Ernest Harvey Jr.

Ernest Harvey Jr., born August 15, 1923, in Seven Mile Camp in Columbia County to Ernest Sr. and Sarah (Davis) Harvey, endured severe poverty, hunger, and abuse in childhood before becoming one of Baker County’s most beloved and respected citizens. After years of cruelty from an abusive adoptive father, he ran away and hid in the woods, searching for food wherever he could find it, sometimes in garbage cans, and he clung to schooling so strongly that he slept at Sanderson School at night after entering through a broken bathroom window, leaving before the caretaker arrived and returning to his palmetto hideaway until classes began. He carried his only pair of pants wrapped in newspaper, washed them in a creek, and dried them on a rock or in a tree to keep clean despite ridicule from other children. In a 1993 interview, he recalled a family life marked by constant hunger, a railroad home so small it was moved by crane with the family inside, being taken from his fourth-grade classroom to satisfy his father’s moonshine debt, and being sent at age 12 to a doorless, windowless farmhouse on 20 acres where he was given no food, slept among rats and bedbugs, and was beaten with a heavy flat shovel. He remembered searching the woods for food and sometimes being invited to eat by Walter and Mary Woodbright. Drafted in World War II, he later attended the University of Florida in Gainesville on 81 dollars a month from the G.I. Bill, overcame scorn about his writing and prospects, passed English, and earned a master’s degree. He became an educator of children, served for more than two decades as principal of Macclenny Elementary School, was a faithful member of Manntown Congregational Holiness Church, and said, “I hold no malice against any man.”

Macclenny, Florida · United States