Influential Member of the community and of the port was a booster for the city and early Rotary Club President

John Abercrombie Merritt served on both the Escambia County Commission and Pensacola City Council and was one of the founding members of the Pensacola Area Chamber of Commerce.

Merritt was born on March 16, 1864, in Russell County, Ala., where his mother lived on the farm of Dr. Charles Abercrombie, while his father was in England seeking supplies for the Confederates. His father, Lucius M. Merritt, had been a political prisoner at Fort Pickens in 1862 for refusing to sign an oath of allegiance to the federal government. His father, however, was released in early 1863 and rejoined the Confederate cause and his family.

He was 5 when he arrived in Pensacola in July 1869 aboard the ship Mine Lizzie. John received his early education at Episcopal schools in Pensacola, in Sewanee, Tennessee, and a school in North Carolina. About 1880 his father arranged for him to study law with E. A. Perry, who later became Florida governor. Merritt soon decided law wasn't for him.

At his father's death in January 1893, young Merritt took over his shipbroker business, calling it John A. Merritt and Co. Richard H. Turner Jr., his brother-in-law, joined him as a one-third partner around 1900. In Pensacola Supply Company, a sister company that did stevedoring for the Merritt Company, he was joined by Manuel (Guy) Palmes as a partner.

Merritt was an influential member of the community and of the port, working quietly to help promote the city. He was recognized throughout West Florida as a business leader. In 1900 he served three years on the board of the Citizens National Bank. He was a partner in the Bluff Springs Gravel Company and a director of the new Hotel Company, which operated the San Carlos. He was also one-third owner of the Bayou Chico Land Company.

Joining with J. Simpson Reese of the Citizens and Peoples Bank, Merritt worked with the group of Chicago engineers and bridge builders to form a shipbuilding company to build merchant ships for the government. Although no ships were finished before the end of World War I, the company began building ships on Bayou Chico. Prior to the completion of the first ship, the firm built a new bridge across the bayou that would open for the ships to reach open waters.

At the height of the lumber boom, Merritt and Co. arranged charters for the export of lumber around the world, later turning to coal with the decline of local pine timber. He developed a relationship with a London company for the export of coal and circa 1933 he began a lucrative partnership with Weis Patterson Company for the import of mahogany logs from Central and South America.

Although Merritt was not interested in the practice of law, he became deeply involved in the politics of the city. In 1894 he was elected tax assessor for two years; from 1896 to 1904 he was secretary of the Pilot Commission; and from 1907 to 1908 he was Chairman of the Board of County Commissioners. In 1931 he served on the first city council under the city manager form of government, our present form of city government.

Merritt was a founding member of the Pensacola Area Chamber of Commerce and in 1923 was its president, a position also held in later years by his son Richard and his grandson Ted Nickinson. When the Pensacola Chapter of the American Red Cross was organized in 1917, Merritt was a member of the finance committee. Since then, several members of his family have served on the chapter's board of directors.

Merritt helped found the Rotary Club of Pensacola, serving as its second president. He was a president of the Pensacola Country Club and member of the YMCA. He told the Rotary Club in an early 1930's talk that he had given up some of his social outlets after his marriage. These included membership in the Osceola Club, Knights of the Pythias and the Dudes, a young men's baseball team in the 1890's.

Sometime after his 1892 marriage to Mary Turner, daughter of another prominent Pensacola family, Merritt joined his Scotch Presbyterian in-laws in the Presbyterian Church. He and his wife raised five children to adulthood and had 13 grandchildren. Merritt and several members of the Turner and Merritt families are buried in St. John's 1 North Section 5, Lot 18.