Whidden, James

 JAMES WHIDDEN FAMILY

 

Arriving in the Charlotte Harbor area 15 years before the start of the Civil War, the Whidden family were truly pioneers. It wasn’t easy to make a living in Florida in the 1850s so James Whidden began to acquire cattle.  When the Civil War started, James Whidden, along with other local cattlemen, ran the Union blockade of Charlotte Harbor to supply cattle to the Confederacy and then to Cuba when the Civil War ended.   As written in Angie Larkin’s book “In Old Punta Gorda” “The cattle industry was an integral part of Florida’s early growth. In the Punta Gorda area, shipments of beeves were at their high between 1901 and 1908.  Cattle were driven out Marion Avenue to a loading dock west of town and herded onto boats sailing to Cuba.  Roundup time was one of excitement and noise in town.”  Cattle continued to be a major source of income in the Charlotte Harbor area until Cuba imposed an import tax of $2.50 per head on the cattle, reducing the shipments.  The arrival of the rail road in 1886 had opened a new market for the cattlemen to market their beef domestically and continue to prosper.

 

James Whidden’s son, Robert Whidden,  had 1,000 head of cattle of his own on 7,000 acres of land. To earn a steady living, he also worked as the ranch foreman for W. Luther Koon, one of the area’s largest cattlemen.  Robert had two children, James Edward and Florence. James was born in 1904 in a frame house in Charlotte Harbor just northeast of where Rolls Landing is now. Even as a youngster, children worked to help the family. Life was not easy.  It was a 9 hour trip from their home in Charlotte Harbor to Punta Gorda via horseback through Fort Ogden where the river was shallow enough to forge.  Rounding up and driving the cattle to market was a time consuming process. There were no fences in Florida as everything was open range.   Camping out in the open with a saddle for a pillow, the food was pretty plain and the days were long. Roundups generally started in July where the spring born calves would be marked, branded and dipped.  Steers would be driven to market. As the cattle industry decreased in the area, several of the Whidden family earned a living fishing during the days that mullet fishing was a primary source of income in Charlotte Harbor.

 

In addition to cattle and fishing, the Whidden family had citrus groves to supplement income and later generations became developers, developing Whidden’s Industrial Park on Harborview Road. Several generations of Whiddens are buried at the Charlotte Harbor Cemetery so they are still right at home where they rode the range. The 6^th generation of Whiddens still reside here in Charlotte