P.K. Yonge

Philip Keyes Yonge (May 27, 1850 – August 9, 1934), usually given as P. K. Yonge, was a businessman and civic leader. A resident of Pensacola, he was a prominent Floridian. A founding member of the Florida Board of Control (the governing body of the State University System of Florida, Florida's public university system), he served on that board for almost 30 years as a member and chairman. The P.K. Yonge Developmental Research School in Gainesville is named for him.

Yonge was associated with the Southern State Lumber Company and its predecessors and served as president and manager of the corporation. The company was one of Florida's largest lumber firms at the time, with its headquarters in Pensacola.

An active citizen of Pensacola for nearly half a century, Yonge served as alderman from 1905 to 1909, and was president of the Chamber of Commerce in 1908. He received his LL. D. degree from the University of Florida in 1921. He was Phi Kappa Phi at the University of Florida, Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Georgia and a member of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. His son, Henry Yonge, Jr., had begun a career in law but because of his Loyalist leanings was forced to leave Georgia when the American Revolution broke out in 1776. He made his way to St. Augustine, capital of East Florida, where he gained employment in service of the Crown, serving as acting Attorney General; and eventually being appointed Secretary and Registrar General of the Bahamas in 1788. Because of his Loyalist sympathies, in 1778 Henry Yonge, Sr., with his sons Philip and William John, was banished from Georgia as well by the rebel usurpers of the colony's government. They took a ship headed to the Bahamas, but it was seized by a British privateer who conveyed them to St. Augustine.

P. K. Yonge's father, Chandler Cox Yonge, was born at Fernandina in 1818, when it was still a Spanish possession. The elder Yonge became a lawyer and was only twenty years old when he served as assistant secretary of the first Florida constitutional convention held in 1838 at St. Joseph. In 1843, Chandler Yonge was elected to the Florida state senate, and in 1845 he was appointed by President Polk as the United States district attorney for Florida. When Florida seceded and joined the Confederacy he served in the same capacity for the Confederate States; later he was commissioned as a quartermaster in the Confederate Army with the rank of major and stationed at Tallahassee. that eventually developed one of the South's premier herds of Jersey dairy cattle.

With consolidation of Florida state schools in 1905, Yonge was appointed a member of their Board of Control, the governing body of the state university system of Florida. He served, except for one term, until his retirement in 1933 at the age of eighty-three, and was its chairman for the last twenty years.

Florida Historical Society and later years P. K. Yonge was a charter member of the reorganized Florida Historical Society in 1902 and served as its president from 1932 until his death in 1934. He was an active collector of Florida historical materials and assembled a vast collection of books and documents that his son, Julien C. Yonge, inherited and further expanded. Julien Yonge later donated the collection, which formed the nucleus of the P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History, to the University of Florida.

Yonge's wife, Lucie C. Davis, died in 1932. A life-long member of the Episcopal Church, he was survived by five of his nine children. Yonge died in Pensacola on August 9, 1934, and was buried there in St. Michael's cemetery