A 17-minute look back in time
Silent film discovered during research for history book
The grainy images show children running outside of Clermont Elementary School as women decked out in cloche hats and fur-trimmed coats follow close behind. Men unload steamer trunks at the train depot from the now-defunct Atlantic Coast Line.
The mid-1920s scenes are among 17 minutes of black-andwhite silent film footage uncovered during research for a history book tracing Clermont’s roots before it became a fast-growing Orlando bedroom community and a destination for triathletes worldwide.
The film canister was unearthed from the library’s archives and is thought to possibly have been shot by Charles Short, a retired mechanical research engineer for General Motors.
A 5-minute clip will be shown at a launch party for the book, “Clermont — From Gem of the Hills to Choice of Champions,” at 6 p.m. Monday at Cooper Memorial Library in Clermont.
Filming was a fresh concept nearly a century ago, said Doris Bloodsworth, one of the book’s editors and writers, so some of the scenes are a bit awkward.
“It takes you back to that time and place,” she said. “It’s just funny that back then this was such a new thing. People sort of acted like they were going to get their picture taken, so they stood very stiff and didn’t smile.”
The research that revealed the silent film resulted in a 404-page hardback, which was produced by the Cooper Memorial Library Association and expands on a history book published in 1984 for the city’s centennial.
The library team worked for more than a year to produce the revised version and decided to go back in time even farther than when the city was founded in 1884.
“We went even went back to
the Ice Age to explain how the ridges were made,” Bloodsworth said.
Caryl Harris, library board president and a retired reference librarian, said putting the book together was time consuming but worth it to preserve the history of Clermont.
It took “a lot of research, a lot of writing, we had to re-index the whole thing,” she said. “This has been a labor of love, and we’re so excited to share it with the community.”
The previous book’s printing plates were lost, so board member and coauthor Lisa Graham said she spent about 45 hours painstakingly retyping the manuscript over 3 ½ months.
Graham, a fifth-generation south Lake County resident, said she remembers the land once dominated by citrus groves and the aftermath of the consecutive freezes in the 1980s when she returned from college.
“Coming home and seeing all the devastation was very difficult to see because that’s what I’d grown up with,” she said.
“A lot of new residents don’t know that aspect. They know it as a place where’s there’s a lot of homes.” Clermont, Lake’s largest city with 40,000 people, continues to grow with single-family subdivisions on the horizon and a planned 243-acre sports-themed community dubbed Olympus.
Bloodsworth said there’s been significant demand from newcomers to learn about the city’s past, and the new book will prove interesting for history buffs.
“There’s something to me very hopeful about history,” Bloodsworth said. “People are resilient.”
The book is $35, with profits going to the library. Copies can be purchased at clermontbook.com.
As for the old-timey clip, a Longwood film restoration and digitizing company converted it so it could be easily viewed, Bloodsworth said. Plans call for showing it during presentations about the book. Eventually, it could be made available on YouTube, she said.