Digging up the past

Shards give tantalizing glimpse of life on
Tick Island. Photo credit and copyright:
Florida Museum of Natural History

Last month, I wrote about historical facts surrounding the life of the heroine of my new novel, Growing A Family in Persimmon Hollow. This month, I do the same for the hero.

He's an archaeologist who's fascinated by the pre-Columbian history of the novel's Central Florida setting. True enough. The time and place intrigued scholars and amateurs in the late 1800s. But I had to stretch historical truth. The hero is the son of Italian immigrant parents who own a produce market in the Northeast. It's doubtful such a person would ever have breached the academic firewalls of the era's Ivy League.

In the novel, he's mentored by an eccentric, now-retired professor unusually free of the biases found in elite academia at the time. And the hero reached college only because a teaching sister in Catholic parochial school noticed and nurtured his intelligence.

Such individual attention in elementary school also would have been hard to come by in reality. Both my parents were the children of immigrants in the early 20th century. There were 30 to 40 children to a classroom. Many raced home after school to help their parents so the family could survive. My father did manage to get a college education, but he did so by attending night classes at a Catholic college while working full time during the day. He chose a business major that would lead to a staid career. I suspect he would rather have been an artist. It became a hobby.

I think I better plan some future blog posts about immigrants and education. Back to the novel's topic for now. In real history, archaeological remains suffered indignities in 19th century Florida and elsewhere. Then, as now, scholarly controversies and debates raged. So I imagine some archaeologists were sensitive to the humanity behind the findings. Others, not so much.

Burial and trash-filled shell mounds left by former civilizations were leveled in the name of scientific discovery. Professionals occasionally boasted about how quickly their workers demolished a site. They crowed over the number of artifacts unearthed. 

Amateur pot-hunters were busy then, too, and did serious damage. Untold numbers of artifacts were carted off. On the plus side, some scholars of the time recorded their findings meticulously. I could spend hours paging through The East Florida Expeditions of Clarence Bloomfield Moore. 

That was in the late 1800s and very early 1900s. By the first decades of the 20th century, town officials got involved. They viewed shell mounds - many still existed then - as free road-fill and paving material. 

When I worked in print journalism, local history stories were among my favorite assignments. I'll never forget one interview. An elderly gentlemen recalled youthful days of riding his bicycle behind trucks that were hauling shell into town for use on roads. He and his friends scooped up the artifacts that fell, literally fell, out of the trucks. He said town leaders  were proud of themselves for using the shell to pave roads. They were saving tax dollars.

The novel's hero learns the true 
value of archaeological discoveries.

Yes, it makes us cringe today. In the novel, a secondary character of Seminole and European descent points out what the hero doesn't want to see and what other characters don't realize. The hero's increasing awareness is part of his character growth. 

Much was lost in Florida before scholarly approaches changed and protective laws were passed. As late as the 1960s, dredging, pot hunting, and archaeological expeditions were simultaneously taking place on Tick Island in the middle St. Johns River valley. An estimated 175 burials were found along with numerous artifacts that made their way to museums or private collections. I've heard old-timers say that boxes - boxes! - full of priceless artifacts were hauled away. Local belief is that only a percentage of what's there has been found.

This important archaeological site is closed to the public today. Luckily for history and humanity, there's a good reason for the island's name. The place is also hard to access. And home to many alligators and poisonous water moccasin snakes. 

Tick Island seems to have been a significant ceremonial site. Perhaps someday, modern mapping tools, ground-penetrating radar, and other archaeological methods can tell us more about the people who once lived there. And do so without disturbing or harming anything on site. We can hope. 

Persimmon Hollow: What's in a name?

The Wild West? No, early DeLand. This view from 1882
shows the corner of Indiana Avenue and Woodland Boulevard.
(Credit: Volusia: The West Side)

Before saleratus manufacturer Henry A. DeLand arrived from New York in 1876 to create an "Athens of Florida," and before his settlement became the City of DeLand in 1882, the area was known as Persimmon Hollow. 

The name has a quaint quality that appeals. My entire historical Catholic romance series, Persimmon Hollow Legacy, is built around a town of that name (yes, that is a shameless plug). A DeLand-based craft brewer, Persimmon Hollow Brewing Co., adopted the moniker (not a shameless plug; I'm more of a wine drinker, but I do like to support local businesses). Otherwise, vestiges of the early name are slim to none, locally.

Several years ago, when I purchased domain names for future use for my novels, persimmonhollow.com was already taken. I was able to get persimmon-hollow.com and persimmonhollow.info. (2022 update: I no longer own them.) That first URL belonged to a boutique store in, of all places, Oklahoma. (2022  update: URL no longer works.) There's also a Persimmon Hollow Village venue center, also in Oklahoma. Its website describes it as a collection of stores grouped together to resemble an "1880s Western Village."

DeLand once looked like an 1880s Western village, a real one. You need only view the West Volusia Historical Society photo that accompanies this post to get the idea. The 1882 view of DeLand shows the downtown corner of Indiana Avenue and Woodland Boulevard, looking west. The image appears on page 243 of the historical society's 1986 book about local history, Volusia: The West Side, edited by William J. Dreggors, John Stephen Hess, and S. Dick Johnston.

One of the book's chapters is titled Persimmon Hollow. However, the clue to the origin of the region's early name is found in the previous chapter. It's the best explanation I've yet come across. The book's authors attribute the history to a man named "Hugh Vernon Bracey, who came to Beresford with his father in 1870" (page 237). Hugh reportedly explained Persimmon Hollow as:

...a place where the spring water caused wild persimmons to grow in abundance. When the fruit ripened, deer, quail and other wild animals would gather there to feed ... It was one of the prime hunting spots of the few adventurous souls who had settled here at that time ... (237)

What an idyllic verbal portrait, marred for my 21st century sensitivities by the mention of hunters. I do understand that homesteaders in 1870s Florida hunted as a means of survival, not for sport. That would come closer to the turn of the 20th century, when tourists slaughtered our wildlife just because they could, and locals decimated bird rookeries so society matrons could decorate their hats with feathers.

I digress. DeLand today doesn't have a spring, and wild persimmons aren't common - at least not in my part of town. Springs bubble to the north -  DeLeon Springs in the eponymous town - and to the south - Blue Spring in Orange City, Green Springs in Enterprise, and Gemini Springs in DeBary. The closest is eight miles from my home, the farthest is 20 miles away. They're all beautiful. 

That doesn't mean an equally jewel-like pool of water never existed in or near the heart of DeLand. Perhaps one did 150 years ago. Maybe it was closer to Lake Beresford, out by the St. Johns River about five miles from downtown. In the mid-1800s, settlers homesteaded in the Beresford area because the river was the main highway at the time. 

The allure of the name Persimmon Hollow lingers, despite the coldness of the trail. As with some mythical Shangri-La, we cling to what we can of a place none of us has ever seen.

Four families grow into a parish

Florida has a deep-rooted Catholic history that dates to the 1500s. But much of the peninsula was mission territory in the late 1800s. My parish, St. Peter Catholic Church, was no exception. In the early 1880s, it was a mission of the church in Palatka, a riverfront city almost 60 miles away. That was a daunting distance in days when roads were sandy ruts and horsepower had four legs.

A wonderful parish history in the St. Peter's archives tells the story of the earliest Catholic settlers. The typed document is an example of the locally written parish histories stored in offices and archives of faith communities everywhere. They are rich sources of local histories and deserve digital preservation and wider dissemination.

"Mrs. Charles Paiva, Historian," wrote the St. Peter Church parish history. She credits a Miss Emily Brady "who kept track of church history as it happened." Please leave a comment if you know Mrs. Paiva's first name. I'd love to add it here.

(Photo courtesy St. Peter Catholic Church)
The first Catholic Church in DeLand could seat 60 people.

The history relates how Fr. Willliam J. Kenny said the first Mass in DeLand on June 7, 1883, in the Kilkoff home, which still stands on West New York Avenue. Four families were in attendance - Kilkoff, Dreka, Ziegler and Fisher.  Less than a year later, a small Catholic church was constructed near the center of town. On April 19, 1884, Fr. Kenny offered Mass in the new chapel, pictured on this page. The next day, April 20, Right Rev. John Moore, bishop of St. Augustine, dedicated the parish "to the service of God under the patronage of St. Peter."

An interesting detail emerges from the chronicle about that long-ago day, and it bears hearing in our modern era of religious strife and intolerance. "Members spoke of it as a joyous occasion and spoke of generous help given by non-Catholic friends," writes Mrs. Paiva. The organ was a portable melodeon on loan from a local Methodist. And, "... members of other faiths" - formed the choir that sang the High Mass. Remember, it was all in Latin then. 

A year later, the parish had 13 families. Today, it has about 3,000 families. The first little chapel accommodated 60 people. Over the years it was enlarged, and finally replaced. The current church, on the same property, was built in the 1960s.