Chuluota memorial will honor deputy 102 years after his death

Tuesday morning the Seminole County Commission voted to memorialize three police officers who had died in the line of duty over the course of a century, including a Chuluota memorial long in coming.

Former Florida Rep. Bob Cortes pushed for the memorials starting last year, along with others for fallen first responders, drafting legislation that would eventually pass in the Florida Legislature this year before heading to the County Commission. 

“It’s got a lot of moving parts,” Cortes said. “The hardest part is getting it through the legislature passed and then signed by the governor, but even after that it’s not a given.”

But after nearly a year in the process, the memorials have reached their final step. 

Chuluota’s local hero

“When you have someone who pays the ultimate price…those individuals sacrificing their lives for us, they need not only to be recognized but remembered,” Commissioner Bob Dallari said. 

For one of those fallen deputies, the “end of watch,” as police officers say, was just east of Oviedo, during a gunfight in a Chuluota doorway more than 100 years ago.

James Cleveland Jacobs’ biography already has a home with the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office, where visitors can view a video of the life of the young deputy whom Charles Hand, in his second of three separate stints as Seminole County sheriff, called “my bravest deputy” shortly after Jacobs’ death.

“It’s at that moment that their families and those in our community watch what we do,” Seminole County Sheriff Dennis Lemma said Tuesday, remarking on the importance of letting families know their lost loved one will be honored for their sacrifice. 

Inside the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office headquarters, Jacobs’ story and those of other fallen deputies greet visitors. In Oaklawn Memorial Park in Lake Mary, a cenotaph in red-brown stone fronted by a bronze plaque stands as a monument to first responders killed while on duty. As if to underscore the danger of the work, it has enough room reserved for as many as 32 names. Today it has 11. 

For Jacobs, whose ornately carved light gray tombstone stands marking his final resting place near other family members in Chuluota Cemetery, an individual memorial for his bravery was long in coming.

Jacobs was born in 1892 to a man who drove a team of oxen from North Carolina to settle in what’s now Chuluota. Jacobs would grow up there on the wild Florida frontier, leaving school after the 8^th grade to help support the family.

In 1921, after a stint as a jail guard making $65 a month, Jacobs became a deputy sheriff, patrolling the streets near his family’s home. He kept a disarmingly boyish face into his 20s, but usually found himself, as was often the case at the time, patrolling Chuluota’s streets alone. The final day of Jacobs’ watch would be an exception.

The story of his last day, according to articles from the Sanford Herald and the Sheriff’s Office account of the event, is set on Sept. 14, 1922. Jacobs set out at about 9 a.m., investigating an alleged theft of trousers near where the railroad used to run. He and fellow deputy Charles Lord tracked the suspect to a house on Park Avenue near the tracks. As Jacobs stood at the front door, a shotgun, found nearby the suspect inside the house he’d been hiding in, fired at close range and Jacobs, returning two shots as he fell, became the first Seminole County deputy sheriff to die in the line of duty. 

His assailant, Percy Baylis, was taken to Orlando and then Tampa to avoid a lynching before he could stand trial. He was convicted, and in the small walled rear courtyard of the Sanford jail he was hanged – allegedly the first and only legally sanctioned hanging in the county’s history.

Now Jacobs’ history will have a final chapter. Just west of where the railroad tracks used to travel down to Orange County, disappearing deeper into citrus country, there’s a section of State Road 419 that parallels the old railroad tracks, past the Chuluota Grocery Store and deli and the tiny post office before bending lazily westward toward Oviedo. It traverses the entirety of its run through Chuluota in just over a mile. The County Commission and Sheriff’s office chose to have Jacobs’ memorial placed there, where he used to keep the county safe. 

“Making sure that communities who have never had the opportunity to live with or learn from these heroes, that their names last forever in our history is so incredibly important,” Lemma said.

And so, at both ends of that span of an increasingly busy two-lane road, will stand markers naming it the James Cleveland Jacobs Memorial Highway, keeping watch as drivers pass into Chuluota and, as they leave again less than two miles later, bidding them farewell.