Mother Hunt: Big love

The City of Daytona Beach
featured this photo of 
Sarah Hunt on their website page
about 2025 Black History Icons:
https://www.daytonabeach.gov/1441/2025-Black-History-Icons

Where to begin with the story of Sarah Hunt, aka Mother Hunt. The City of Daytona Beach and the Daytona Beach News-Journal honored this remarkable woman in February 2025 as a Black History Icon. She deserves the recognition.

A couple of big names tend to garner major Black history attention in Daytona Beach, with understandable reason. Mary McLeod Bethune and Howard Thurman are legendary giants, famous far beyond their Daytona Beach legacies. 

But for every Bethune and Thurman in the world, there are a thousand Sarah Hunts. In Daytona, she saw orphans and elderly in dire need and she did something about it. She took in children -- sometimes left on her doorstep -- and guided frail elderly to safety and security by providing a home for them all.

She officially founded an orphanage in 1924 on what is now George Engram Boulevard. The home is believed to have been the first black orphanage in Florida. 

The facility was first known as the Old Folks and Children's Home. It was later renamed the Florida East Coast Orphan and Child Caring Home. Sarah Hunt also founded a church across the street from the orphanage, the Mount Mission Missionary Baptist Church.

She received little to zero help from whatever state agencies existed in the 1920s and 1930s. Closely tied to her story are memories of her walking around the neighborhood with a basket on her arm, seeking donations to help keep alive those in need. She used her own funds and community donations to maintain the orphanage.

Little is known about the personal life of Sarah Hunt, yet the few details we have convey a sense of dignity, determination, strength and Christian love. 

She was born in either the 1857 or 1865 or 1867 and came to Daytona Beach from Georgia in 1905. Why she moved here is unknown. She died in 1936 from pneumonia and is buried in Mount Ararat Cemetery in Daytona Beach. 

One of her final acts - hours before her death - was to contact a local representative of the Florida state welfare system. She relayed her worries about the 25 children and six elderly people she looked after at that time. "She told the welfare worker the orphanage was totally without funds, that even the supply of food was limited." 

That information is from a Dec. 19, 1936 Daytona Beach Morning Journal newspaper article about Sarah Hunt's death. The same article noted she had been well known both locally and to state welfare agencies as Mother Hunt. 

The article explains that the Florida welfare department couldn't help because the orphanage wasn't licensed by the state. But Mother Hunt's plea traveled up departmental lines. The statewide director issued a statement encouraging private and church-led agencies to aid the orphanage. 

On the surface, it sounds like red tape prevented the state from taking over the orphanage. Still. I'm a little suspicious. Surely they could have done something. There obviously was a relationship and an open line of communication. But this was the Jim Crow South. Just the fact that the state director issued a supportive statement was probably outside the norm.

The 1936 article says nothing about Sarah's life before she reached Daytona. We learn a little more from her death certificate, which someone uploaded to the Find A Grave website. The certificate says she was about 79 years old when she died in 1936. That would put her birth in the 1850s. Her exact date of birth is listed as unknown.

Sarah was born in Rabun County in northern Georgia, a state where slavery still existed in the 1850s. Was she born to enslaved parents? Free parents? A forced encounter? Her father's name and birthplace are listed as unknown. Her mother's birthplace is also listed as unknown, but her name is given. The first name is illegible but the last appears to be Hunt.

Interestingly, the death certificate also lists Sarah as the widow of a Robert Hunt or Robert Hugh. She's shown as homekeeper of the "colored orphanage," and as having worked at that occupation for 50 years. 

That's far longer than she oversaw the formally established orphanage. That leads me to think she cared for others informally for decades before opening the dedicated home in 1924. It was her life's work. What led her to it? We may never know. But there is a clue in the 1910 U.S. Census.

The 1910 Census lists Sarah Hunt, age 45 (birthdate 1865), as a widowed dressmaker living on Daytona's Midway Street in a home she owned. If this is the same Sarah Hunt, she must have arrived from Georgia with some or all the money needed to buy a home. No local dressmaker could earn enough in five years (1905 arrival to 1910 census) to cover a down payment, mortgage and taxes. That she owned her home is significant. It was no easy feat for a widowed Black woman at that time and place. 

That Census also shows Sarah as living with one adopted adult child. Then there is the shocker: Sarah is listed as having four children -- none of whom were still alive. What happened to them? How did they die? My gosh, to lose all four children? It's unthinkable. One of my grandmothers lost four of her eight children and it scarred her for life. And she still had four who lived.

Sarah shows up in the 1914 Daytona Beach City Directory as a widowed nurse living on 2nd Avenue in a house she owned. And in the 1920 U.S. Census as a 53-year-old (born 1867) rooming-house proprietor in a 2nd Avenue house she owned. I love that she attained and maintained home ownership in such a challenging time.

Census records and directories don't provide a full picture. They leave questions. Far more telling is the way the orphanage was renamed Mother Hunt's Orphanage soon after her death. It speaks to how much she was loved, respected and admired.

The orphanage remained in operation. A March 7, 1961 article in the Daytona Beach Morning Journal notes that it was "the only licensed orphanage for Negro children in Florida." 

Mother Hunt's Orphanage eventually became the Sarah Hunt Methodist Children's Home. It merged with the Florida Methodist Children's Home in 1971. The two became the Florida United Methodist Children's Home, a longtime fixture on acreage near Lake Monroe in Enterprise. The Daytona Beach property later became part of Bethune-Cookman University. 

In 2011, a new structure at the Children's Home was named the Sarah Hunt Home. It's so fitting that her name lives on. A March 30, 2011 Daytona Beach News-Journal article covered the building's dedication. In the article, a Rev. Walter Monroe is quoted as saying Mother Hunt "tried to provide a haven and refuge for that [each] person to become whole again."

And perhaps, in doing so, Sarah Hunt also became whole, herself. 

Writers went solo on frontier

Learn more about the conference at this link:
https://www.catholicwritersguild.org/online-conference

I'm preparing to give a presentation at the Catholic Writers Guild Online Conference, Jan. 31-Feb. 2 (2025). During my research, I wondered whether writers gathered for professional meetings or conferences in Florida's pioneer days. Artists were known to flock together here. The art colony at Hotel Ponce de Leon in St. Augustine was famous during the Gilded Age.

All such gatherings in that age were in person, not virtual like the upcoming CWGO. If you're reading this before Jan. 31, 2025, there's still time to register for CWGO. It's a great conference and reasonably priced: $45 for Guild members; $65 for nonmembers. Presentations are Jan. 31, Feb. 1 and 2, and pitch sessions to publishers are Feb. 10-13. Learn more at https://www.catholicwritersguild.org/online-conference.

Back to the Gilded Age in Florida. I dove into one of my favorite research portals: old newspapers. And found few mentions of writers gathering for a conferences or meetings. I browsed newspapers from the 1890s to 1930. 

The lack of information was frustrating because Florida is famous for being a writer's haven. There's an entire book about it: The Book Lover's Guide to Florida. I have it; it's a fabulous look at authors who lived or wrote here, and the sites associated with them. Here's a link on Google Books. 

So, what did I discover about writing and Florida in the late 1800s and early 1900s? Well, St. Augustine did have a bookstore. The city's Tatler newspaper carried a notice in its Jan. 26, 1895, edition:

"A favorite haunt of book lovers is El Unico, the shop under the great arch of Hotel Cordova. ...All of the leading books are received as soon as issued, and every day one finds new volumes on the tables."

The scant mention of literary meetings concerned newspaper writers or out-of-state news. One example was a notice about British writer Rudyard Kipling resigning from the Society of Authors after being a member for 25 years. He disliked how the organization supported "charity books published in aid of the war." The war was World War I, as the notice appeared in the Daytona Daily News on April 14, 1917.

Members of the Alabama Press Association toured St. Augustine in January 1895 on a trip that included several other stops in Florida and in Cuba. The Tatler's coverage focused on places the members visited in the Oldest City and mentioned nothing about a conference or presentations. 

The only thing the gathering stirred up was gossip. A subsequent news item chided the city's Board of Trade for its conspicuous absence during the group's public welcome to the city. The power of print media was stronger back then. It was a time before the internet and even before TV and radio. Happily, the press association members said they had a great time in St. Augustine.

Writers were the ones who got the word out about Florida. Travel writers, authors, poets, novelists, essayists -- writers of all kinds and all levels of prestige - explored the state. The influx began in the mid-1800s and has never let up. But apparently in the early days, writers here didn't assemble for professional gatherings. They traveled here alone or with family or friends. It's almost hard for me to think about a time when writers conferences didn't exist. 

Writers gathered with other creative artists, 
as this 1912 issue of the Pensacola Journal
 tells readers.

Frontier writer interactions took place mainly on the personal or small-group level. Professional gatherings were worthy of newspaper mention. The Pensacola Journal in January 1912 let readers know that authors, poets, sculptors and musicians were assembled in Philadelphia for the annual meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. But Philly is a long way from Florida.

Some aspects of writing transcend both time and distance, however. A reader letter published in the March 1, 1893, edition of the Florida Agriculturist complained about the damage and misinformation "bad" writers can do. He? She? -- no name is given--was irked by a popular garden writer and speaker full of endless advice that many people followed. The letter writer visited the popular writer's plant nursery and found it to be a disappointing failure of wilted and dying flora.

Writers have always needed guidance. More reason to attend the CWCO! There's always something new to learn. Once you look at the list of presentations, I think you'll agree. Scroll to the bottom of this page to find links about presentations, presenters and pitch sessions: https://www.catholicwritersguild.org/online-conference

A look at pioneer landscape of Naples

Pioneer view of area that became Naples,
 Florida. This is a screengrab of a WCGU video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRBW-tuD79Q

The end of the calendar year is perfect for mentioning old habits. Mine is about newspapers. I still subscribe to the formerly family-owned paper where I worked for many years.

Today, the newspaper is part of the USA Today chain owned by Gannett. When I log in to the online version of the local paper, I can also see stories from throughout the chain's holdings. This morning a letter to the editor popped up from the Naples area, more than 200 miles from me. The writer was frustrated about overdevelopment and overcrowding and the resulting traffic jams.

Located on Florida's southwest coast, Naples is a picturesque city and one of the state's wealthiest areas. Yet it is plagued by overdevelopment like so much of Florida. A look at Naples today makes it hard to realize how remote the area once was.

It's funny that the newspaper letter appeared in front of me two days after I watched a YouTube video about the early days of Naples. What a contrast. 

For this short holiday season post, I leave you with that video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRBW-tuD79Q. You also can find the video and many others by going directly to the WCGU page on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@wgcu 

You'll see how the Naples area was developed in a resort-like manner almost from the start. It always fascinates me to see how settlements appeared in their early days. 

Thomas Merton's Florida connection

Fr. Frederic Dunne at his
election as abbot. Note his
motto at the top of the photo.
Photo is from the book,
The Less Traveled Road

The “small world” adage seems appropriate as I write this. How else to explain the link I found between the Florida frontier and one of the greatest spiritual writers of the 20th century?

That writer is Thomas Merton. The Florida link is Dom Frederic Dunne. He was the abbot at the Abbey of Gethsemani who accepted Merton into the Trappist monastery in 1941. That happened in Kentucky, a long way from Florida. But Fr. Dunne not only had roots in Florida, he had roots in a Catholic colony established in the Florida wilderness in the early 1880s. 

At Gethsemani, Dunne noticed Merton’s talent and encouraged him to write. I believe he ordered him under the monastic rule of obedience to continue writing even when Merton resisted. (If you’re not familiar with Merton, do a Google search and you’ll see just how impactful that order to write would be.)

Merton later acknowledged Dunne’s influence and impact on his writing. Over the years, Dunne also become a spiritual mentor and father figure for Merton. The two remained close until Dunne's death in 1948.

So who was this influential figure who spent part of his youth in the Florida wilderness? He was one of the 14 students who sat at the kitchen table of Catholic home-school pioneer Cecelia Morse in the frontier settlement of San Antonio in south central Florida. I wrote a post about Mrs. Morse and her school a few months ago: https://frontier-florida.blogspot.com/2024/07/home-school-mom-catholic-ed-pioneer.html.

The settlement was a Catholic colony established by Dunne’s uncle. The younger Dunne spent some of his formative years there, between the ages of 11 and 16. This included years when his own father worked away from home because jobs were scarce on the frontier. 

A spiritual memoir about Dunne shares some important background about his years in the tiny Florida community. The Less Traveled Road by Rev. M. Raymond was published in 1953. Raymond was a monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani and he knew both Merton and Dunne

In his book, Raymond draws parallels between the silence and solitude Dunne experienced in the wilderness environment and the silence and solitude he found at the Trappist monastery. Raymond also notes how the hardships of frontier life laid a foundation for the austerity of monastery life. 

Raymond drew on firsthand reminiscences of one of Dunne’s sisters about the family’s life in Florida - and just how solitary it was. For example, it took a week to travel to and from Tampa, a distance of 32 miles. The Catholic colony was also 45 miles from the nearest railroad. 

Dunne attended Mrs. Morse’s frontier homeschool for about four years before starting carpentry work to help support his family. Raymond believes the teacher gave Dunne’s intellect a solid formation. Dunne himself credited Mrs. Morse, his brothers, his older sister Katherine - who helped raised him after their mother died — and his uncle, colony founder Capt. Hugh Dunne, with providing guidance in the years when his father lived and worked many miles from home.

Another frontier influence was the establishment of a Benedictine monastery in the colony. Dunne gained firsthand knowledge about religious life in a place far removed from centers of Catholicism and centers of society. 

All those experiences helped shaped the abbot that Dunne was to become. He entered Gethsemani in 1894 and became abbot in 1935.

Dunne became renowned not just for guiding Merton, but also for the expansion he oversaw at Gethsemani in his years as prior and abbot. Yet by all accounts he remained humble, hard-working, down-to-earth, astute and intuitive. He’s a man I would have liked to know. 

Frederic Dunne as a
young man. Photo is from
The Less Traveled Road.

Quilt revival had Florida flair

The Palm Beach Post published
this quilt pattern in 1933.

Funny how lifestyle trends come and go. That applies to quiltmaking as much as to anything else. 

On  Feb. 14, 1928, the Miami Herald ran an article that noted "old fashioned quilts are coming back into vogue." Specialty stores were said to carry patchwork and bed covers common in "grandmothers' day." If you figure roughly 20 years per generation, then grandmothers' day would have been 40 or more years previous - the 1880s. 

The trend rippled across the country, not just in Miami. The Florida version included a tropical twist. The May 3, 1929, issue of the Miami Herald featured a column offering home decorating advice specific to the region's climate. The column by Grace Norman Tuttle recommended homemakers use family heirloom quilts as substitutes for then-popular Oriental wall hangings. 

The quilts were considered "mural decorations." In one Miami home, a quilt was attached to the wall behind a bed and served as a type of wall-decor headboard. The effect must have been dramatic, because the top of the quilt was placed where the wall met the ceiling. The quilts used in the featured home were family heirloom pieces. 

The Herald and other Florida newspapers also featured quilt patterns for sale on a regular basis, for people who wanted to create new quilts. This, too, was a national trend. Newspapers all over the country pounced on the popularity of the quilt revival and offered patterns. Readers would mail a few cents or a dollar and in return would receive a pattern or several patterns for making the featured items. 

One of my favorites was printed in the Dec. 27, 1933, edition of the Palm Beach Post. It's perfectly Floridian: it's based on palm leaves. The newspaper writer called Palm Pattern No. 469 as "a striking quilt pattern." I agree. You can see it in the photo at the top of this post.

The writer stated that the palm is a symbol of victory and a longtime decorative emblem. Perhaps that antiquity explains why the pattern that looks so Floridian is attributed to an unknown quiltmaker "of generations ago." 

An aside: I checked Barbara Brackman's BlockBase Plus database to see what I could find about the palm leaf pattern. She lists four published names for this pattern, with the earliest dating to 1922. It could have been an older pattern, just one that had been unpublished until then.

To get the pattern and instructions, a reader had to send 10 cents to the Palm Beach Post's Needlecraft Department. Which was, inexplicably, in New York City. Or maybe not inexplicably. Requests for patterns offered by newspapers nationwide probably funneled into a few clearinghouses. 

But I'm sold on the Florida look of this one. The pattern was said to be especially lovely when made with a green print on a white background. The quilt was supposed to be simple to make. I'm skeptical. Bias edges and multiple matching seam points don't make for a simple quilt. But quiltmakers generally don't back down from a sewing challenge. I'm game.

Truth in advertising

Market gardening was grueling work in frontier
Florida. These19th century homesteaders
are harvesting cucumbers.

The destruction wrought by Hurricane Helene reminds me life in Florida can be challenging. My neighborhood was spared this time, but who knows what the future holds.

Florida frontier life was always challenging. Hurricanes were one obstacle among many. Newcomers learned the hard way. Many had been lured to Florida by promotional material that emphasized and exaggerated the state's potential.

That resulted in some seriously annoyed transplants. "Most of the market gardening in Florida, so far as we know it, cannot but prove disastrous," was the verdict of three Vermont brothers after a few years here in the early 1870s. 

They blamed the false promises fed to them before arrival. "Land agents and visionaries hold forth that great crops may be expected from insignificant outlays; and so they decoy the credulous to their ruin."

Those are sharp words. More surprising is that they appear in an 1873 book written specifically for new settlers in post-Civil War Florida. 

As usual for that era, the book has a weighty title: The Florida Settler, or Immigrants' Guide, A Complete Manual of Information Concerning the Climate, Soil, Products and Resources of The State. The contents were compiled by D. Eagen, commissioner of Lands and Immigration.

Eagen reached out to Florida locals and asked them to submit reports on their counties. They replied with specifics about climate, crops, terrain, industries, wages, transportation, economic outlooks and occasional descriptions of a town's business district. (Zero mention of domestic details that so interest me.)

As expected, positive aspects are highlighted. Some go beyond that, though. The correspondent from Madison County wrote that "Florida is in need of an energetic, thorough-going, stirring, enterprising, industrious class of men. The late unhappy and unfortunate civic strife seems to have dwarfed our energies, and as of yet we have been unable to shake off our lethargy or gain anything like our former vigor."

The "civic strife" was, of course, the Civil War. It had ended a mere eight years before the book was published. 

The Vermont brothers were among early post-war newcomers, as they were already planting in 1870. They bought 275 acres near Mandarin for $275. That's about $5,300 today. They - and/or their hired workers - cleared 35 acres for planting.

Mrs. H.B. Stowe recounted their agricultural experimentation in a Christian Union article reprinted in the 1873 book. I'm guessing Mrs. Stowe was Harriet Beecher Stowe, who owned a home in Mandarin.

Despite the brothers' harsh words, in the end they said their best market crops were "handsomely remunerative." That was after a lot of trial and error. They discovered the need for ample fertilization the hard way. They also learned what crops to plant and when to plant them.

Among the challenges they faced during their first three years:

• Cabbage seeds sowed in sandy soil without manure resulted in weak plants beaten down by rain. Entire crop was lost.
• Three acres of cabbage were half ruined by a Christmas frost.
• Four acres of cucumbers planted in "new, hard, sour land" produced a "wretched crop." 
• A hailstorm prematurely spoiled what had been the following year's otherwise good crop of cucumbers.
• Tomato plants were lost to rain, wet land and insufficient fertilizer. A heavy rain also  helped ruin the next year's crop.
• A Christmas freeze killed half an acre of blooming pea plants.

The Vermont natives improved cultivation methods each year. By the fourth year they saw a decent return on their investment. But they warned potential newcomers that growing good market crops required intense cultivation. They said market gardeners would spend as much on manure for one acre as they would to buy 100 acres of new land. 

That's real advice, the kind any potential settler in the 19th century would appreciate. Today's newcomers, not so much. For them, I recommend taking a good look at topographical maps before buying any house or land in Florida. Get acquainted with the flood plain and stay away from lowlands. Don't build on the waterfront. And evacuate when told to do so.

Society columns: social media of 1920s

A January 1925 edition of The Palm
Beach Post was filled with society
news and advertisements like this.
(Source: newspapers.com)

We seem to live in a weird version of the Roaring Twenties of a century ago. Everything is frenzied and fast-paced. Development races along. The famous and super-rich party on. Social media influencers drool over it all.

I wanted to learn how upscale folks partied during the wild times of the 1920s. And learn how newspaper society columnists - the social media influencers of their day - wrote about the celebrities of that era.

Where else to look in pioneer Florida but Palm Beach. It was as famous then as now for money and status. But only during the season, generally January to March.

The January 18, 1925 issue of The Palm Beach Post gushes about the winter season. And I mean gushes. Social-media influencers today have nothing on those old-time newspaper society writers.

Breathy articles about people and places are interspersed with numerous large ads for housing and hotel developments. It was the high times of the1920s Florida Boom. There was so much to write about and advertise that the newspaper edition had 66 pages that day.

Let's turn to the glee sprinkled through that edition's society pages. It'll give you an idea what the rich and famous of 1920s Florida did in world that was spinning quickly and crazily. Much like ours is today.

The hyperbole is all there in print. All I did is quote it and add my occasional note. Enjoy!

• "The Royal Poinciana welcomed many additional guests yesterday and everyone was on the qui vive to see the register and note who had come and who was with them and so on."
•  I had to look it up: qui vive means "on the alert or lookout."
• "All records for the opening of the Coconut Grove, the dear old Coconut Grove, beloved of Palm Beach and world famed as its greatest attraction, were absolutely smashed yesterday. ...before the first bar of music was heard the Coconut Grove was like a great garden full of fluttering, vari-colored flowers, and all Palm Beach in gala array had filed through ..."
• "Mrs. Mc_ was looking very charming in a petunia printed silk frock with a small cloche to match; Mrs. M_ was a symphony in sky blue; Miss W_ was a poem in rose ..."
•  I omitted their full names.
• "Whitehall welcomed for the season today Mr. and Mrs. R_ of Chicago, who will spend the entire season here and are known to all the smart colony here."
• People didn't just visit Palm Beach. Members of the elite social circle considered themselves a colony.
• "One hardly knows where to begin in the chronicle of the day's events at The Breakers yesterday, for so many celebrities appeared upon the scene that it is difficult to know to whom to give this place of honor."
• The honor went to author Ring W. Lardner, responsible for penning "the most delightful description of Palm Beach and its hectic life that has ever found its way into print." I'll have to go seek out his book. BTW, I never heard of him or any of the other celebrities mentioned in that article.
• "Dr. Bertha Scher, whose wonderful work in restoring youthful contours to face and neck ... has brought her a large clientele of society women in New York, Virginia, Hot Springs and Hollywood, Cal., where she has lately achieved a great success among motion picture stars... Many in Palm Beach are now availing themselves of Dr. Scher's treatments which remove ravages of sun, wind and sea..." 
• Hard to think of a time when Hollywood needed a state identifier, even in that silent-movie era.
• "The beautiful rooms (at Whitehall) made a perfect background for the rare jewels and lovely gowns of the women and everyone was quite lost in admiration upon entering the rooms of the superb collections of canvases, an exhibition of rare distinction and beauty."
• This was about an art exhibit at Whitehall, where the "great foyer made a wonderful promenade and the patio with its roof of star-pierced sky and" (many other superlatives) "combined to make the whole scene one of such rare loveliness that everyone was entranced..."

Where were the editors?!

I skipped the abhorrent (to me) enthusiasm for an upscale retail furrier business that opened a shop for the season at one of the hotels. And I couldn't help but note that entitled people act the same no matter what the year. One day, a woman and her daughter staying at The Everglades Club informed management at 11 o'clock in the morning to prepare for the daughter's exclusive wedding - that was to take place that morning!

"... in a limited time," the newspaper columnist wrote, "the drawing room was transformed into a bower of beauty, with white roses, calla lilies and lilies of the valley with a wreath of ferns and greenery."  After a wedding breakfast, the lovely couple motored off in a Pierce-Arrow limousine for their honeymoon in Miami and Cuba.

The fun and festivities faded in Florida by the end of 1926. Bank crashes and hurricanes shut down the state's boom long before 1929's Black Friday struck the entire nation. 

By 1933, height of the Great Depression nationwide, the Palm Beach Post's Jan. 22, 1933, Sunday paper had only 16 pages. Advertisers had vanished along with the yacht owners and jet-setters (actually, railroad-setters, ha ha) who formerly spent the winter season seeing and being seen. Society writers devoted column inches to dressmaking patterns.

And I can't help but remember that history repeats itself.