Revered elders helped shape heritage of historic Eatonville Family heritage
Olga Mitchell of Orlando was known for her “long, tight hugs, impeccable diet, and fabulous sense of style,” her obituary noted after Mitchell’s death last month at 95. Mitchell was also known for her passion in exploring her family history and its relationship to Eatonville, perhaps the most storied historic community in Central Florida because of its most famous daughter, the author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston.
Just a few months before Mitchell’s death, Eatonville’s eldest elder, Ella Augusta Johnson Dinkins, died at 102 on Nov. 29. Dinkins had not only known Hurston but had helped initiate the annual festival founded in Hurston’s name in 1990; in the years since then, it has brought more than a million people to Eatonville. The passing of these elders brings reminders of how important they, and others like them, have been in preserving our history.
Unlike Ella Dinkins, Olga Mitchell didn’t have youthful memories of Eatonville; she began her quest to learn more about it after she left Greenwood Lake, New York, in 1996 for retirement in Orlando. The next year, she came across a picture of Eatonville founder Joseph Clark in the Sentinel and recalled how, in her youth, her grandmother had talked often about Mitchell’s great-grandfather Joe Clark, and what a “big man” he was.
She and her sister had thought it just was “grandma talking,” Mitchell recalled. Now, in 1997, the picture propelled her on a quest: Mitchell and her sister, Gloria Fenton Magbie, dove into research and family lore, with help from a friend, Marion Civette Elden. Their work resulted in “The Life and Times of Joseph E. Clark: From Slavery to Town Father,” a book the trio published in 2003.
Clark was born in 1859, they wrote — the third child of enslaved parents on N.N. Clark’s plantation in Covington, Georgia. When the Civil War ended, he was 6 years old, beginning a life of freedom with a plantation owner’s last name. By the time Clark was 21, he was working in Maitland-area orange groves that belonged to Josiah C. Eaton, a retired Navy captain from Maine.
Clark brought with him to Central Florida a dream of founding an all-Black town, and in 1882, after Eaton sold him much of the land that would later become Eatonville, Clark subdivided that land and sold it in lots to Black families.
He also built and ran a store that would become the social center of town — immortalized today in a brass plaque on Kennedy Boulevard and in the writings of Hurston, a vital person of Eatonville’s past whom Ella Dinkins could recall from memory.
Born in Orlando in 1918, Dinkins moved with her family to Eatonville in 1930, when her father, an architect, relocated the family there during the hardships of the Great Depression. He helped build Eatonville’s first elementary school, while her mother, a student of W.E.B. Du Bois, became a town matriarch.
Dinkins’ parents “were symbols of Black excellence and autonomy, and Dinkins carried that torch,” journalist Renata Sago wrote in an NPR tribute to Dinkins. “She raised money to buy the first incubators for Black babies in the segregated hospital. All 80 years that Dinkins could participate in an election, she did.”
“In the context of her time, we see that she was emblematic of Black women,” Dinkins’ daughter, N.Y. Nathiri, told Sago. “She expected a high standard of everyone with whom she worked because she wanted them to be the best that they could be.”
‘An Eatonville Saga’
You can learn more about Eatonville’s past through a podcast recently launched by the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community, with N.Y. Nathiri, the group’s executive director, as principal storyteller. Titled “An Eatonville Saga: The Story of a Historic Black Town’s Struggle to Survive and Thrive,” it’s available online at preserveeatonville.org.