Who Was Cassandra Sweeting?
I met Cassandra Sweeting when I was looking at old pictures of Lanark Village archived online in the Florida Memory Project.
To be clear, I didn’t meet her face-to-face; she died before I was born. But her image kept popping up, reminding me that before Lanark became a haven for beach bums on a budget, before it was a retirement village, and before soldiers trained here for the D-day invasion, it was a vacation spot for Tallahassee’s leisure class.
It’s easy to see that Cassandra was a member of that class. Here she is with other family members on the steps of her childhood home.
It’s rather grand, isn’t it? From the internet, I learned that Ms. Sweeting was born in England and that her parents moved to the US because of her heart condition. They must have believed she would receive better treatment here.
The family chose the Tallahassee area because they had relatives nearby, and once settled, her father opened a jewelry store. By the looks of it, he was successful.
As I studied the pictures of Ms. Sweeting and imagined life as it must have been at the luxurious Lanark-on-the-Gulf resort, I began to develop a sense of who Ms. Sweeting might have been aside from these bare facts about her life.
In most of the photos, she’s surrounded by friends, so she must have been social and fun-loving. She most likely would have fit right into the Village as it is today (aside from being over-dressed, by our current standards).
Pictures of her in boats and on piers suggest an affinity for the water and life at the shore. Why else would she have spent her leisurely days at Lanark?
Although she later married Warren Coleman Dixon, a Madison County boy, many of the pictures from Lanark show her with Charles Puleston. In the pictures’ descriptions, he’s identified as a friend, but there’s a sweetness to the images that suggests there may have been stronger feelings between the two.
The way both young men are gazing at Ms. Sweeting in this picture makes me think she may have been particularly engaging in some way; maybe she was especially smart, funny, kind, or charming.
She died in her sixties in 1948, but her carefree life in Lanark has been memorialized in this collection of photos. Looking at them makes me wonder how Lanark will next be refashioned and reborn.
It makes me wonder how I will be remembered. It reminds me of time’s passage and the need to squeeze all the juice out of every moment we’re here and to live in such a way that, when the time comes, we may rest in peace.
