As a result, the area weathered a number of challenging periods, with a cycle of lean years, increased profits, and overproduction repeating itself regularly. The local economy in Quincy and Gadsden County remained closely tied to the tobacco industry until the 1970s. Census records indicate that those Quincy Jews who were not in the tobacco business owned dry goods and retail stores in the early 20th century. Other families, including the Feinbergs and Weinbergs, had roots in Russia and Poland. His wife, Rosie Spitz Wedeles, was also a native Bohemian, and records suggest that two of her sisters made their way to Quincy as well: Katherine (Caroline) Spitz Buchbinder and Hanna Spitz Fischer. Max Wedeles came from the town of Osek (Wossek in German), now in the Czech Republic. Many of Quincy’s Jews had roots in Central Europe, especially Bohemia. The company was later known as the Max Wedeles Tobacco Company, and it operated farms and a packing house. Max Wedeles’s cousins, Emile and Joseph Wedeles, were partners with him in the Taussig and Wedeles company, although they do not seem to have made their homes in Quincy. A number of Quincy Jews owned tobacco farms and related businesses, including Max Wedeles, a native of Bohemia who arrived from Chicago in 1896. The shade tobacco grew under sheets of cheesecloth and served as an excellent material for cigar wrappers.

Gadsden county emerged as a tobacco farming center in the late 19th century, with tobacco farmers there switching to large leaf shade tobacco shortly after 1900. Some Quincy Jews were buried there as well, after the Bainbridge B’nai B’rith chapter founded a Jewish cemetery in 1878. From the 1870s on, Bainbridge boasted a stronger Jewish community, and Quincy merchants travelled there to board northbound trains on buying trips to New York. Instead, Jews in and around Quincy and Gadsden County maintained ties to coreligionists in Bainbridge, Georgia, just across the state border. Quincy’s Jewish population increased in the closing decades of the 19th century, but the town never developed its own synagogue. He notes that other Jews remained in Quincy and Marianna after the murder and that Quincy’s Jewish population reached seventy-five in approximately 1880. According to researcher Daniel Weinfeld, Samuel Fleishman’s murder was motivated by the regulators’ opposition to black social equality rather than anti-Semitism. Marianna resident Samuel Fleishman was assassinated in 1869 for allegedly urging African American citizens to seek vengeance for recent anti-black violence perpetrated by white supremacist terrorists known as “regulators.” His brother Phillip Fleishman, of Quincy, moved away with his family following the killing. In 1864, Ferdinand Fleishman committed suicide in Cincinnati, and his family subsequently relocated. There is no record of any Quincy Jews owning enslaved people prior to emancipation.Īlthough the Fleishmans were the area’s largest Jewish family in the area at the time of the Civil War, only Simon Fleishman remained by 1880. Samuel Fleishman, who had moved to Marianna in neighboring Jackson County in the 1850s, avoided conscription by placing some of his property in his wife’s name and escaping to New York City for the last years of the war. He spent the remainder of the war in prison. Simon Fleishman, who lived with Phillip, did serve in the Confederate Army and was captured by the Union Army in 1863. Ferdinand and Phillip Fleishman had already acquired significant property, and both paid substitutes to enroll in their places. When the Civil War began in 1860, Quincy Jews faced the difficult choice of whether or not to fight for the Confederacy. The agricultural economy also shaped Gadsden County’s racial demographics in the antebellum period, with the majority of the population made up of enslaved African Americans. They were attracted by the area’s developing plantation economy, which provided a customer base for their mercantile operations and accounted for more than three-quarters of the Florida’s cotton production. By 1860, six members of the Fleishman family lived in Gadsden County or neighboring Jackson County-a significant proportion of the two counties’ roughly fifteen Jews. He initially worked as a peddler, but soon moved south and opened a store in Quincy. Samuel was born in Bavaria around 1822 and immigrated to New York City in 1845. By 1850, the area had attracted a small number of Jews, including Samuel and Phillip Fleishman. White settlers founded Quincy in the 1820s, and the new town developed as an agricultural, economic, and administrative hub for Gadsden County.

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