Sydney O. Chase

Sydney O. Chase photo; source: UF Digital CollectionsSydney Octavius Chase came to Florida from Philadelphia in 1878 to investigate the possibility of operating a citrus business. Sydney soon became associated with General Henry S. Sanford, a leader in the Florida citrus industry and community leader of Sanford, Florida. Sydney's brother, Joshua Coffin Chase (1858-1948), joined him in 1884 and they formed Chase and Company that year. The firm received financial backing from family members in the North. Chase and Company would eventually own General Sanford's experimental farm, Belair, and the Chase family home in Sanford was located there. Over the years, the Chases both owned and invested in a number of citrus groves, and their company interests also included insurance, storage facilities, fertilizer, tung oil, sugar cane, and other crops. Sydney was an important civil leader and helped develop the city of Sanford and other communities in the Orlando region. Sydney O. Chase married Alonzo Church's cousin, Laura Duval Whitner Chase (1872-1940), on October 22, 1892. Chase would have been 31 years old at the time of the Expedition. He was assigned to mess No. 1, and he also was the photographer for the expedition. Unfortunately, the photographs he took did not develop properly and are very blurry.

The text of Wallace R. Moses's record of the Expedition and the text of Alonzo Church's A Dash Through the Everglades, which are both included in this project, are derived from typescripts found in the Chase Collection in the Special and Area Studies Collections Department of the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries. Sydney Chase, or someone in his family or company, made relatively minor annotations to these texts.

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For other topics referenced in the Expedition texts, please refer to the Index to Subjects and Names.
1892 Everglades Exploration Expedition : Three Digital Texts, 2015