Submitted by Rebekah Sheats
It started with tung nuts and ended with Nazis. An unlikely story perhaps, but this is how it goes:
Tung oil, derived from the nuts of the tung tree, was an important ingredient in the production of paints, varnishes, and similar materials. The oil was originally imported from China, with as much as 12 million gallons purchased annually by the United States in the 1920s. Farmers across Florida began experimenting with growing tung trees about the turn of the century. By 1930, the Gainesville News stated, “Experiments over a period of 20 years show that soil in North Florida is particularly adapted to the growth of tung trees. Already 6,000 acres are under cultivation.” The paper noted: “the growing of tung trees in Florida will become a tremendously profitable industry.”
In 1939, New York attorney Arthur Dunn visited Jefferson County to hold a meeting encouraging local farmers to invest in the production of tung oil by planting 3,000 acres in tung trees. Dunn believed that “the lands of Jefferson County and its vicinity are more suited to tung oil production, from the standpoint of climate and the natural productivity of the soil, than those in any other section.” Mayor Richard Simpson chaired the meeting which was attended by many local farmers and businessmen.
Word of the future of Florida tung oil production spread across the nation. After a 1939 meeting of the American Tung Oil Association in Mississippi, it was noted that “Florida may become one of the chief centers for this product.”
It was therefore no surprise when an Illinois scientist decided to make Florida his home. Leonard Arnold Delp, a native of Illinois, had heard of the wonders of tung oil. He had a master’s degree in chemical science and decided to move south and invest in a tung grove, where he hoped to practice scientific farming. With two partners, he purchased the old Tuscawilla Plantation on the border of Leon and Jefferson counties. Using his scientific knowledge, he intended to improve the soil and turn the plantation into a productive, profitable tung grove. He and his wife Theo Francis moved here in the early 1940s. They were accompanied by their two-year-old daughter Derylene (better known today as Dee Counts). Born in 1940, Derylene’s first memories were of life at the tung grove and the arrival of a war that brought strange new friends to her Florida home.
Tung oil was pressed from tung nuts. These nuts were harvested by hand, an operation that required a large labor force. Young Dee loved to watch the farm hands assemble at the meeting shed in the early morning hours at the start of every day. A large flat-bed trailer would carry the men and women to the grove to begin their day’s work.
Occasionally Leonard took his daughter with him in his inspection of the tung trees. Dee watched in fascination as the workers sifted through the piles of dead leaves carpeting the ground to locate the large tung nuts hiding among the leaves.
Gathering the nuts wasn’t difficult, but the work required much bending and proved a tedious occupation. Leonard recognized the monotony of the work and offered his employees incentives to further encourage and interest them in their work. Around the grove he would conceal nuts of various colors. Some he had painted red, others green.
Dee recalled: “Daddy explained to the hands that each color represented a different bonus. If a worker found three red nuts, they got such and such a bonus; if they found two green ones, they would receive this bonus, and so on. It was an incentive to encourage them to work harder. And I remember there was one gold and one silver nut. That was the epitome if you found one of those.”
Leonard employed local laborers to work his fields. But with the arrival of German prisoners of war in America, another type of worker became available. These men were housed in barracks in Tallahassee and were rented out to local farms as day laborers. Leonard, who spoke German fluently, gladly employed some of the men in his fields. Dee noted, “Those men fascinated me as a child. Here were these people who looked like me, but they spoke a strange language I couldn’t understand.”
Leonard enjoyed visiting with the men over lunch and often brought Dee along with him. The young child loved to listen to the guttural language spoken by the Germans.
One day, as Dee excitedly prepared to accompany her father to see the workers, Leonard sat his four-year-old daughter down and told her gently, “You can’t come with me to the fields anymore.”
Heartbroken, Dee asked her father why. Leonard took the child up on his knee and explained, “These German men have children just like you. They’re separated from their children right now. When they see you, it reminds them of their own children who are far away, and this makes them sad. I don’t want to make them sad.”
Through her father’s sensitive handling of this situation, Dee learned from childhood the importance of kindness and consideration of others.
Dee’s days were filled with childhood delights, and her nights were no less thrilling. Her parents served as air wardens throughout the duration of the war. At night, they would bundle Dee into the back seat of the car and drive to a sighting station on the west side of Jefferson County. Dee remembered: “We had to climb a ladder to get into the lookout shelter. Daddy would put me to bed on a blanket in the back of it. Then he and my mother would stand at the front of the shelter with binoculars. They had a chart that identified the shapes of different planes, and they would call in anything they saw.”
In her pajamas on her makeshift bed in the back of the shelter, Dee watched her parents in fascination until the unrelenting call of sleep claimed the young child.
Those few dark hours each night in the lookout shelter passed quickly, but the memories would remain a lifetime.
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