The Life & Lies of St. Pete’s Founding Mother

Meet Sarah Armistead, formerly Sarah Williams, formerly Sarah Judge, formally Sarah Craven, also known as the “Mother of St. Petersburg”. In her obituary, she is credited with holding the straws which her then-husband, John Williams, and Orange Belt Railway president, Peter Demens, drew to decide who had the right to name the city they had just founded—a story which later became a legendary coin flip. A story which we now know never happened.

Why would Sarah lie? It’s possible we’ll never know. So maybe the better question is: who was Sarah Armistead anyways? And what gave her the confidence to make claims like that?

Follow the story of Sarah Armistead, published in four monthly installments.

Part One: Sarah Craven

St. Pete was not named in a coin flip. That is a myth that has been told so many times that it even appears on the City’s Wikipedia page. It has been passed down for decades—which is perhaps the reason it became so popular. But how did it start?

The answer to this lies in the 1917 obituary of Sarah Armistead, formerly Sarah Williams, formerly Sarah Judge, formally Sarah Craven, also known as the “Mother of St. Petersburg”. In both the St. Petersburg Times and the Tampa Tribune, she is credited with holding the straws which her husband, John Williams, and Orange Belt Railway president, Peter Demens, drew to decide who had the right to name the city they had just founded.

Of course, we now know that there was probably never any drawing of straws, or a coin flip either. The truth is a much less interesting clerical adventure involving the post office—a story for another time. But later, long after Sarah’s death, an acquaintance of hers would remember her telling the story of the straws, spreading the rumor herself.

Why would Sarah lie? It’s possible we’ll never know. So maybe the better question is: who was Sarah Armistead anyways? And what gave her the confidence to make claims like that?

Let’s start at the beginning, back when she was just Sarah Craven.

Her mother’s name was Isabella Stewart—and that’s about as much as we know, given it was the early 1800s and she was a woman. Sarah’s father was James Craven, who, according to some records, was a barber, according to Sarah, was a soldier, and according to his 1872 obituary, was a drunk (“James Craven died of drink,” it says. “He has not been sober since 24th May.” It was December.). All or none of these things could be true.

Sarah herself was born in Ontario in 1843 as the first of five children. We don’t know what kind of income her parents had, so we can only speculate on her education—or, really, any other part of her early life. For over two decades, she makes no appearance in Canadian newspapers, for better or for worse. She does show up in the 1861 census, interestingly alone, in some other family’s household, but the rest of the information we can gather about that — “female, age 17” — is hardly revealing.

It isn’t until she’s 27 that we start to get a better picture of who Sarah Craven is.

Her first appearance in newspapers is in Detroit, under the headline: “Alleged Embezzlement.” Sarah, along with her new husband, John Judge, are being accused of embezzling $1700, the equivalent of over $40,000 today, from their employer, Giles Pullman.

This is where things start to get interesting.

Stay tuned for next month's edition of St. Pete in a Snap for the next installment in the life of Sarah Williams Armistead.