City moves to name prominent midwife’s home as historic place
A white house on Bruton Boulevard served as a sanctuary for women to give birth for decades when much of west Orlando and surrounding Central Florida was lined with orange groves.
Mary Jane Johnson lived there and delivered about 1,500 babies — including four of her eight children — as a midwife in the Central Florida area, including many in the west Orlando home. She was 80 years old when she died in 1985, her grandson said.
At one point in the 1970s, she was the lone remaining licensed midwife in Orange County, and a necessity for Black women who couldn’t give birth in hospitals due to segregation, and others without the financial means to do so.
“A lot of these babies she didn’t get any money for because the people just could not afford it,” said Arthermon Johnson Jr., one of her sons. “We had one kid who was born and his mother was not able to pay, so when he got grown, he came back and paid her for the delivery.”
The Orlando City Council is expected to vote on Monday to designate the now boarded-up home and property as historic, which protects it from being demolished and redeveloped.
The Johnson family still owns
the home, which now sits on a developed block near Washington Shores. Arthermon Johnson, 83, said the family found herbs on the property that Mary Jane Johnson used in her work decades prior.
Much has changed in that time.
Family members recall orange groves and woods surrounding the home, which was one of the only ones around when Mary Jane Johnson was delivering babies.
The block now has churches, a city Neighborhood Center and is surrounded by single-family homes.
With the historical designation, Arthermon Johnson Jr. said the family was pursuing grants to fix it up and was considering making it a community center of some kind dedicated to midwifery.
Supervising births, or midwifery, ran in Mary Jane Johnson’s family, according to a 1975 Orlando Sentinel story. Her mother and grandmother were midwives, and she worked well into her 70s delivering babies throughout Orlando, Oviedo, Kissimmee and other surrounding areas.
“It was handed down from god,” she said at the time. “As long as God gives me strength, I don’t give up God’s work.”
The profile states she was the last licensed midwife in Orange County and one of just 57 statewide. Decades prior, about 4,000 midwives worked in Florida, according to the Midwives Association of Florida.
In the 1800s, most births were supervised by midwives, according to an article by Dr. Dominique Tobbell, a University of Virginia professor, while in the 1900s hospitals and physicians became responsible for more births, and midwives attended fewer births.
Mary Jane Johnson stopped attending school after the third grade, and eventually had seven sons and a daughter of her own. But she told the paper in the 1970s she was proud that six of her children went on to graduate from college, and several had careers in education. Her husband was a janitor at Jones High School.
“I was promoted to fourth grade but never got to go. I never got to read or write well, but we sent the children to college,” she said at the time.
The story details the home, including a secondstory ward for mothers with three beds, a television and ashtrays.
“Growing up, people always said they were our cousins and they said that because my grandma birthed their parents, or they called her ‘Granny,’ ” said Ralph Johnson, one of Mary Jane’s grandchildren who lives in Orlando.
City officials haven’t been able to pin down the precise year the home was constructed, though have estimated it was built in 1925, according to the application to the city’s Historic Preservation Board. The application states, “Ideally, the property could be used as an informational park or museum to the mid-wife profession through an adaptive reuse rehabilitation.”
“There is also a lack of representation for preserving the history and providing historic designation for the west side of Orlando, African-American heritage sites, and those that focus on women and their contributions to society,” the application for historic preservation reads.
Ralph Johnson said the house had once fallen victim to vandalism but the family was working on “bring(ing) it back to its original state to honor her the best way possible.”
“If you picture your grandmother, she was it times 50,” Ralph Johnson said. “I’m tickled pink this process is moving forward as well.”