Black Heritage Trail leads way to rich, varied stories
Recently, the Sentinel’s Ryan Gillespie reported about efforts to declare the Orlando home of the late midwife Mary Jane Johnson a historic site. Johnson died at 80 in 1985; over decades, she delivered about 1,500 babies, and at one point in the 1970s, she was the lone remaining licensed midwife in Orange County.
Johnson’s modest home on Bruton Boulevard served as a sanctuary for women for decades, Gillespie wrote. It’s a great example of a building that may be simple in scale and building materials but can open a path to a large and complex story.
“African American scholar James Horton says that a single visit to a history site can make a life once lived real,” notes a National Trust for Historic Preservation publication on “Preserving African American Historic Places.” “Preservation contributes much to a forgetful society,” the authors note. “By preserving historic sites that tell the story of African Americans in this country, we draw attention to the contributions of both ordinary and extraordinary people.”
Trails to discovery
Some of these sites from our state’s rich history are included in the Florida Black Heritage Trail, available online (and in a downloadable PDF) from the Florida Division of Historical Resources. It’s one of several “heritage trail” publications from the state, including Florida Jewish Heritage Trail, co-authored by Central Florida’s Rachel Heimovics.
Some sites are functioning
museums; others are private dwellings not open to the public. But together, the list shows the depth and variety of the heritage of Black Floridians. It’s a valuable resource for teachers, too.
The Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts in Eatonville is featured, as is the Wells’Built Museum of African American History and Culture in Orlando, the Hannibal Square neighborhood
in Winter Park and many other area sites. Other sites and structures are less well known.
Near the corner of Orange Avenue and Church Street in Orlando, for example, the Nicholson-Colyer Building, 29 W. Church St., stands in contradiction to the conventional wisdom that Black-owned businesses in Orlando existed only west of the railroad tracks in the city’s early history.
In 1911, Black business
owner J.A. Colyer built this Victorian brick commercial structure with J.E. Nicholson, a Canadian grocer and baker. Colyer is listed in Orlando’s 1907 city directory as a “merchant and tailor.”
A few blocks farther west, the former Ebenezer United Methodist Church building, 596 W. Church St., survives amid high-rise condos not far from Exploria soccer stadium. Declared an Orlando Historic Landmark
in 2004, it’s a survivor from the days when West Church was a busy commercial corridor for Orlando’s Black community.
The Ebenezer congregation built a wooden church on the same site as early as 1892, Orlando historian Tana Porter has written. Members began constructing a brick replacement in 1922, “adding a second story in 1924 and a steeple and front steps to complete the church in 1926; the differing colors of the bricks suggest the sequence of the construction,” Porter notes. “The congregation prospered and eventually outgrew the building, which they sold in 1976.” The striking church “stands as a reminder of the Parramore that once was,” Porter writes.
A few miles north in Eatonville, famous far beyond Central Florida as one of the nation’s oldest Black communities, the Moseley House, 11 Taylor St., was built about 1889, shortly after Eatonville was founded in 1887. It survives as a rare example of the pre-1900 wood-frame houses that were once so plentiful in Eatonville.
The house was the home of Matilda Clark Moseley, a niece of one of Eatonville’s founders, Joseph E. Clark. Matilda or “Tillie” was a childhood friend of Eatonville’s most famous resident, author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, and Hurston was a frequent visitor to the house.
You’ll find many more sites and biographical sketches on the Florida Black Heritage Trail — inspiring places for visits during Black History Month and all year long. Find it at https://dos.myflorida.com/ historical/preservation/ heritage-trails/black-heritage-trail.
Mark your calendars
Rick Baldwin will talk about “The Early Years of Winter Park” at noon on Feb. 23 in the Winter Park History Museum’s Speaker Series. It’s at the Winter Park Welcome Center, 151 W. Lyman Ave., and will be broadcast live on the museum’s Facebook page. Email museum@wphistory.org or 407-647-2330 to reserve a spot for the in-person event.
Feb. 26-27 marks a big weekend for history when Pine Castle Pioneer Days returns to Cypress Grove Park, 290 W. Holden Ave., Orlando. The annual family-oriented, community-planned event promotes the history of the Pine Castle area through demonstration, talks, music and more. This year’s program focuses on the dairy industry, an integral part of Pine Castle’s early years. For hours and program details, including talks at the Pine Castle Historical Society’s History Tent, visit PineCastlePioneerDays.org.