Find Good. Share Good. Celebrate Good.
Issue #005 · Monday, September 7, 2026
Hey, Fleming Island 👋
Happy Labor Day. The forecast has bad news and the school calendar has good news, so let's do the bad news first and get it over with.
Labor Day is looking like a wet one. Rain and storms are likely for most of it, so if your plans depend on blue sky, keep a Plan B handy.
The good news is that this is homecoming week at Fleming Island High, and by Thursday night there'll be a parade going past. Coffee up. 🌴
⛈️
86° / 76°
HIGH / LOW
TODAY AROUND THE ISLAND
Showers and storms likely.
An 80 percent chance, and a quarter to half an inch of it. Heaviest before 2, easing a little mid-afternoon.
🦅 It's homecoming week
School's out today, and then it goes straight into the biggest week on the Fleming Island High calendar.
Thursday brings the Homecoming Parade, 6 to 7 PM. An hour, on a school night, free. If you've never gone because you don't have a kid there — go anyway. This is the one week a year the whole school comes down the road, and standing on a curb watching it is about as close to small-town as Fleming Island gets.
Friday is the homecoming game, 7 PM, at home against Ridgeview. It's also the district opener. The Eagles are 1-2 after a rough couple of Fridays, but district play starts at 0-0 for everybody and Ridgeview is 0-0 too. Where the standings are concerned, Friday is a clean slate.
Saturday is the dance, 7 to 10 PM, for the students.
And there's volleyball at home twice before any of that — Tuesday against Santa Fe and Wednesday against Spruce Creek, both from 5:30.
🗑️ Your bins still go out today
Everything else is shut, so it's a fair assumption that collection slips a day. It doesn't.
Curbside collection runs as normal today. Rosemary Hill is open normal hours too. The Environmental Convenience Centers are closed, but they're closed every Monday anyway, so that's not a holiday thing.
Closed today: county offices, all five Clay County libraries, Animal Services, and Environmental Services admin.
🏫 Tomorrow night: three people, one building
Here's a good one, and it's tomorrow.
The Green Cove Springs Preservation Society is running a talk on Dunbar High School — Clay County's Black high school under segregation — and what happened to the building after the school closed. It's still standing, and it's still in use, as the Augusta Savage Arts & Community Center.
What makes it worth the drive is who's speaking. Three people, between them covering the whole life of one building:
Betty Demmons, of the Dunbar High School Alumni Association, on what the school was and what it meant to the people who went there.
Felecia Hampshire, former mayor of Green Cove Springs, on how the building was saved and what preserving it actually took.
Henrietta Francis, president of the Augusta Savage Mentoring Center, on what goes on in there now — mentoring, the arts, and the rest of it.
Someone who was there, someone who saved it, someone who runs it. That's a better hour than most.
Tuesday, September 8 · 6:00–8:00 PM · Village Improvement Association, 17 Palmetto Ave N, Green Cove Springs · $10
Tickets go through Zeffy, which takes no cut, so the whole ten dollars goes to the Society.
🇺🇸 Friday is twenty-five years
September 11 falls on Friday, and it's the twenty-fifth one.
If you want somewhere to mark it, we have our own. Outside Clay County Fire Station 20 stand two nine-foot sections of exterior wall steel from the 68th floor of the North Tower. Clay County Fire Rescue and the firefighters' union applied to the Port Authority's World Trade Center artifacts program in 2011 to bring them here.
Next to them grows a Survivor Tree — a descendant of the Callery pear that was pulled half-destroyed from the original World Trade Center site, restored, and then propagated. Its fruit went to students in Queens in 2013, and hundreds of seedlings came out of that. This is one of them.
It's a few minutes out of anyone's Friday, and it's ours.
The county also runs Heroes Walk, where $200 puts an engraved brick at the memorial in the name of a firefighter, officer or paramedic you want to honor. The first section is a hundred bricks and all of it goes to keeping the memorial.
📅 What's happening around town
Monday, September 7 — Labor Day
🇺🇸 Everything's shut except your bin collection. See above. No school either.
Tuesday, September 8
🏫 The Story of Dunbar High School
6:00–8:00 PM · Village Improvement Association, 17 Palmetto Ave N · Green Cove Springs · $10
🏐 Volleyball, home vs Santa Fe
5:30 PM · Fleming Island High
Wednesday, September 9
🏐 Volleyball, home vs Spruce Creek
5:30 PM · Fleming Island High
🎤 Karaoke with Ashe
8:00 PM · Encore, 2015 County Road 220 · 21+
Thursday, September 10
🦅 Homecoming Parade
6:00–7:00 PM · Fleming Island High
🎵 Darrell Rae
6:00 PM · Encore · 21+
Friday, September 11
🇺🇸 Patriot Day — twenty-five years. The county's 9/11 memorial is at Fire Station 20. See above.
🏈 Homecoming: varsity football, home vs Ridgeview
7:00 PM · Fleming Island High · District opener
🎶 September Porch Fest
7:00–9:00 PM · The Rivers House, 219 Spring St · Green Cove Springs · Free
Brandon Leino plays the porch — Clay High graduate, local business owner, longtime guitarist. Bring your own chair and the lawn is free. Reserved spots start at $20, and because it's Zeffy, every cent goes to the Preservation Society.
🎵 Old Man Jameson
8:00 PM · Encore · 21+
Saturday, September 12
🎃 Fall Festival
10:00 AM–3:00 PM · Clay County Fairgrounds, 2463 FL-16 · Green Cove Springs · Free admission
100+ vendors, food trucks, music. See below.
🌶️ No Man's Land Chili Challenge and Flea Market
10:00 AM–3:00 PM · Military Museum of North Florida, 990 Roland Ave · Green Cove Springs
Second year. You vote on the chili. Also food trucks, local authors, military vendors, Revolutionary War reenactors, a First Coast Model A car show and the LifeSouth blood bus.
💃 Homecoming Dance
7:00–10:00 PM · Students
🎵 Julia Gulia
8:00 PM · Encore · 21+
Sunday, September 13
🎵 Darrell Rae
4:00 PM · Encore · 21+
🎃 One more good thing: a hundred vendors and a fairground
If homecoming week leaves you with a Saturday morning and nothing to do with it, Charming Sisters Events is putting on a Fall Festival at the Clay County Fairgrounds, Saturday the 12th, 10 to 3. More than a hundred vendors, food trucks, music, and free to get in.
It's 88 degrees and storming this week, so calling anything a fall festival takes nerve. Go anyway. September in Florida is when we decide it's autumn by agreement rather than by evidence, and a fairground full of pumpkins is as good a way to vote as any.
2463 FL-16, Green Cove Springs. Questions go to Ashley at [email protected] or 618-972-3950.
And if a hundred vendors isn't enough for one morning, the Military Museum is running its No Man's Land Chili Challenge at the same time, ten minutes away on Roland Avenue. Same Saturday, same 10 to 3. Reenactors, a Model A car show, and chili you get to vote on. Pick one, or be ambitious.
Before you go... tell me something good 💛
See a new business opening? Know about an event we should have on the calendar? Got a neighbor doing something wonderful, a local team having a big season, or just something good happening around Fleming Island?
Send it our way. This only gets better when all of us help find the good stuff.
❤️ Tell Us Something Good — A neighbor doing something kind. A kid doing something awesome. Something new going in around town. Anything that makes you think, "people around here should know about this."
📅 Submit an Event — Live music at a local restaurant, a fundraiser, festival, market, school activity. Anything locals can put on their calendar.
⭐ Get Featured — Own a local business? Tell us your story through a short interview and give the community a chance to meet the people behind it.
Survive the rain, cheer on the Eagles, and go pretend it’s fall this weekend.
Shelly 🌴
Find Good. Share Good. Celebrate Good.