Ostriches have been as soon as an attraction in Jacksonville and St. Augustine.

Within the previous days of amusement parks, pre-Disney, roadside sights in Florida typically boasted of their ostriches or alligators. Or each.

Jacksonville acquired in on the motion in 1898 when Charles D. Fraser opened the Florida Ostrich Farm on Talleyrand Avenue. It grew into a significant vacationer attraction, and folks have been nuts about their ostriches.

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Because the Instances-Union’s Sandy Strickland noted in a 2018 article, “you would cruise alongside in an ostrich-drawn cart or small wagon. You could possibly pose for an image atop one of many ornery birds. You could possibly watch them race and eat a complete orange at feeding time. You could possibly purchase their plumes, boas, hats, followers, feathers and different souvenirs.

“However what you didn’t do was get inside putting distance of their lengthy legs. One highly effective kick from a riled-up ostrich may kill you.”

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In 1912 the park moved to a a lot bigger web site, 50 acres, close to Evergreen Cemetery, taking up a brand new title: The New Ostrich Farm, Amusement Park and Zoo. Strickland famous that it added alligators into the combination and wild animals too. Annie Oakley went sharpshooting there, and there have been parachute jumpers and rides on tethered sizzling air balloons.

It was a giant deal, a giant attraction, for some time. However within the Nineteen Twenties the ostriches and alligators moved to what’s now the Southbank, close to the Treaty Oak on the location of the previous Dixieland Amusement Park, and have been exhibited on a brand new farm identified by a number of names. 

“By the Thirties the ostriches apparently had misplaced their novelty, and their destiny stays unknown,” Strickland wrote, with an help from historian Wayne Wooden. “The farm closed, and the gathering of alligators was bought by the St. Augustine Alligator Farm in 1937.”

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Years later in 1946, entrepreneur James Casper gave the ostrich-alligator combo a brand new strive, simply up the street from the Alligator Farm. One such was Casper’s Ostrich and Alligator Farm, about 2 miles north of downtown on U.S. 1, which opened in 1946. The attraction featured every day ostrich races the place drivers have been pulled on a light-weight cart.

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Ostriches really had an earlier connection to the St. Augustine Alligator Farm, which started in 1893 because the Burning Springs Museum on St. Augustine Seaside, on the final practice cease working via Anastasia Island.

St. Augustine resident Everett Whitney would seize native alligators and cost individuals who have been ready for the subsequent practice. Within the Nineteen Twenties, he added ostriches, briefly.