Effie Knowles

The Effie Knowles Saga
by Larry Smith
Nassau Guardian Newspaper Exerpt
This is a story about unusual Bahamian connections...a tale that begins in the 18th century and still spins today. A story about Indians, lawyers and land sharks...and a glimpse of the life of one little-known woman of Bahamian descent who made good in the United States, but left open a pandora's box of island intrigue.
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Florida lawyer Effie Knowles is something of a celebrity in Bahamian real estate and legal circles these days, although she has been dead for 20 years and few people have ever heard of her.

Her parents were Bahamian emigres. She was born in Key West in 1892 and died in Miami in 1984 at the ripe old age of 92. Her grandfather - James Alexander Knowles was born on Long Island in 1839 and moved to Key West. Florida did not become a US territory until 1821 and for a long time Bahamians looked on the Keys as northern Out Islands.

At the height of the Depression, the 1930 census puts Effie living with her widowed mother (Julia), two sisters (Laura and Beatrice) and a brother (William) in Miami. All five were described as white and literate, and Effie - a lawyer - owned the house. All are now dead.

But their legacy lives on - a legacy that stretches back to the earliest land grants in the Bahamas. In fact, Effie’s claim to more than 15,000 acres on several Bahamian islands has generated enormous controversy lately, with some describing transactions involving this estate as “the biggest land fraud in our history”.

Effie's mother (Julia Dorsett) was from Nassau, where both of her parents were born. Julia went to Key West as a child and married William E. Knowles, an American whose father was from Long Island. When Julia died in 1956 at the age of 91, the Miami Herald described her as a Florida “pioneer”.

Effie’s father died in 1904 in Key West. But his great great grandfather was James Knowles Sr, a loyalist planter who received extensive crown grants on Long Island before he died in 1805.

Effie’s maternal grandparents were Laura Nairn and Joseph B Dorsett, a salt raker on Rum Cay. Joseph’s grandfather was George Dorsett, a privateer from Charleston, South Carolina who died in 1783 after receiving land grants in the southern islands. The Dorsetts were some of the first English settlers of Virginia.

Complex chains of title have been built up from this genealogy. And the various properties - on Long Island, Eleuthera, Rum Cay, Andros, and Cat Island, as well as about a dozen prime lots on New Providence - are a subject of intense dispute amongst attorneys, realtors and developers...involving court cases in both Florida and the Bahamas.

But since neither Effie nor her father were Bahamian citizens, experts say she may well have forfeited any land claims simply by failing to pay property taxes. According to local lawyer Bill Holowesko (who has spent years doing title research), the origin of Effie’s ‘estate’ dates to the 1960s, when Holowesko worked for arch realtor H. G. Christie.

“Effie came into our office one day with a list of properties around the country that she claimed to own,” he said recently. “She had gone to the registry and simply copied all the crown grants to people in her family tree. This list keeps reappearing.

“There is no doubt about the crown grants, but lots of things could have happened along the way,” Holowesko added. “I told HG that she didn’t own a lot of this land and he never agreed to buy anything.”
And all of this controversy is rich with irony in view of Effie’s efforts over many years to reclaim Florida land for the Seminole Indians. Effie became a lawyer in 1926 and joined President Franklin Roosevelt’s Department of Justice in 1934. She returned to private practice in Miami in 1953 and retired in the 1970s.

In her private practice she was an attorney for the Seminole tribe for over 20 years, pursuing a celebrated land case with the Indian Claims Commission. The commission was created by Congress in 1946 and awarded more than a half billion dollars before its mandate expired in 1978. One of those awards was won by Effie Knowles.

The Seminoles are descended from a few hundred Indians who eluded capture by the US army in the 19th century. Today, about 2,000 live on six Florida reservations. And descendents of some of the so-called Black Seminoles live on Andros, at a place called Red Bays.

In addition to Indians from Georgia and Alabama who migrated to Florida in the 1700s, Seminoles were made up of other tribal remnants as well as runaway African slaves from southern plantations. In fact, the word Seminole means, "one who has camped out from the regular towns," or "runaway" .

In the 1950s, there was a push among Indian tribes to pursue land claims and treaty obligations with the US government. In 1970, the Indian Claims Commission awarded the Seminoles $12.5 million for 32 million acres taken from them during the Seminole wars. This was the claim that Effie Knowles worked on, receiving a fee of $150,000.
From here the story gets more complicated. According to her obituary in the Miami Herald, Effie's health had failed and her fortune had faded in her final years - to the extent that a Dade County judge declared her incompetent just before she died.

But a year before her death at Miami’s North Shore Medical Centre in 1984, Effie - who never married - willed most of her estate to two “dear friends and companions”, Merril and Raymond MacDonald of New Jersey. In fact, Merrill - a taxi driver - was to be buried next to her, the will said.

“I have carefully considered the interests of any living relatives that I may have and it is my expressed intention and desire not to give, devise or bequeath any part of my estate to them,” she declared. That estate consisted of a few thousand dollars in cash, her Miami home... and vast acreages in the Bahamas.

In 1987, soon after the will was probated, the MacDonald father and son team sold Effie’s property to a Bahamian company called Newport Harbour Limited set up by Bill Davis, a former state senator from Arizona, and Nassau lawyer Dawson Roberts. The price was only $180,000 for thousands of acres on several islands.

But Davis failed to get government approval to complete the transfer. So some say the land is now effectively owned by Mr Roberts. According to one expert who has seen the documents, “Effie Knowles probably had as good a title as anyone to these properties under the circumstances, but it could just as easily be challenged.”

In the meantime, the MacDonalds began re-selling the estate. Many of these transactions started out with conveyances for large chunks of land at nominal prices, which the Bahamian government accepted although realtors say the land was grossly undervalued, assuming good title.

For example, just two years ago the MacDonalds conveyed 2000 acres at Rum Cay for $128,000 or $64 per acre. One-acre lots on the water at Rum Cay are now selling for $100,000. And this property - together with everything else that Effie Knowles owned in the Bahamas - has ostensibly already been sold to Newport Harbour.

So in 2004, Newport Harbour filed a writ against the MacDonalds for alleged "fraudulent conveyances" of land "legally and beneficially owned" by the company. But the sales continued as the luxury property market in the Bahamas heated up.

One of those the Macdonald’s re-sold land to was Rum Cay Ventures, owned by Americans Michael Fothergill and Steve Sweitzer. Fothergill was convicted of money laundering and bank fraud in Florida in 2002. His company has been re-selling lots to foreign investors who may not be aware that the titles are questionable. And there have been many conflicting claims to other parts of the estate.

According to realtor and former member of parliament Mike Lightbourn, “the Effie Knowles saga will go down as one of the biggest land frauds in Bahamian history. I have never experienced anything like this in my life where land can be marketed all over the world on the Internet and foreign buyers pay an overseas attorney to buy something for which there is no title.”

And for a woman who played such a key role in settling historic Indian land claims in Florida, the disputed status of Effie’s sometime Bahamian estate is a fascinating tale of geneaology, greed, intrigue and government incompetence.