Angas, Robert Moore, 1887-1955

William Moore Angas was born in 1855 in Great Britain. He moved to Florida in 1895 and was employed as an agent and manager of several British owned companies operating in Florida over the period of 1895 until his death in 1932. The principal companies with which William Angas was involved were two British companies, the Land Mortgage Bank of Florida, Ltd. and the Florida Syndicate, Ltd., described briefly by Alfred P. Tischendorf ("Florida and the British Investor", Florida Historical Quarterly 33, October 1954, p. 120). William's son, Robert Moore Angas, was a Jacksonville civil engineer born in 1887. Robert Angas conducted his deceased father's business from 1932 until all transactions were concluded in 1953.

In addition to the Land Mortgage Bank of Florida and the Florida Syndicate (succeeded by the Keighley Company), the primary companies represented by William Angas include a third British company, the Indian River Association, and two Florida companies, the Florida Finance Company and the Hollybrook Company. The oldest of the companies, the Land Mortgage Bank, was founded originally only to lend money on Florida mortgages. The Bank's principal properties were in Jacksonville residential properties and several orange groves. As a result of hard times following the freeze of 1895 and of poor, if not fraudulent management by its U. S. agents prior to Angas, the company was forced to foreclose on many properties throughout Florida, making it a large land owner by default. The same adverse conditions also forced the company into liquidation. When properties were foreclosed they usually reverted to the company's English liquidators, Robert Thomas Heselton and Benjamin Septimus Briggs, so technically the Bank never owned property at all, except that some deeds were made to it in error, rather than to the liquidators.

Angas's activities were to attempt to collect mortgage payments due the company, to sell the repossessed property under the best terms possible, and to manage it until a sale could be made. In addition to many lots and homes in Jacksonville, the bank controlled commercial properties and undeveloped lands throughout the state. Evidently, Angas did not participate in large scale plans to develop these properties, but he did cooperate with improvements such as road building, which would make the properties more saleable. Sometimes he would build new houses on the land, if he thought that would encourage sales. Much of the Jacksonville property was in poorer, often African American neighborhoods, where likely buyers lacked funds even in boom time. Once sold, the property often had to be repossessed. Some formal subdivision of the Bank's Jacksonville property did occur, as in Westbrook, Avondale, and Heselton and Payne's subdivision. The planning and selling of these properties was generally turned over to professional real estate companies. A couple of out of state properties were also owned. The rural properties included several orange groves.

Until William Angas came to Jacksonville in 1895, the affairs of the Bank were managed by a company composed of three men, J. C. Greeley, John Rollins, and Harwood Morgan. Affairs were in a very bad state. In the hope they could be improved, a new company, the Florida Finance Company, was formed, of which Angas became president. When conditions did not improve, the Land Mortgage Bank liquidators foreclosed on the Florida Finance Company, adding to the Land Mortgage Bank property. Apparently the old Land Mortgage Bank agents had been lending its money on poor security to dummy buyers and using the money for their own speculation. After 1895, the Florida Finance Company existed only as a shell and any business was conducted by the Land Mortgage Bank. Greeley, Morgan, and Rollins also were related with the Florida Syndicate and the Indian River Association. Legally separate entities, the three companies overlapped in various ways, through common stockholders and directors, which Angas on occasion referred to as "the Keighley clique," after the Yorkshire town where several of them lived, their common employment of Angas, and their common involvement with the Jacksonville trio.

The Florida Syndicate, unlike the Land Mortgage Bank, was formed in 1892 for the purpose of land speculation. Around 1900, the interests of the company were in four categories: the Jacksonville Brick Company, phosphate leases (primarily to J. Buttgenbach Company), 75,000 acres of wild land, and the Hotel Montezuma in Ocala. The principal objective in forming the Florida Syndicate appears to have been the acquisition of land for phosphate prospecting. Some of the properties did have the valuable mineral in sufficient quantity for mining, principally at Holder in Citrus County, and Angas oversaw mining operations. The Syndicate acquired the Jacksonville Brick Company in the 1890s, and operated the brickyard without much success. The fire of 1901 found the yard inoperative, but prompted a flurry of activity to get it back into production. Success was mixed. A few years seem to have been profitable, but the enterprise was always troubled. The principal problem seems to have been the difficulty of finding foremen who knew how to work with Florida clay and with the extremely high temperatures required to burn it. The kiln was in constant need of repair, perhaps also as a result of high temperatures. Although Angas was not the manager of the brickyard, he took great interest in it. The brickyard ceased operation in 1913, and Angas attempted to sell the property for over twenty years. The sale was finally concluded by Robert Angas, who sold it to the Jacksonville School District for a technical school. Although the brickyard business was owned by the Syndicate, part of the property on which it was located was owned by the Land Mortgage Bank, making it one of the points on which the interests of the two companies overlapped and possibly conflicted.

The Florida Syndicate purchased 75,000 acres of undeveloped land in Florida of which more than 60,000 were in Levy County. The property passed to the Syndicate from phosphate prospector John Dunne, and was part of the property Hamilton Disston had acquired from the state. Disposing of sixty thousand acres in Levy County was a particularly daunting task requiring many years of effort. The policy of the Florida Syndicate was to remove the resources from the land, in this case timber, and sell the property. Numerous leases were made on the property for timber and timber products. Divided into roughly 20,000 and 40,000 acres tracts, the deforested property proved difficult to sell and to keep sold, especially as cash became a very scarce commodity in the late 1920s and 1930s. In 1931, the stockholders of the Florida Syndicate liquidated the company and formed a new company, the Keighley Land Company, to take over its assets and liabilities.

The Indian River Association was formed the same year as the Florida Syndicate, 1892, and with several of the same principal stockholders. The company was formed by acquiring the assets of the Indian River Pineapple and Cocoanut Association, which had been formed around 1885. Principal stockholders included former lieutenant governor William H. Gleason and several of his family. By the time the Indian River Association acquired the property, its officers included Harwood Morgan and John Rollins. The property consisted of prime Florida real estate, including parts of Jupiter Island and Hobe Sound, property known as the Gomez Grant on the opposing mainland, and the Riverside division of Jacksonville.

The last company with which Angas was involved was the Hollybrook Company, a Florida company, of which he was president and a large stock holder. The business of the company was to sell lots in the Hollybrook subdivision of Jacksonville. As part of the development, the company donated land to the city for a Hollybrook Park. Angas's interest in parks seems apparent in several instances and appears to be the area in which he showed the greatest civic interest.

From the guide to the Business Papers of William Moore Angas and Robert Moore Angas, 1889-1953, (Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida)