Nixon Smiley of Orange Park Mixed Writing and Horticulture
Raised Poor, Reporter for the Miami Herald, Director of a Prominent Botanic Garden
By CLAY COUNTY HISTORICAL ARCHIVES
Just like artist Augusta Savage and businessman Charles Merrill, Nixon Smiley was a kid from a small town who went on to do great things in life.
Nixon was a reporter, columnist, editor and feature writer for the Miami Herald. He also published several books about his beloved Florida. His specialty was Florida horticulture, and many of his books focused on that topic.
Born in 1911, Nixon grew up in Orange Park hearing the tales of the river and the northern tourists who once graced the town’s homes and hotels. Having lived there until he was about seven years old, the Town of Orange Park left an indelible mark on Nixon, evidenced by the fact that he is buried there in Magnolia Cemetery next to his mother and his maternal grandfather.
An excerpt from a1969 Miami Herald column he wrote about growing up in Orange Park:
My maternal grandparents came here in the 1880’s to open a boarding house among the live oaks on the bluff overlooking the river. Among their winter guests was John Burroughs, the naturalist. More affluent guests, like President Grover Cleveland, stayed at the Hotel Marion built in 1881.
Burroughs was a very famous naturalist who championed conservation and was good friends with Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt went on to champion the creation of beautiful national parks. Burroughs was a regular winter visitor at the family’s boardinghouse, and it was here that the young Nixon may have discovered his love of nature, particularly plants. Life became difficult for Nixon Smiley and his family in Orange Park, as he later explained in his semi-autobiographical work Crowder Tales.
I was about seven when adopted by my paternal grandparents of Crowder, Georgia. It was the fall of 1918…. I had lost both my parents, my father in a logging train accident and my mother in the influenza epidemic. My widowed maternal grandmother, with whom I was left, was unable to feed an ever-hungry boy, much less clothe and educate him. So, she wrote to my grandparents in Crowder. Would they take the boy?
They did. James and Emma Smiley (Pa and Emmer as Nixon called them) opened their home to the young boy. His grandmother, Lizzie Strickland, put him on a train by himself at seven years of age and asked the conductor to make sure he got off at the Crowder stop. And so began a life of hard physical farm labor and poverty.
Nixon survived his childhood filled with Pa’s and his uncles’ escapades. Nixon later moved back home to the Jacksonville area where he began his career at the Florida Times Union in Jacksonville. Excluding a brief stint during World War II, he wrote for the Miami Herald from 1940 until he retired in 1973.
Nixon Smiley was an avid gardener, but he was more of a naturalist than just planting tomatoes and a few flowers. He volunteered at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden and then became the interim director from 1953 to 1961. Nixon Smiley passed away in 1990. His wife, Evelyn, and son, Karl, survived him.
As a reporter and author, he contributed to conservation, beautification, and the study of Florida horticulture. The Nixon Smiley Research Papers are held at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida, and the 120-acre Nixon Smiley Pineland Preserve is located in Dade County.
