This week, a return to Silver Springs, Florida, which I casually looked at on the blog last summer and again when a postcard popped up for auction.
I’ve now found pictures of the 1934 leaflet interior, the very year Lovecraft visited, and it details what Lovecraft could have seen and heard there…
Local weird lore from Aunt Silla, the ‘legend’ of the place.
He may also have seen Ross Allen’s Reptile Institute which was established at Silver Springs in 1929, and opened to the public in 1930. Thus Lovecraft could, if he had the cash, have seen displays of alligator wrestling, ‘milking’ of the toxic snake-venom, and sundry reptiles in captivity.
“Big George”, ‘largest alligator in captivity’, and Ross Allen.
Allen had established a large collection of “South and Central America” reptiles, with dozens of alligators, hundreds of snakes, monkeys, deer, birds, turtles, lizards, exotic animals. He performed wrestling demonstrations with live alligators and giant anacondas in the pool there. He used the profits for medical research for human health… “Allen pioneered many forms of snake anti-venom, including a dried variety” and he was a pioneer in this.
It’s interesting to then consider that Lovecraft might also have seen the Allen collection and show, but I suspect he was not able to afford both the entrance ticket and the boat trip(s). He doesn’t mention Allen or the Institute, and only tells correspondents about the river and its jungle environment. From how he describes the river, one might assume he was told that to see the animals in their natural habitat was the better option than paying to enter the Allen Institute. The river itself showed him… “alligators, turtles, snakes and strange birds” all along its length, and be found the sights “indescribably weird”. He does remark on “the snake-house at Silver Springs”, but does not appear to have gone into it or known more about it. It seems he knew about it only because he had a close-up with a “huge cotton-mouthed moccasin” snake. A local man had climbed aboard the tour-boat so as to take this catch to the “snake-house” downriver. Lovecraft was very glad that the captor kept a “firm grasp” on the snake’s neck all the way back. Lovecraft would not have termed it “the snake-house” if he had known it was actually a much more substantial venture and had a proper name and famous keeper.
Surprisingly, there is no mention of Silver Springs in the new Letters to Family volumes. At least according to the Index, there being nothing under either “Silver Springs” or “Lovecraft: travels of…”. Indeed the whole of 1934 is almost a blank.
But the volume of Baldwin, Rimel, Frome letters, newly acquired here, does have a few items. Evidently Lovecraft thought the Silver Springs boat-trip had been rather brisk, even at “ten miles in a launch”, since he later remarked that he had enjoyed a trip up the similar “Black Water Creek” in Florida in summer 1935 all the more because of “the more leisurely observing conditions” compared to Silver Springs. This raises the question of if Lovecraft took the slower (he uses the term “sailing”) “glass bottom” boat cruise, or the “Speedboat Jungle Cruise” as indicated on the leaflet above… “Silver River and back in 45 minutes” over a total of ten miles. Evidently there were these two types of trip available, and the speedboat trip appears to have been the longer but faster one. Actually, Lovecraft talks in his letters as if he did both, and the leaflet does pitch the speedboat ride as an add-on to the ride on the glass-bottom boat. True, he was strapped for cash at the time… but the Barlow family may have been paying.
No postcards are to be found of the “Black Water Creek” as it appears to have been a local place… “a marvellous tropical river near the Barlow place”. Last summer I tentatively suggested it might have once run south of the Barlow homestead, given the proximity of a farm of the same name, and a likely channel still visible on the (now far better drained) terrain.
