Bone garden represented dignity

This photo of Aggie Jones in her bone yard is
from about 1908. (Credit: Florida Memory)

If I were one of those celebrity or political billionaires who toss around their money, I'd buy people DNA tests so they could trace their ancestry.

DNA results allow testers to understand some of their own behaviors and preferences and to feel pride in being part of a tribe. At least that's how DNA results make me feel.

DNA tests didn't exist at the turn of the 20th century, when a woman named Aggie Jones presided over one of the most popular locations in Lake City in north Florida. There, she was known as Aunt Aggie. Elderly African-Americans were often called aunt and uncle in the Old South. Not sure why. 

Aggie was a former slave who was part Seminole and part African-American. She created a bone-garden landscape that made her famous. She collected and arranged animal bones in artistic, structured patterns that caused people to marvel. Shrubs, vines, and flowers grew in and among the bones. Aggie also grew vegetables and sold the produce. She gave away bouquets in hopes of receiving tips from visitors.

Tourists and locals apparently wandered the garden at will, relaxed in chairs Aggie had set up, and took photos of one another as one does at tourist attractions. Local youth borrowed or rented bones to use on Halloween. Aggie's bone yard was a topic of talk near and far. 

Aggie was a fortune-teller and she also had a museum of sorts within her house. I had the impression people dropped by as they saw fit, not even trying to set up an appointment. It was like Aggie's house and garden existed for others to enjoy at will. She was always a gracious hostess. But did she have a choice?

I learned about Aggie and her garden in May Vinzant Perkins' 15-page book, Aunt Aggie's Bone Yard: A Historic Old Garden in Lake City, Florida. Perkins was a poet and gardener in Lake City. She appears to have written her book in 1952 but the material refers to the early 1900s. Aggie was in her 90s when she died in 1918. 

You can read the entire book online via the link attached to the title. More information is available in a 2003 Orlando Sentinel newspaper interview with one of Aggie's descendants. The article is also available online: "Search for Family Roots Leads to Special Garden."

What made me start this post with a DNA comment was an article I read recently in a history/archaeology magazine that I have now misplaced, to my great annoyance. The article discussed archaeological finds in an ancient settlement in - to the best of my recollection - Nubia, which is the modern-day Sudan region. 

Unearthed among other findings were animal bones aggregated in a way that reminded me of Aggie's collection of bones. They seemed to have been arranged in what might have been a structured pattern, as Aggie's were.

I wondered if Aggie were descended from the Nubians. And if so, if she retained a cultural consciousness about her heritage. I wondered if the voices of her ancestors stayed with her in some way. Or if homeland traditions were handed down orally, from elder to child. And I wondered if she also learned traditions associated with her Seminole heritage.

I have no answers, just a vivid imagination. But I'd like to think the answers are yes. Such self-knowledge would have given Aggie agency, dignity, and identity. Those strengths were normally hard to come by for a former slave at that time and place.

Today, a DNA test could trace the threads between Aggie and her heritage. She didn't have that option. But even long before such validation was possible, Aggie was strong enough to carve out a distinct identity. And it was very much at variance with the cultural norms that surrounded her. She and her story deserve to be remembered.

POSTSCRIPT: On a side note, I'd like to share this photo of a beautiful quilt of Aggie, created by artist Teddy Pruitt. Click on the photo to be taken to the artist's website, which shows a larger image.

Progress steamrolled sacred grounds

This was photographed at an abandoned cemetery
in Charlotte County. Efforts were made to clean up
the burial ground about 10 years ago.
(Photo credit: Jeremy, Waymarking website)

Cemeteries are on my mind. For two reasons. One, I am helping my elderly father through his final days. In the not-too-distant future, I'll stand at the New York burial site he purchased some 50 years ago. I'll watch as he and my deceased mother's cremains are put to rest next to a baby they buried decades ago.

At least I know where my long-gone brother's grave is. And where my parents are to be buried. And what the family tombstone looks like and what names and dates will be added to it. Finally, I'll have the peace of knowing my loved ones will rest undisturbed in a long-established Catholic cemetery.

That's not the case with lost and/or forgotten African-American cemeteries in Florida. It seems every week I hear another news report about the discovery of a lost cemetery. We're not talking isolated resting grounds hidden in overgrown woods. I'm hearing disturbing reports of established cemeteries that were paved over during the first half of the 20th century. Roads, stores, houses, you name it, were built atop what should have been protected sacred ground.

Such wanton disregard is hard for me to understand. These aren't isolated cases.There are numerous videos in  Tampa news station 10 News WTSP's YouTube playlist "Erased: Tampa Bay's Forgotten Cemteries." 

The videos focus on several cemeteries in the Tampa area. Closer to my part of Central Florida, there was news a few years ago about an African-American cemetery split from its community - and subsequently forgotten - when Interstate 4 came through Lake Helen.

Another nearby abandoned cemetery is associated with a late 19th-early 20th century African-American community named Garfield. The settlement of Garfield was founded by ex-slaves after the Civil War. The land was lost to back taxes during the Depression and pre-World War II years. Today, what used to be Garfield - and its cemetery - are swallowed by the city of Deltona.

The Garfield cemetery was briefly in the news 15 or  20 years ago, when someone stumbled across its location. I haven't heard a thing since then. The city of Deltona apparently did an archaeological survey. It, too, was buried. I tried to read it over a decade ago, but the city never responded to my request to see the document.

In another local case, a forgotten potter's field was rediscovered during construction of a hospital expansion in DeLand. Only a few old-timers remembered the site had been the burial place for people who had died indigent and/or unclaimed.

These local cases, plus what's being uncovered in Tampa, plus others I've read about, are chilling signs of a disheartening disrespect that likely infected much of Florida in the past century. May all the deceased and the sacred grounds they rest in once again regain their dignity.

---

Click here or on the photo below to go to a YouTube playlist about lost cemeteries in the Tampa Bay area:

Mystery photographer revealed

A brief biography of R.A. Twine is featured
 in the Saint Augustine Historical Society journal
El Escribano 2016, published in 2018.
One of Twine's photos is on the cover.

Back in 2017, I  wrote about African-American Catholic photographer Richard Aloysius Twine after discovering his amazing 1920s photographs in Florida Memory's online Twine Collection (which in 2022 no longer seems to exist).

The sharply dressed young man visually catalogued residents of St. Augustine's Lincolnville neighborhood in the early 20th century. He  photographed portraits, groups, community gatherings, and class outings and other scenes revolving around St. Benedict the Moor Catholic Church and School life.

I wrote a two-part post: the first about Twine and the second about St. Benedict the Moor School, which Twine attended. But information about Twine was sparse. I wanted to know more about the photographer and his later years. Did he move away? Die young? I even titled the first part of the post "Gifted Photographer a Mystery Man."

Imagine my delight, then, when I received Volume 53 of El Escribano, The St. Augustine Journal of History, in 2018. The entire issue is devoted to the photography of Twine and his near contemporaries, Hugo and Earnest Meyer.

First, I'm happy to say Twine didn't die young. He moved north, as did many people of color in that era, but he also moved farther south.

Richard Aloysius Twine 

Thanks to a brief biography about Twine in Volume 53 of El Escribano, I'm now able to share more details. The bio was written by Dr. Patricia Griffin and Diana Selsor Edwards, with editing by Robert Nawrocki. I recommend you find this issue of the journal if possible and read the entire thing and enjoy the photographs reprinted in it. 

The issue is titled El Escribano 2016 but it was published in 2018. One of Twine's portraits, depicting a young woman, is featured on the cover. The journal is a project of the Saint Augustine Historical Society. Contact the historical society's Research Library to learn where you can access a copy.

Here, from the biography, are some excerpts and points of interest about Twine's life:

• He was born in St. Augustine in 1896 to former slave David Twine, who fought for the Union in the Civil War, and Harriett Bronson Twine, believed to have also been a former slave.
• Many family members were devout Catholics. 
• Twine moved to New York in 1916 but returned to St. Augustine about five years later and opened a photography studio.
• Twine was interested in filmmaking, and also was a playwright who staged theatricals with like-minded friends at St. Benedict the Moor Church.
• He operated his St. Augustine photography studio for only a handful of years - less than five. Several family members had scattered, and he followed some of his siblings to Miami, where they had opened a restaurant.
• The Great Depression ended Twine's photography, film, and theater dreams. He spent his later working years managing a hotel and boarding house.
• He never married.
• Twine died in Miami in 1974. He was 78. He's buried in San Lorenzo cemetery in St. Augustine.

I can't find a better tribute than this one written in the biography: "Richard Twine's public legacy is enduring in his Lincolnville photographs." His images offer viewers "... an intimate sense of people whose lives would otherwise have been lost to recorded history." (Page 11). 

So true. The photos and the biography do even more, though, in my opinion. They give us a glimpse into the man who was Richard Aloysius Twine, who also would have been lost to history. And they leave me, again, wanting to know more.

---

Read the related 2017 posts: Part 1 and Part 2

Hardly perfect

Detail of the cover of the 2006 El Scribano.

I didn't want to write this post. So I delayed, and delayed, and procrastinated some more.

Why? Because I like to write about the strengths of the pioneer Catholic community in Florida. Not its weaknesses.

But the Holy Spirit prodded me to post. Humans are flawed. Amid the many people trying to do right in pioneer Florida, some did wrong. Possibly, they didn't realize it. One can hope. But just as we stumble along on our paths today, so did the Catholics establishing a foothold for the faith in Florida. They, like us, hopefully realize(d) faults and make/made amends.

In this case, the positive is that the Church and its representatives in Florida educated children of color in an era when it wasn't popular and when laws made it difficult. The negative is that within that educational system, some people engaged in racist behavior. 

That truth emerged from recollections written by a former pupil of St. Benedict the Moor Catholic School in St. Augustine. They are published in the 2006 issue of El Scribano, the St. Augustine Journal of History.

I wrote about the St. Benedict the Moor school in this blog in March 2017. I particularly noted how three religious sisters were jailed in 1916 because they were white women teaching children of color. The memoir in El Scribano focuses on a slightly later time period -- the late 1920s and early 1930s. The article's author, Barbara Vickers, was born in 1923 and attended St. Benedict school from kindergarten through eighth grade.

The overall article is about family and neighborhood life in the St. Augustine community of Lincolnville, with school a part of it. Some elements are familiar to Catholic schoolchildren everywhere and in every era: "The sisters stressed catechism, multiplication tables, and literature, and they were very stern." I remember as much from my years of Catholic school.

Other aspects, however, were worlds apart. Listen to what else Vickers writes: "Items discarded from the white Catholic school, St. Joseph's Academy, were considered good enough for black children." That included desks and schoolbooks, which were about three years behind, "but sold to black students nonetheless."

Part of me rises to defend those early religious sisters. I imagine their funds were severely restricted. Vickers writes how the sisters would varnish the old desks before sending them to St. Benedict's. But there's no excusing some things. Vickers remembers that only light-skinned children of color were chosen to crown a statue of the Blessed Mother each May. And that a choir teacher, a Sister St. Matthew, told Vickers that "all colored people can sing," when the young pupil tried to explain that she couldn't carry a tune.

Vickers doesn't write with bitterness. She includes details about happy times, in fact, the memoir is more positive than negative. She tells how everyone in the community crowded into the school yard to decorate floats for the Emancipation Day parade each year. And she remembers that: "It was always a pleasure to attend the nine o'clock mass at St. Benedict's and see the sunlight coming in from my favorite stained glass window..."  Her grandmother and great-aunts had donated the window in memory of their mother. 

In its contributor notes, El Scribano lists Vickers as having been a "vocal leader in the town's civil rights movement." I don't know if she is still alive, but I thank her for penning her remembrances of school years. I like to think at least some of the sisters were free of prejudice, but I have to accept that some weren't. As with all history, we have to know of past wrongs in order to learn from them.

School site echoes vibrant past

Does this building still stand? This is
 a 2011 image of St. Benedict the Moor
School. (Credit: Google Street View)

Second of two parts

Six years is a long time in our age of instant communications. The turn-of-the-20th-century building at the core of today's post might not exist anymore. I can't find photos of St. Benedict the Moor School newer than a 2011 Google Street View, pictured first in this post. That's an ominous sign, for the school's history is rich. The physical remainder, as you can see, is in dire shape.

Built in 1898, St. Benedict school was "one of the first all-black Catholic schools in Florida," according to a 2014 article in the St. Augustine Record. The St. Benedict parish in St. Augustine's Lincolnville neighborhood was founded in the 1870s, during Reconstruction. St. Benedict's Church was built in the early 1900s. It's been restored and appears vibrant again. 

A few web resources linked in this post document the church and school history. As always, for me, the social history leaps out. Such as the time three Catholic nuns were arrested in 1916 because they were white women teaching black schoolchildren. Jim Crow laws forbade such interaction during segregation years in Florida (and probably in other states).

As a Catholic-owned educational institution, St. Benedict's was a private school. A judge ruled the law didn't apply to private schools, and the nuns were released. Their names deserve mention, though: Sisters Mary Thomasine, Scholastica and Beningus, according to the St. Augustine Record article. That news story also notes the arrests occurred on an Easter Sunday.

St. Benedict's students ride in a school float decorated
for an Emancipation Day parade in the 1920s.
(Credit: State Archives of Florida/Twine)

The information about the nuns is listed in various websites and on a historical marker erected on the grounds of the church complex. Photos of the marker are below.

Lesser known are the photos by African-American Richard Twine, a photographer who's the subject of Part One of this post. He photographed St. Benedict class pictures, church gatherings and even the school's float in an Emancipation  Day parade in the 1920s. The images bring to life the human side of one of the decades when St. Benedict School thrived. The Twine collection may be viewed on the Florida Memory website.

The school closed in the 1960s, some 70 years after it was built with money from philanthropist and Catholic nun St. Katharine Drexel. Restoration efforts started, but stalled. In 2004, the school was considered one of St. Augustine's most threatened historic places. I wonder if restoration remains a goal. I sure hope so.

Credit: These closeup views of the
Black Catholic Heritage historical marker
 are from a gallery on waymarking.com

Gifted photographer a mystery man

Photographer Richard A. Twine self-portrait.
(Credit: State Archives of Florida/Twine)

July 2019 update:
Mystery photographer revealed

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Original 2017 post:

First of two parts

Funny how threads of interest travel online. Last week, I saw a Facebook post by Florida's Bureau of Library Development. It linked to a page on the State Archives of Florida's Florida Memory website. The trail was worth following. It led to an African-American photographer named Richard Aloysius Twine.

I can't link to a Wikipedia page about Twine, because one doesn't exist. I hope to rectify that by creating a page for him as part of a retirement project. He deserves wider recognition for the visual record he made of the African-American community of Lincolnville in St. Augustine. Between 1922 and 1927 he created more than 100 images of Lincolnville people, places and events.

Twine's images are preserved at the St. Augustine Historical Society and are (2022 update: were) showcased online at Florida Memory. That website provides the only biographical detail I could find about Twine. He was born in 1896 and was a professional photographer, at least during the 1920s. He was in his 20s when he documented community life.

What the brief bio doesn't say, but what I infer from the photos, is that Twine was Catholic or was close to the Catholic community in Lincolnville. A number of his pictures depict St. Benedict the Moor church, churchgoers and schoolchildren. St. Benedict the Moor was the first African-American parish in the St. Augustine diocese, according to a 2014 article in the St. Augustine Record. Part Two of this blog post looks more closely at the church and school.

Ninety-six of Twine's photos can be viewed online. (2022 update: The site no longer exists.) One of my favorites is "The 'Catholic Crowd' After Church." Twine - looking quite dapper - is seated in the middle of the photo, and is surrounded by women wearing their Sunday best. The image preserves a slice of life from a long-ago Sunday.

I looked at every one of the photos. Each draws the viewer in for a closer look. Each leaves the viewer with a better understanding of a place and people at a certain point in time. A sensitive and gifted man was behind the camera. I wonder what happened to him. Did he stop taking photos? If so, why? Did he move away? Embark on a different career? The photos are silent.

'The 'Catholic Crowd' After Church" by Richard A. Twine.
He's seated at center.
(Credit: State Archives of Florida/Twine)

Part 2 of the original 2017 post is about St. Benedict the Moor Catholic School.

Looking for hidden histories

Aunt Lizzie - no other name given- was a cook at
DeBary Hall. This photo is on page 104 of the book
 Saga of Baron Frederick de Bary & de Bary Hall

There is a hashtag going around in Twitter that says #BlackHistoryYouDidntLearnInSchool. I think there ought to be another one that says "black history you didn't learn enough about." To me, that includes recollections about daily and community life in pioneer black communities as told via personal journals, histories, letters, books, and interviews.

I'm not talking about famous Blacks and highly documented communities such as Zora Neale Hurston's Eatonville. I mean the everyday people who come and go through life, contributing much to the wider cultural fabric and then fading from history.

Much of what I've turned up about everyday 19th century Black life in Florida is filtered through the histories of the dominant culture. We may learn that such-and-such a person worked for so-and-so, but we don't know what that person did when they went home. 

For example, the 1968 Saga of Baron Frederick de Bary & de Bary Hall, Florida (Convention Press) includes photos of " 'Aunt Lizzie,' who cooked the 4:30 a.m. breakfasts" (104); Bryson, who was Baron DeBary's valet; and Anthony, "who used to walk four miles to and from DeBary Hall each day" (105).

Couldn't someone at DeBary Hall have provided Anthony with a mule or horse and cart? What was Lizzie's last name? Did she also walk to work, likely in the middle of the night? Who cooked for her family? Were any of these employees residents of the nearby community of Garfield, settled by the formerly enslaved? How much did they earn? Silence echoes where there should be answers. These pioneers are deprived of even their full names.

I give Saga author Edith G. Brooks credit for including photos of these early Florida residents in her book. And for at least sharing a glimpse of what life was like for them as employees. 

In a word: hard. 

During hunting season, Lizzie was always at her post when most people were asleep. She turned out breakfasts of grits, broiled game or birds such as quail, and griddle cakes, and had them ready by 4:30 in the morning for the hunters. 

In a side note, Edith writes that the children loved Lizzie, who would tell them "endless and fascinating stories" (30) while smoking her pipe. How I wish we knew some of those stories.

Joseph Branham, born in the 1870s, was interviewed when
 he was 92.  This photo is on page 113 of Saga.

Anthony cleaned guns, polished boots, skinned game, and always arrived at work with a lantern. That's because he wouldn't go home "until all the family were in bed" (31). Yet he'd be back on the job in time to light the fires for those early-morning breakfasts.

If Anthony walked four miles daily, that means he lived about two miles from DeBary Hall. He must have been home each night just long enough to grab a few hours of sleep. 

We learn a little bit more about a worker named Joseph Branham, because Edith interviewed him in 1967 when he was 92. That means he was born about 1875. 

Joseph talked of how much he enjoyed "tending the high-stepping horses owned by both Frederick and Adolphe" (65). Frederick was the "Baron" who built DeBary Hall, and Adolphe was his son. Joseph primarily drove Adolphe's mule cart. 

Equally interesting to me is that we find out what Joseph did after decades of work at DeBary Hall: He retired to a small farm, where he "grew fruits and vegetables and sold them at his roadside stand" (65).

Florida was segregated during all of Joseph's working years. His older predecessors worked at DeBary Hall during Reconstruction and the subsequent era of increasingly discriminatory regulations. Life wasn't easy for any Florida pioneer. For some, the burdens were even heavier.

DeBary Hall Historic Site is open to visitors.

Faith, stronger than greed

Historic St. Paul's AME Church building of Garfield may
be part of this Iglesia Cristiana de Deltona church complex.
Source: Google Images

I tend to favor historical tidbits that showcase tolerance, acceptance, and understanding among people struggling to settle a frontier. They're hard to find in the history of the lost African-American community of Garfield. 

Hard, because many Garfield homesteads were lost due to back tax issues in the first half of the 20th century. The seized land was later sold to the corporation that created Deltona, now the largest city in Volusia County.

A group of formerly enslaved people settled Garfield after the Civil War. I once saw one of the Homestead Act documents that granted 88 acres to a Washington Ferguson in 1888 "to have and to hold, he and his heirs forever."*

Forever lasted until the Great Depression in the segregated South, when descendants of the original owners starting having trouble meeting tax bills. In the 1980s, a then-elderly former Garfield resident told me the land was lost at tax sales in the 1930s and 1940s. 

He and about 60 other descendants of the original homesteaders were later taken to court in order to clear title to the land, so it could be sold to developers. Sad story, to be sure. 

The glimmer of light, if there is one, is in how the tight-knit faith community of Garfield held together even after the neighborhood fragmented. 

They had organized a church in 1880, according to WPA records online at Florida Memory.  In 1887, Arthur Benson of Brooklyn, N.Y., sold two acres of land for $1 or $2 to some of the original settlers of Garfield, including a man named July Jenkins. The land was near a pond that still bears the name Jenkins Pond. 

The  property was to be used for religious and educational purposes by members of the local African Methodist Episcopal Church.

But by the 1940s, community members had lost their land and many had scattered. No one lived near the church anymore. Trustees worried about fire threats to the now-aged building. So in 1948 they moved the small wood-frame structure, board by board, to a parcel they bought for $112 on Lakeshore Drive. 

Worship continued for decades there, long after Garfield ceased to exist. The St. Paul AME Church members had praised God for 100 years by the time I met the last-surviving church trustee, Robert Poole, in 1989. The congregation that once numbered about 200 had dwindled to nothing. He worried about what would happen to the historic building after he died. 

Another faith community stepped in. Within a few years, the building housed an active, Spanish-speaking Christian congregation, Iglesia Cristiana de Deltona. And, as far as I can tell from Google Images, the church's complex still incorporates the original Garfield church structure - allowing the spirit of Garfield to live on.

In the early 2000s, Garfield was in the news** when the church's original cemetery was rediscovered. I haven't heard anything in recent years about next steps, and the Internet turns up only the original stories. 

I close with a question that nags at me, a non-attorney. Church property isn't taxed. So how could it be lost to back taxes? Doesn't the original church site, that sliver of the larger parcel sold for a couple of dollars to five Garfield settlers in 1887, still belong to their descendants or to the church conference? 

Just a thought.

*Note about the quoted item in the second paragraph: The source is a 1989 article I wrote for the Daytona Beach News-Journal. It appeared in the newspaper's western Volusia regional edition called The Volusian. 

**This GenWeb item includes text from one of the news articles: http://www.africanaheritage.com/uploads/256/GarfieldSettlementCemeteryfromBilluploaded.txt. And this archived Orlando Sentinel article explains how a property owner discovered land he'd just purchased contained part of the Garfield cemetery: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2001/04/26/long-lost-graveyard-foils-deltona-dream-2/