Editor’s Note: Leslie Kemp Poole pens Lessons from the Marjories, a column meditating on the legacies of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Marjorie Harris Carr, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas.

Long before author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings won her Pulitzer Prize or Marjorie Harris Carr summoned up opposition to the Cross Florida Barge Canal or Marjory Stoneman Douglas became a force for protecting the Everglades, there was May Mann Jennings. 

To my thinking, she was Florida’s first “Marjorie,” an affectionate term for a stalwart environmental advocate.

Jennings was the state’s first female political powerhouse, championing topics that made the all-male legislature wince: equal suffrage, city beautification, improvements for the Seminole Tribe, better forestry practices, and Florida’s first state park. She didn’t always win, but at a time when women couldn’t vote, she put these issues (and many more) onto the state’s agenda.

Jennings didn’t do it alone. Her “old-girl” network of politically connected women throughout the peninsula offered their talents, time, and opinions to promote such issues, creating much-needed change.

Perhaps no female was as politically savvy as Jennings. Born in 1872, Jennings grew up in then-rural Crystal River where her family owned an orange grove. Her father, Austin Mann was successful in business, agriculture, law, and politics—he served on the county commission and the state senate. At age 18 she married an ambitious judge, William Sherman Jennings, a friend of her father’s. It was a perfect melding of personalities and politics.

“May and Sherman Jennings were well suited to each other, a partnership sealed, figuratively and literally, in the halls of government,” writes biographer Linda Vance. “Similar in background, education, and aspirations, they were to work side by side for the next thirty years.”

They were together when Sherman was elected to the state legislature and then governor in 1900, giving May Jennings a broad platform and connections that would serve her well throughout her life. Contemporaries called her the governor’s “right hand man” and “trusted counselor,” Vance notes, adding that “in a city that had known few such politically astute females, May quickly acquired a reputation for her keen mind and political knowledge.”

One of her strongest platforms came through her work in women’s clubs. Early in her marriage, Jennings was a leader in the Brooksville area club, where members complained loudly to local officials about roaming cattle that created a nuisance in their community. That became one of the earliest focuses of the Florida Federation of Women’s Clubs (FFWC), founded in 1895 to be the statewide umbrella of local clubs.

After her husband’s gubernatorial term ended, the couple moved to Jacksonville where May Jennings became involved in a variety of issues and interest clubs. By 1914 she was FFWC president, a position that enabled her to promote many projects near and dear to her heart. “May disliked inaction; she was a doer who saw inaction as weakness,” Vance notes.

In environmental circles she remains legendary for her work protecting Paradise Key, a hammock island in the Everglades located 12 miles from Homestead. For years, botanists and naturalists had extolled the beauty of the area, home to a variety of birds, orchids, and royal palm trees—the latter of which they feared would be exploited by a planned road project through the wetlands. Two Miami-area clubwomen, Mary Barr Munroe and Edith Gifford, asked the FFWC to help save the key, but got no traction until they approached Jennings. Fortunately for all of us, Jennings took on the challenge and formulated a plan to make it a state park. Other FFWC officers were wary of the project, worrying that the organization couldn’t take on the expense and headache of operating a park, but Jennings powered through with the project, in spite of the fact that she initially had not seen the site.

Other clubwomen gave valuable support. Mary Kenan Flagler, the widow of railroad magnate Henry Flagler, pledged 960 acres on the key that Jennings hoped the legislature would match in land donations. A Tallahassee clubwoman broached the subject with Virginia Trammell, who agreed to talk to her husband—Gov. Park Trammell—and invited Jennings to stay in the governor’s mansion during a trip to Tallahassee. Pretty cozy housing for a lobbyist! With Trammell’s recommendation, state leaders in 1915 approved the park, thinking it had no better use. Royal Palm State Park was Florida’s first state park and the first in the nation created by the persistence of clubwomen. 

That moment of joy was followed by frustration that the state didn’t fund the $1,000 requested to run the park. Jennings, never daunted, solicited donations from FFWC members and wealthy acquaintances, including Thomas Edison, and the FFWC rented out some of the lands to farmers to make ends meet. In 1916, the FFWC launched a “mile-of-dimes” campaign to raise money and hired the park’s first caretaker who created paths for visitors. She also made sure that Royal Palm got the first Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp in 1933 to benefit from the federal labor provided to improve the park.

The foresight that went into preserving Royal Palm State Park became even more valuable when the FFWC donated it to become part of Everglades National Park (ENP), dedicated in 1947 as the first national park created for its important biological diversity. Jennings and the FFWC clubwomen had long acknowledged that fact but now the nation understood. Everglades National Park is now a UNESCO World Heritage site, an International Biosphere Reserve, and a Wetland of International Importance, drawing visitors from around the globe.

Today, visitors roaming the grounds at ENP’s Anhinga Trail may not be aware that they are walking the path of Jennings. It is the site of Royal Palm State Park and one of the most popular stops in the park, featuring a boardwalk and almost-guaranteed sightings of wading birds and alligators. Most of the namesake trees, however, are gone in the aftermath of hurricanes.

During the next two decades until her death in 1963, Jennings scored many more successes. She and other FFWC activists had become a powerful political force in the state, using “sandspur tactics” to press legislators on issues that concerned them. Former FFWC President Lucy Worthington Blackman recalled that by 1940, lawmakers had learned to clear “the women’s calendar by passing the legislation so persistently demanded of them” because clubwomen had proven they would stick to thorny issues and walk the halls of the state capital until they won. 

Those tactics were Jennings’ forte. Her leadership touched topics ranging from higher education and public health funding to gaining a 100,000-acres reservation for the Seminole Tribe to helping charter the League of Women Voters in Florida, now one of the most active environmental organizations in the state. Jennings was dubbed the “Mother of Florida Forestry” for her tireless work to create the Florida Forest service and improve forestry practices. Her list of accomplishments is far longer than this essay could describe. 

As for her connection to the Marjories, Jennings and Douglas knew each other from the FFWC, Everglades advocacy, and suffrage promotion. Jennings died just before the Cross Florida Barge Canal battle heated up but she might have enjoyed that challenge. And I like to think that Jennings reveled in Rawlings’ beautiful descriptions of rural Florida—a world she knew and toiled to save. Surely her work—a model of advocacy—has earned Jennings the additional title of “Florida’s First Marjorie.”

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Cover image: May Jennings speaking during the “W. S. Jennings” launch ceremonies at Jacksonville in 1944. Photo courtesy State Archives of Florida