Page 40 - John Anderson

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Within three years, all the other young men in both camps had left
Florida and Anderson remained on his 80-acre parcel and Joseph
Price continued to expand his property just to the North. John Andrew
Bostrom helped promote the newcomer John Anderson for tax
assessor of Volusia County. John Anderson served for two terms,
1877 and 1878, and 1881 and 1882, and Mr. Bostrom often spoke
of the courteous and generous dealings of John Anderson in this
connection: "He straightened out the books, put figures into fine
shape, and incidentally won the loyalty of every inhabitant of the
county. Had his tastes turned to politics, he would have been urged to
run for the Legislature at this time."

He made long expeditions alone on
horseback by day and by night, swam rivers
and streams in the course of his journeys,
and contented himself if need be with small
allotments of food or sleep in order to
succeed in securing a complete list of cattle,
land owners and in eventually working out a
more equitable system of taxation.

For a number of years at Jacksonville, John
Anderson planned and carried out
exhibitions of citrus fruits and rare growths
of plants, experimenting with guava,
cassava (tapioca), and sisal hemp and even
with the more homely Irish potato, to see
what its possibilities were in just that
section of the South.

In 1886, the New Orleans Cotton Exposition was held. Mr. Anderson
felt that Ormond ought to be represented and accordingly bent all his
energy and activity toward making the representation worthy of the
town he always felt to be the finest in Florida. He worked unceasingly
for Florida's credit there and a writer remembers hearing him

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