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J: Where did they come from?

C: My father came from Hernando, Mississippi. My mother's family
 came from Wabash, Indiana, There were no railroads. They came
 down to Jacksonville and got on the riverboat, and came down the
 St. Johns River. My grandfather, Basil Bennett, had preceded them
 and had planted an orange grove and built a home. My mother tells
 me that he met them at the landing, which was then called Lake
 Beresford Landing. He had two horses and a flat wagon on which
 they put all their worldly possessions, of which some I still own.
 He took them to that home and they lived there until the big
 freeze. They lived there from '73 until either '89 or '98, which
 I'm confused about, and then they moved in town.

J: There was a big freeze in December 1894 and February 1899.

C: That's the one I'm talking about (1894); that's when they moved
 into DeLand.

J: Were you born in a house, or in a hospital in DeLand?

C: Oh there was never any hospital here in 1900.

J: How long did you stay in the home?

C: We stayed in that home until Papa made a little more money, and
 we bought a beautiful lot near Stetson University on Michigan
 Avenue. We had sold the home on south Boulevard and moved into a
 house that we rented on Rich Avenue while we waited for the house
 to be completed. We moved into the house in 1906. I have pic-
 tures of us driving up to it. It was a big colonial house with
 columns. I can remember the truck backing up to the door, and I
 was allowed to ride on that truck with my brother. Each room in
 that house had a fireplace; that was all the heat we had. Finally
 we just couldn't keep the house warm, and we'd close off the liv-
 ing room. Then upstairs in his room Papa put in a coal grate, and
 we'd all go out there in the morning and get dressed in his room.
 The house was laid out differently than any house I've ever seen
 since. My room entered into my mother's, my mother's entered
 into my brother's, my brother's entered into my father's, and then
 my father's went out on to this was upstairs, a large screen
 porch. We would all grab our clothes and run into Papa's room to
 get dressed in the morning in front of the coal grate. By then he
 had the fires going downstairs. Of course, in those days we paid
 five dollars a week for service that stayed all day, and they would
 come in the morning and bring in the wood and start the fires. Of
 course, you couldn't do that now; nobody could afford that now.

J: How many servants were there?

C: We had a colored maid who came in the morning and got breakfast,
 and lunch, and then she had a son named Alvin, and he came and did
 the wood work, carried in the food. We had an old colored woman