Will Lanehart volunteered to mark the channel through the sawgrass. They cut poles from the bushes along the way and tied a long, white piece of cloth to the top of each one. That worked for a while, but it didn’t take long for the poles to take root. In a few months, says Charlie, they were fine green bushes just like thousands of others in the swamp. ¹⁶

A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts

Just how Palm Beach got its signature coconut trees is still debated. Memoirs of early settlers show that there were a few coconut trees on the beach even when Augustus Lang began planting them by his cabin around 1860. But there’s no doubt that the Providencía gets credit for the profusion we have today.

Charles Pierce, the most valuable diarist among the first settlers, says that one day in 1878 a small Spanish brigantine washed up on the beach carrying coconuts from Trinidad and some provisions for the crew. The crew had already been taken aboard a passing steamer and the old weather beaten ship was lying in four inches of water at low tide. Neighbors Hiram Hammon and Will Lanehart had already climbed aboard, saying that the captain had told them the wreck was theirs.

Wrote Charlie Pierce: There were enough coconuts on board to supply all the settlers with all they could use had they had free access to the cargo, but Hammon and Lanehart had claimed the wreck and they charged two-and-a-half cents each for the nuts. This was cheap enough, but there were some settlers who could not afford to spend any money buying nuts to plant; they needed what money they had to buy food and clothes.

Hannibal Pierce bought 200 nuts for himself, 200 for neighbor Cecil Upton and 700 for Lighthouse Captain James Armour, who had a homestead on the lake. Says Charlie: James Hubel helped to plant the 700 coconuts on Captain Armour’s homestead at the foot of the lake. Cap Dimick, Frank Dimick, M.W. Dimick and Albert Geer bought large quantities of the nuts and planted them all over their homesteads. To them, more than anyone else, belongs the honor of putting the Palm in Palm Beach. ¹⁵

Few if any crops ever went to a market in the early years – at least not beyond Jupiter. With so little cash, people went to Titusville for provisions only with the greatest reluctance and only after they ran out of inventive ways to prepare potatoes, pumpkins, palm and palmettos. Charlie Pierce recalls that:

On one particular occasion my family lived for two weeks on palmetto cabbage...fish, Indian pumpkin and wild game. In these cases many were the substitutes used to help along the lack of real food. Tea was made from the dried green leaves of the wild coffee plant found growing in the hammocks. It proved quite wholesome and a fair substitute, but the makeshift for coffee proved better. Mother discovered it and her coffee proved very popular on the lake. It was made by cutting sweet potatoes into small chunks, baking them in an oven to a crisp, dark brown, and then grinding them in a coffee mill. The brew looked exactly like coffee and tasted fairly good, very much like Postum cereal. ¹⁷

Early on, trips to Titusville were always to buy necessities rather than sell crops. Charlie Pierce soon had a new a baby sister named Lillie, and many years later as Mrs. Frederick Voss she recalled that the only way we had any money was the men would go over to the beach and hunt up a piece of wreck and rip the copper sheathing off it and take it clear to Titusville, 160 miles. ¹⁸

Brass hinges, copper piping, ship’s bells, nails. It wasn’t unusual for a family to assemble 500 pounds of beached brica-brac from wrecked and passing ships. Most of the time, scrap dealers in Titusville would buy it. One store where Charlie Pierce got his first school slate in exchange for a copper bolt generally gave 10 cents a pound for brass and 15 cents for copper. ¹⁹

Just after the turn of the century one of Lake Worth’s many newcomers asked a wizened resident why he didn’t just scoop up everything on the beach at once and sell it for a big bundle.

No, said the old timer, patiently. It’s like going to the bank. Whenever you need cash, you go to the bank and draw out as much as you need. You don’t spend your nest egg all at once.

Big Crops, Little Money

To say that Lake Worth was isolated is true indeed, but elsewhere America was bustling. The year 1876 was marked by a Centennial Fair celebrating a hundred years of nationhood. In Florida, Key West and Tampa were cities with over 10,000 each and with strong commercial ties to Spanish Havana. To the north, Gainesville and St. Augustine were burgeoning towns of 3,000 each and Jacksonville, at 4,000, was becoming a paper-mill center and a gateway to jobs for those who craved mild winters.

That others didn’t stream so quickly to Lake Worth country was due in part to the chaos of the Civil War and the so-called Reconstruction Era that followed. Travel certainly didn’t seem appealing to most folks after Union forces had blown up railroad stations and ripped tracks into what folks called snake heads. Moreover, Reconstruction had brought a jumble of carpetbaggers, corrupt politicians, bankrupt railroads and mergers that often saw new railway corporations formed by buying old stock for pennies on the dollar.

By 1876, the Florida congressional delegation and state government reverted from a reformist Republican-Carpetbag- Scalawag conglomeration to the Democrat white gentry that had once opted for succession. Whereas their predecessors had pushed for land giveaway programs to attract new settlers (forty acres and a mule), the new Bourbons focused on the most painful lesson they had learned from the War Between the States. They had learned that an agrarian society was no match for an industrialized one, and so they went about attracting northern capital to Florida, both for business and infrastructure. By 1881 the governor-controlled Internal Improvement Fund would pretty much put all of its resources at the hands of large developers and railroaders.

Down in Lake Worth, 1876 might be called a watershed year for a couple of different reasons. First, the federal government began building a chain of five Houses of Refuge along the southeastern coast in an effort to reduce the toll of shipwrecks and encourage more commercial shipping. Hannibal Pierce saw an opportunity to make a steady cash wage (about $400 a year) as keeper and took his family down to Orange Grove Haulover (today’s Delray Beach) as soon as construction was finished. His first neighbor, Mr. Malden, went to take up the same job at the newly-built Gilbert’s House of Refuge in