Florida - Bellamy Bridge - Jackson County, FL

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Location: 25 miles south of Dothan in Jackson County.  Near Jacob and White Pond Road.

http://www.e-southerndata.com/bellamy.htm

The Bellamy Bridge Ghost Story is Jackson County's most enduring legend.  Several residents of the county, all in thier eighties and nineties, indicated in 1986 that they were told by their parents, who had heard it from their own mothers and fathers.  This would date the orgin of the legend back to the 19th century.  The story also begins to appear in print at about the same time indicating that it was common knowledge by the beginning of the 20th century.  This is a reasonable timetable since the legend revoles around a young woman named Elizabeth Jane Bellamy who died in 1837.  Her overgrown and often vandalized grave is a few hundred yards south of Bellamy Bridge in the edge of the river swamp.




As the story goes, Elizabeth was the young bride of Dr Samuel C Bellamy, a prominent member of early Florida society.  The fact is verified by her headstone as is the date of her death, May 11, 1837. The rest of the story has been handed down by word of mouth through the years and sometimes repeated in local newspapers.  Although there are numerous variations, the most common revoles around the courtship and wedding of Elizabeth and Samuel.  Enamored by his young bride, who had promised to love him forever, Samuel built a large column mansion for her in Marianna.  The wedding date was set for May 11, 1837.  Guest it is said, began arriving a full week before the wedding with gifts as far away as Europe.  Their wedding was to be held in the rose garden behind the house, but that event took a tragic turn.

During a waltz at the grand reception Samuel and Elizabeth danced too close to the burning candles and her elegant dress burst into flames.  Before any of the guest or her husband could react, Elizabeth ran from the house in panic and was engulfed by fire.  She lingered for days but ultimatley succumbed to her injuries and died.  Poor Elizabeth was laid to rest south of the Bellamy Bridge.  Her husband refused to live in the mansion he had built for his bride and the house became abandonned.

An appartion began to appear on dark and foggy nights , wandering the swamps around the small cemetery where she was buried.   It is said Elizabeth merges from the grave each night in search of her husband.  Some have described her as a pale image in a long, white gown, moving slowly along the river bank.

Dale Cox, Two Egg.

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Some online links for Bellamy Bridge.

http://www.exploresouthernhistory.com/bellamybridge

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FX7j9WInS-c

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~fljackso/EJCB.html

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A much different tale of Elizabeth and Samuel Bellamy:

http://www.exploresouthernhistory.com/bellamybridge2.html


The true history of their marriage, however, departs significantly from the legend. Family
correspondence indicates that Samuel and Elizabeth were married in North Carolina on July
15, 1834, three years before the date of the supposed Florida wedding. The couple soon
moved to Jackson County, Florida, however, where they settled on Samuel's newly acquired
Rock Cave Plantation northwest of Marianna. The estate included hundreds of acres of
cultivated land and was farmed by the forced labors of more than 80 African slaves. King
Cotton was then booming and planting was an extremely profitable venture in Florida,
especially for individuals with the means to put together large gangs of slave laborers to clear
the fields and cultivate the cotton. The little family grew. Samuel and Elizabeth had a baby boy
in late 1835, giving him the name Alexander after several of Samuel’s ancestors.

The bottomlands of the Chipola River were indeed ideal for the production of cotton, but they
were also breeding grounds for vast swarms of mosquitoes. Deadly fevers, including malaria,
ravaged the growing population throughout the early history of Jackson County. The young
Bellamy family was not spared. According to a December 6, 1836, letter from Hardy Bryan
Croom, Elizabeth’s half-brother, to his wife, the fevers had hit particularly hard that fall.
Samuel, Elizabeth and baby Alexander were all suffering from what likely was malaria. The
deadly fever was often described by doctors of the time as the “intermittent and remittent” fever  because patients often improved, only to relapse and in many cases die. Samuel C. Bellamy,
in fact, did recover from the fever, but his wife and child did not. According to an obituary in the
Tallahassee Floridian, eighteen-year-old Elizabeth Jane Croom Bellamy, as her tombstone
records, died on May 11, 1837. She was not the victim of a tragic wedding night fire, but died
instead of a mosquito-borne fever. Eighteen-month-old Alexander, according to the same
obituary, died seven days later.

Elizabeth and the baby were laid to rest at the family cemetery on the Chipola River plantation
of Samuel's brother, Edward, near today's Bellamy Bridge.