![]() ![]() In 1931, duPont told a friend nonchalantly, “Let this Depression pass…They all pass.” Jessie continued to live at Epping Forest, which she referred to as “the shack,” until her own death in 1970. Even heading into the Depression, the duPonts kept opening banks across Florida. Infusions of his own wealth in Florida banks during the Depression stemmed financial chaos. When duPont died in 1935, he had lived at Epping Forest for eight years. When Florida’s thriving banking and real estate economies drew the couple south from Delaware, they bought controlling interests in Florida banks and built their home south of San Marco in a new neighborhood called San Jose. After he left the family business and his first wife died, he married Jessie Ball in 1920. The company would eventually adopt the famous slogan, “Better Things for Better Living…Through Chemistry,” and their manufacture of Teflon would result in one of the worst environmental disasters in American history, as chronicled in 2019 in Robert Bilott’s book Exposure and the movie Dark Waters.Īlfred, however, had gone his own way. ![]() duPont and de Nemours and Co., came from explosives. Featuring rough plaster walls, clay barrel tile roofs, grand arches and courtyards, the style mushroomed across Florida during the land boom of the 1920s, which brought the duPonts south and ended in the stock market crash and the Great Depression.Īlfred duPont first gained position through the family gunpowder factory, and much of his family’s wealth, via E.I. The house named for an ancient English wood, converted by architect Ted Pappas into a yacht club for then-new owner Herb Peyton in the 1980s, is one of Jacksonville’s best examples of Mediterranean Revival style architecture. The claim may be dubious, but every history keeps secrets and raises questions. Even less well known is the theory that duPont was murdered, poisoned at his own table, here at the historic home. Even Alfred duPont’s infusions of personal wealth into the state’s banks to avoid a wide-scale Florida economic panic during the Great Depression paled in comparison. ![]() Historic San Jose house has many unusual, maybe even murderous stories to tellĮpping Forest, the grand riverfront estate, reached its pinnacle of fame when helicopters delivered the American and Egyptian presidents here for an international summit. ![]()
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