Building the Florida dream

Aerial image of early Deltona

I'm expanding the parameters of my blog today. The 1960s in Florida pretty much seem like pioneer history at this point. 

OK, I know, it's a bit far-fetched to write about the 1960s when I describe the blog as having a late 1800s-early 1900s focus. But Florida still wasn't heavily developed in the early 1960s.

One of the most interesting aspects of that decade is the way planned communities took hold in the state. One of the companies that led the movement was the family-owned Mackle Company.

I recalled their influence when my hubby found an amazing 1960s video in which one of the Mackle brothers spoke at length about the company's many initiatives in the state. The video seems to have been filmed in the late 1960s or possibly early 1970s.

Mackle mega-developments have taken some rap over the years. But on this video you'll hear some prescient comments. Frank E. Mackle Jr. predicted water as the resource needing the most careful shepherding. He spoke about the need for what we today call greenbelts and about how the Mackles included parks in their planned communities. 

The Mackles' Florida communities were launched more than half a century ago and today are some of the state's large cities. The one I'm most familiar with is Deltona, as I live near there. The photo with this blog post shows the community when construction was in full boom, in the late 1960s. The empty land at top right helps illustrate the before-and-after. 

Today, Deltona is a city of more than 90,000 residents. It's the most-populous city in the county I live in. My city of residence, founded more than a century earlier in the 1870s, has about 35,000 residents.

The other Mackle communities across the state also mushroomed - Spring Hill, Marco Island and others. Marco Island was the upscale one, but the others offered truly affordable housing.

In the early 1960s, a one-bedroom house with lot included cost just under $7,000 in Deltona. That comes in at about $79,000 in today's dollars. Today's tiny houses in planned communities tend to start somewhere in the $300,000s.

The Mackle-built communities faced growing pains, as you can read in a 1985 Orlando Sentinel* article. But they continued growing. The Mackles did a lot of advertising and public relations, and people responded.

The company even displayed one of their Florida houses at the 1964 World's Fair in New York. I remember. I saw it and walked through it. My eight-year-old self was mightily impressed. Didn't known at the time it was a Mackle house in Deltona. I only saw a bright, airy depiction of the Florida dream. 

That dream is still bringing people today.

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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.

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

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/