Set aside labels, share some Spehovka

No matter your heritage, it's easy to agree
 that the savory sausage bread Spehovka
is delicious. (Photo credit: Gerri Bauer)

Everybody is labeled in this era of identity politics. Yet each label holds within it multiple complexities and distinct characteristics.

One of my labels is Slovenian-American. My paternal grandparents and other paternal-side relatives were immigrants from Slovenia, where their roots were centuries deep. They left their homeland when it was still part of Yugoslavia. Tiny Slovenia proclaimed its independence in 1991.

The outside world knew my father's family as Yugoslavian. Within the family, they were always Slovenian. And proud of it. That heritage passed to me. 

When I moved to Florida, I was delighted to learn there was a Slovenian community west of New Smyrna Beach. There aren't a lot of Slovenians in the world. I felt an immediate kinship, even though I'd never met anyone in the community.

The settlement began as Briggsville, and later became known as Samsula. It was founded in the early 1900s as a farming community and remains agricultural today. All kinds of vegetables were and are grown there: corn, peppers, squash, onions, cabbage, greens, etc.

Although named after a man from Bohemia named Lloyd Samsula, the community is Slovenian in heritage.  Many Slovene immigrants were among the earliest settlers, according to the history shared on the Samsula Woman's Club website. That history says the first to arrive were members of the Kravanja family in 1912.

Many other Slovenian family names are shared on that website and on the Samsula Historical Archive, a community history website. I searched for names from my family tree, including my grandmother's Kralj and great-grandmother's Habian/Habjan, but came up empty. As a newspaper reporter decades ago, I interviewed a Samsula woman who had started a Slovenian museum in her home. Many items on display - such as clothing and crafts - were somewhat familiar to me. But not enough for a full connection. 

When my parents moved to Florida many years ago, I was certain my father would find kindred spirits in Samsula. I encouraged my parents to attend an event at the SNPJ Lodge. The Slovene National Benefit Society organization/lodge has long served as Samsula's social hub.

My father's ethnicity is Slovenian. Yet he carries an Italian surname due to the name affixed to an abandoned orphan in my family tree. My father was informed by some people at the SNPJ Lodge event that he wasn't really Slovenian. The hand of friendship wasn't extended. Just the opposite. He never went back to an SNPJ Lodge event. I don't blame him.

Gerri Bauer photo

My dad's experience soured my enthusiasm for finding heritage kinship in Samsula. But I still bought the Woman's Club cookbook when it was first published. In that pre-internet time, Slovenian recipes in English were almost nonexistent. My family had a Slovenian cookbook, but it was written in Slovenian, a notoriously difficult language for non-natives.

I was dismayed to discover the Samsula cookbook's recipes for potica featured pecans. No, no, no. Potica is a sweet breadlike cake pronounced, roughly, in English as "poh-teet-za." This delicious treat has always been made in my family with walnuts, not pecans. I suspected the Samsula recipes were regional or country variations, and continued paging through the cookbook.

Then, I couldn't find any recipe for spehovka. Later editions of the cookbook may include the detailed steps for this savory sausage bread. To me, it's a Slovenian cultural treasure. My father wrote down his mother's recipe more than a decade ago and became known in the family for his delicious spehovka. I now make spehovka according to family tradition. The first time I made it, Dad happily supervised. I welcomed his advice. It's a challenging recipe.

Yet my family recipe is different than the spehovka recipes I've found in modern English-language Slovenian cookbooks, even some from the motherland. One of these modern recipes even calls for using bacon and eggs as the filling! Not in my spehovka.

Spehovka is one of my culinary specialties, along with Sicilian pizza and lasagna from the other half of my heritage, my maternal side. I'm a mix of cultures, as we all are. Even within our designated labels, we're different, as I learned with my exploration into the Florida Slovenians. We're all human, too, more similar than we sometimes care to believe.

Set aside the labels for a while. Sit down and share a slice of spehovka, or pizza, or sweet potato pie, or flatbread, or beans and rice, or kimchi, or chicken curry ... You get the idea.

Guava pies and two-board bridges

Pine Castle takes its name from this house
built from pine by early settler William
Harney. He called his home his pine castle.
Photo credit: Pine Castle Pioneer Days

Pine Castle is a community within the sprawl of Orlando. Today, it's swallowed by the metropolis of some 2.4 million people. A century ago, Pine Castle was a pioneer settlement. 

As recently as 30 years ago, longtime residents remembered what life was like in the early days. Some people shared their memories in a magazine issued as part of a local heritage festival in 1986. Among them was a woman named Rose McCoy.

Rose's parents bought 40 acres on Lake Gloria in 1910. I can't find a Lake Gloria on Google Maps in the neighborhood labeled Pine Castle. Perhaps it went by another name back then, when the area was surrounded by wilderness and Orlando was a place some distance away.

My favorite thing about Rose's reminiscences is her emphasis on daily life. She recollects interesting elements of frontier living in the early 20th century. Among them are the following tidbits. They are transcribed from Pioneer Days: Focus on Farm Life, published by Pine Castle Center for the Arts, 1986:

• a two-board "bridge" (Rose's quotes) about 30 to 40 feet long, used to cross a narrow waterway on the family's property

• students eating lunch every day under the trees outside the schoolhouse

• chapel services daily at school

• a home garden of corn, peas, lettuce, strawberries, beans, grapes and pineapples

• fresh milk stored in large china bowls in a pantry

• screens all the way around food cabinets

• legs of the food cabinets placed in cans of kerosene to prevent ants from climbing up

• abundant guava trees, and plenty of guava pie 

• household gas lights, gas stove and gas iron; the carbide gas and other components were stored in a shed and brass pipes were installed in the house

• a visit by a priest from Orlando who provided Catholic instruction and taught the family's children the Hail Mary and other prayers

• attendance at the Pine Castle Methodist Church services and Sunday school

I'm guessing the family was Catholic, else Rose's mother wouldn't have invited the priest to visit and give religious instruction to the family. There must not have been a Catholic church close enough for the family to reach by foot, horse or early automobile on a regular basis.

Once again, I find that pioneer Christians reached across denominational lines without rancor in order to worship the Lord. It's a pattern that pops up in my research. A welcome one.

Pine Castle presents a Pioneer Days Festival each year. Learn about the event and more at the festival's website, and watch this video to learn more about Pine Castle history:

Enjoy this video by Rob Matheson

Gifted photographer a mystery man

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

July 2019 update:
Mystery photographer revealed

---

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.

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/

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.