Research leads to book about 1880s Sanford murder trial
When a young Englishman named Archie Newton stepped from a steamboat onto a dock at the bustling river town of Sanford in 1880, he surely could not have imagined that his new life in Florida would lead to a murder charge.
In 1882, Newton hoped to buy land from Samuel McMillan, an eccentric orange grower, and invited McMillan to tea to seal the deal. On his way home, McMillan disappeared, and soon a search party dragged his headless body from a lake, beginning a sensational saga. Newton was accused of killing McMillan in a case that led to trials in Orlando and Tallahassee.
Sanford lawyer Andrew Fink, who tracked down Newton’s story, says he learned that folks today have more in common with people in the past than we think: Past or present, people have similar motives and prejudices, Fink says.
In researching the saga, he used his skills as a lawyer and longtime student of history. A college history major before earning his law degree, he always loved history and also “always wanted to write a book,” he says, but the demands of job, family, and community service came first.
‘On the shelf, just waiting’
Fink pursued writing projects when he could, and one day in 2016, when he was doing research at the Sanford Historical Museum, a conversation with the museum’s longtime curator, Alicia Clarke, sent him on a whole new direction.
“There’s a really cool story on the shelf just waiting,” Clarke told Fink, pointing him toward a folder. “It’s the kind of local history that no one knows about,” he recalls.
Besides the dramatic details, some of the legal aspects of the case, which went to Florida’s Supreme Court, caught his eye. “It established precedents, about circumstantial evidence, for example,” he notes.
His quest to track down the twists and turns of the case took him to the Florida State Archives in Tallahassee, where, to his amazement, he hit a mother lode of information: a dusty cardboard box containing a record of Newton’s criminal trial, written in longhand and full of compelling eyewitness testimony — “really a treasure trove of history,” Fink notes.
Secret pockets full of cash
Certainly the principals in the case sound fascinating. McMillan, the victim, was a bachelor in his 40s who lived a spartan existence despite his wealth and reportedly carried all his cash with him in pockets that were sewn on the inside of his shirts.
The much younger Newton, the accused, was married to a young woman also from England, and although Sanford at the time was quite a melting pot, Fink notes — full of different accents and ethnicities — there may have been a bit of a tendency to “blame the foreigner” in the locals’ assumptions about Newton’s guilt.
And was Newton guilty? To find out, Fink hopes folks will read the book that resulted from his research and writing. Published last fall by the History Press of Charleston, S.C., it’s full of pictures of 1880s Central Florida and also background about Sanford during its era as the gateway city of the Florida frontier.
One thing a lot of people don’t realize, Fink says, is that the city’s famous developer, Henry Sanford, was “teetering on the edge of bankruptcy” in the late 1870s and had sold his Florida project to a British consortium of investors, one of whom was Archie Newton’s great uncle. After McMillan disappeared, folks said “Archie was flashing a ton of cash,” Fink notes, although he was already a young man with a hefty inheritance.
To learn more
You can learn more about this Sanford story on Tuesday, April 9, when Andrew Fink talks about his book, “Murder on the Florida Frontier,” at a free Seminole County Historical Society program. It’s at the Museum of Seminole County History, 300 Eslinger Way, Sanford, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. For details, contact museum coordinator Bennett Lloyd at 407-665-2489 or blloyd@seminolecountyfl.gov.