'Walk Florida' history, by app

The app puts history in your hands. GooglePlay photo

2023 update: This post is from 2016. I can't find these apps any longer. If anyone has any information, please leave it in the comments.

I'm all for reading and writing about Florida history ... but a new (to me) app has me excited about listening, too.

The Florida Stories project of the Florida Humanities Council allows you to "stroll through history." You take walking tours while listening to audio vignettes that stream via the app.

But, hey, this is an app we're talking about. While waiting for it to download to my phone, I listened to some of the sample audios on the Florida Stories webpage - without being anywhere near the featured locales. (Except for the one about DeLand Hall, which I could practically see from my window at the time.)

The recent addition of a DeLand Walking Tour was my introduction to the app. Ideally, you listen to the narration while walking and getting close-up views of the featured buildings and learning about the people and culture associated with them. But it's going to be a while, for example, before I get back to Pensacola - some eight hours away by car. So I look forward to enjoying the Walk: Pensacola segments while walking around the block or sitting and enjoying the scenery in my yard. I also look forward to additions of more tours to Florida Stories.

Most of all, I'm thrilled about this mobile avenue for sharing the wealth of historical information that is found in Florida. Too often, the state's history is overshadowed by theme parks, cruise ships, and beaches. All fun in their own way. Yet all built, in their own way, on everything that came before.

Download the app from Apple's iTunes and Google Play. 

What celebrity looked like in 1888

Frances Folsom Cleveland in a photo
from 1886. Credit: Library of Congress

I can't let election season pass without writing about President Grover Cleveland's campaign visit to Florida in 1888. Or, more specifically, Mrs. Grover Cleveland's trip to Florida. The First Lady was the superstar of her time.

The nation's top newspapers all reported on the journey, according to Presidential Visits to Florida: Grover Cleveland 1888, an ebook by author Ray Osborne which I unearthed only in Google Books. The New York Times, Washington Post, and Harper's Weekly, among other publications, kept close tabs on the presidential entourage.

A good part of the interest focused on the president's wife, Frances Folsom Cleveland. She was young and fashionable and a major celebrity of her day. 

The newspapers "reported on his visit and with a fascination with his new young wife..." Osborne writes. She was so popular that young women nationwide copied her hairstyles, her clothing, and even the poses she used when being photographed, says the National First Ladies Library. In my second novel, Stitching A Life in Persimmon Hollow, my heroine is one of these awestruck young women who can't believe she might get to see the First Lady on the Florida tour. 

A 21-gun salute heralded the Clevelands as they made their way to the Sub-Tropical Exposition in Jacksonville that long-ago day in February 1888. Locals staged a parade, VIPS gave speeches, and a crowd of thousands showed its enthusiasm.

 "A perfect tempest of cheering and clapping hands erupted" when Mrs. Cleveland stepped to the podium upon the request of the crowd, Osborne notes. "Five thousand throats cheered and greeted her."

The Feb. 23, 1888 issue of the Palatka Daily News even quotes the First Lady in a sub-head. "Mrs. Cleveland says it is no wonder people flock down here every winter for our delightful climate," the paper proclaims. 

The article gushes, telling how she alighted from the train "with the gracefulness of a fawn," and making note of her "pretty sylphlike figure." I kid you not. Military guards were needed to keep back the hordes at the evening reception for the Clevelands at St. James Hotel.

The newspaper did include a reprint of the president's Exposition speech, and listings of every locally important person and organization participating in the day's events. A visit by a presidential couple was a big deal in that pre-everything era - no Internet, no social media, no video, no cell phones, no television, no radio, no endless loops of replays in countless media.

If you think about it, the First Lady's popularity was an amazing thing. It happened without all the tools that accompany celebrity status today. She was a brand before personal brands existed.

Hurricanes before The Weather Channel

This Federal Art Project painting of a Miami hurricane was
created by Robert W. Burke. Credit: Florida Memory

With Hurricane Matthew a fresh memory, what else can I write about but stormy weather? We had time to prepare: we boarded up windows, removed or secured yard items, stocked up on supplies, and prepared evacuation kits in hopes we wouldn't need them. Then we watched The Weather Channel and local TV forecasters until the power went out.

Imagine not having warning systems. If there's any bright side to a hurricane, the advance forecast has to be it. Pioneers didn't have such a luxury. In Florida's Hurricane History (University of North Carolina Press, 1998; newer editions have been issued since then), author Jay Barnes writes that "Early hurricanes usually barreled ashore without warning, often with dire consequences." (32)

Barnes explains how early residents watched cloud formations, sunrise colors, and animal and insect behavior for signs of approaching bad weather. Behavior was said to include:

• a cat's nervous tail twitching
• wandering livestock
• shorebirds gathered together
• bees returning to a hive
• low-flying swallows, bats, geese and ducks

Barnes points out that such "questionable forecasting methods" weren't much help. What did help was the scientific research done by a Jesuit priest named Father Benito Viñes in Cuba. Barnes says Fr. Viñes was "the person who did the most to advance the early understanding of hurricanes ..." (33).

From the 1870s until his death in 1893, the Spanish priest studied the storms and created a warning system that relied on volunteer observers, ship reports, and storm alerts issued by horseback and telegraph. USA Today calls Fr. Viñes the hurricane priest in the headline of a 2014 article about the scientist-priest. 

The U.S. Weather Bureau was formed in 1891. Four years later, in 1895, the Bradford County Telegraph in northern Florida featured an article about the department of agriculture's "new plan for the dissemination of hurricane warnings." The system consisted of steam vessels that would fly flags and blow whistles. Telegraphs also were used, but as the newspaper stated, only one line ran along the east coast "and in almost every hurricane communication is very soon destroyed."

Really, the 1895 system sounds similar to the one devised by Fr. Viñes. He deserves better name recognition. Here's a video so you can start learning about him:

This screengrab is from a video by Belen 
Jesuit Prep, which inducted Fr. Viñes into
the school's Hall of Fame

Flames lit more than a fire

One of the most famous post-fire DeLand
photographs is this one from Oct. 1, 1886
 (Photo credit: StetsonUniversity)

One hundred and thirty years ago this month - Sept. 27 to be exact - the new city of DeLand suffered a fire that scarred a two-block section of downtown. Afterwards, city leaders ruled that new business buildings had to be constructed of brick or stone. 

Thanks to that long-ago ruling, DeLand today has a nationally recognized historic downtown.

But this blog post is about the human drama of the fire, as recorded 90 years afterward in the 1976 Reflections, West Volusia County, 100 Years of Progress. 

For context, consider that the city fire department organized in 1885 consisted of horse-drawn "chemical engines" - a pumper and a hook-and-ladder wagon. Both were hand-operated. The town was proud of its department. Volunteer firemen marched, in uniform, in the 1885 Independence Day parade.

But the equipment was overwhelmed by the fierce fire that started in downtown's Wilcox Saloon at about 1 a.m. on Sept. 27, 1886. The chroniclers of Reflections say that:

Late at night, the fire literally exploded through the heart pine of the buildings. Soon guns were firing, dishpans beat and everybody yelling.

Imagine waking up to such an emergency. The fire lasted about two hours. It leveled 22 buildings in the business district between New York and Rich avenues. An estimated 33 stores were lost. Heroic efforts on townspeople's parts prevented even more destruction. Again, from Reflections:

The Carrolton Hotel at the southeast corner of New York and the Boulevard was saved by hanging blankets toward the fire and pouring water from a roof tank and the bucket brigade over them. Fishers Drug store on the southwest corner was about to burst into flame from the fierce heat of the Miller and Tanner livery stable and feed store on the northwest corner. Somebody thought of the carbonated water for the soda fountain. By spraying it from windows, the building was saved.

Local lore says that, by the time townspeople used the carbonated water, all other water resources had been exhausted. By the time daylight dawned, likely everyone in town was exhausted. But DeLand bounced back, stronger than before.

Still, 130 years later, some peripheral questions linger for me. Reflections includes a photo of the city's first fire brigade and notes that the volunteer firemen wore leftover Confederate Army uniforms. 

The city was settled by a mix of Northern, Midwestern, and Southern people, and I can't imagine Union Army veterans donning rebel garb. The Civil War was only 20 years in the past for them. And how would such apparel make the area's formerly enslaved people and their descendants feel? 

Perhaps I'm guilty of assessing from a 21st century perspective. The 19th century minds struggling to build a new city may have operated from a sense of frugality. People back then didn't waste functional clothing. They reused it.

My other questions revolve around the people lugging buckets of water that terrible night of the fire. Did everyone help? Women and children as well as men? Did people with no stake in any downtown business rush in to help? What happened right after the fire?

That last question, at least, does have an answer. Unpleasant though it is.

In echoes of today's racial struggles and misunderstandings, the story of what happened after the fire is disheartening. The shocked populace turned fearful. They worried that people they termed the neighborhood's "disorderly negroes" would raid the destroyed town. The fear was unwarranted. Nothing happened.

Helen Parce DeLand - daughter of town founder Henry DeLand - wrote a 1928 city history that includes a section about the fire and its immediate aftermath. In The Story of DeLand and Lake Helen, Florida, she writes:

 "... for several days folks went armed in fear of disorder. These fears may have been groundless but all were obsessed by them."

Residents called on local cattlemen, who rode in to serve as patrols. Or, as Helen Parce DeLand writes:

"In their desperation they called on the cowmen from the woods and they quickly came galloping in with rifles unslung, looking for negroes to shoot at. Of course the negroes did not appear."

It sounds like a bad Western movie. Apparently tensions subsided, and the work of rebuilding commenced. But Helen Parce DeLand's recollection - which is omitted from most local versions of town history - reminds me how much narratives of the past are partial portraits that reflect the people doing the telling.

So what should we see when we peer back to September 1886? Heroic settlers united against a raging fire? Cracker cowboys looking for a fight? The voiceless African-American community whose history we don't have? Class, racial, regional tensions? Perhaps all of it. Like today.

A mission to educate

I saw this photo of a Catholic academy while browsing vintage Florida newspapers online, and was immediately intrigued. First, I was surprised, because the photo was part of a large ad telling of the virtues of the academy. Then my questions arose. Where was Loretto? What happened to the school? Why had I never heard of either?

Little did I expect that research would reveal a fascinating thread of Florida Catholic history.

Started as an educational initiative soon after the Civil War, the academy had evolved into a boarding school for boys by the time the ad was placed in the 1890s.  As the photo states, the school was situated in what was then the town of Loretto. The community was later swallowed by the giant city of Jacksonville, but it retains its named distinction today and is considered a neighborhood.

Loretto is adjacent to the historically significant Mandarin, now also a neighborhood. In fact, the other photo on this page is from an article that locates the St. Joseph's Church and school as being in Mandarin itself. This second photo is from a 1914 encyclopedic publication with the unwieldy title of The Catholic Church in the United States of America,Undertaken to Celebrate the Golden Jubilee of His Holiness, Pope Pius X.  At that time, the mission of Mandarin was considered 13 miles south of Jacksonville. 

More interesting, the mission was first visited by a priest from St. Augustine in 1787. Florida wasn't yet Florida at that time. The land was under Spanish rule.

The first church - I guess the first St. Jospeh's - was built in 1858, very early by Florida frontier standards. By that time, Florida was a U.S. state and the Mandarin Mission had suffered from pressure and resistance from non-Catholics. The congregation of St. Joseph's was smaller than it had been more than a half-century earlier. Fr. John Chambon's 1863 census reported 120 Catholics. In comparison, from 140 to 150 baptisms alone were performed during the six-year period between 1787 and 1793.

Fr. Chambon is considered the founder of the mission. But a Fr. de la Fosse of St. Augustine is credited with starting the school in 1868, with Sister Mary Julia and Sister Mary Bernard of the Sisters of St. Joseph, also of St. Augustine, according to the Golden Jubilee book.

 A full history of the still-vibrant St. Joseph's Church is featured on the parish website and it tells how Sisters Julia and Bernard traveled 27 miles by oxcart to start teaching. They lived a mile from the school and once got lost in the thick undergrowth and wandered around until late into the night.

The academy grew into a boarding school after the sisters started taking in boarders to help offset costs. It grew in stature, too, according to the parish history, and had students from as far away as Cuba. The sisters also taught free day school for boys and girls. Because of segregation laws, the sisters had to teach the African-American students in a separate building.

The academy lasted just shy of a century. It closed in 1963, after a remarkable run. The associated church remains a vibrant parish, and its online history is well worth reading. Not only does it provide an overview, it includes details that help convey the challenges faced by Catholics who served in Florida when it was mission territory. I salute them.

Small museums preserve local lore

Florida is dotted with small museums and historic sites that depend heavily on volunteer love and support to stay open. These sites are well worth seeking out and exploring (and supporting). Here's a video overview of Florida Pioneer Museum in Florida City that I haven't yet had the pleasure to visit.

Small, local museums are great because they showcase what daily life was like for pioneers in a specific location. The docents are knowledgeable and enthusiastic about local history. More and more of these mini-museums are gaining a video presence. I'll start to share more videos on a regular basis.

Florida Pioneer Museum is near Homestead in South Florida. Next time you're in that part of the state, stop by.

1899 church houses vital history

Mary S. Harrell Black Heritage Museum is
in a former Catholic church built in 1899.
(Photo credit: Google Maps - Street View)

The National Register of Historic Places application for the St. Rita's Colored Catholic Mission building in New Smyrna Beach includes fascinating historical details.

For purposes of this Catholic-oriented blog post, though, the following anecdotal excerpt paints a vivid portrait for me:

"Later, Sister Genevieve Stanislaus became the superior of the convent and Madonna House. Outraged and provoked by the blatant racism and discrimination still apparent in New Smyrna Beach - especially at the railroad station, public benches, and restaurants in the downtown - Stanislaus sat on 'colored only' benches at the depot, accompanied black children to the beach, and sat in the rear of buses."

I can almost see Sister Stanislaus sitting on a depot bench, draped in a demeanor that dared anyone to interfere.

Sister's resistance didn't take place in the late 19th or early 20th century, the focus of this blog She was a member of the Sisters of Our Lady of Christian Doctrine, which ministered in the city's westside black community from 1941 until 1969, the year the local Catholic church (Sacred Heart) integrated. Madonna House was the name of the initial ministry structure, and St. Rita was the chapel name. Later the ministry became known as St. Rita's Colored Catholic Mission.

When I talk about my love of Florida history, it's an observation that's filtered through my viewpoint. Most resources readily available to me are primarily about white history, and often white history of the upper classes. The absence of an abundance of other historical perspectives is disheartening. So I appreciate snippets like the story of Sister Stanislaus. I thank the Mary S. Harrell Black Heritage Museum for saving that history. (The National Register application credits the museum for the information.)

The Black Heritage Museum is housed in the historic building that was St. Rita's Colored Catholic Mission. Named after Mary S. Harrell, who worked mightily to found and nurture the heritage organization, the museum tells the story of the city's westside community, race relations and Black culture.

The reason this shows up in my blog about Frontier Florida is because the building itself dates to 1899. That's the year it was built as Sacred Heart Catholic Church in New Smyrna Beach.

At the time, it was considered an outpost in Catholic mission territory. I'll write more about the church's founding in a later post. In 1956, a new Sacred Heart church building was constructed. The original from 1899 was moved to the westside community and used as St. Rita's Mission. The Diocese of Orlando deeded the building to the heritage museum organization in 1999.

I encourage all to read the full National Register application for its valuable history, and to visit the museum to connect facts on paper to actual artifacts and the local community. And perhaps to learn something new and grow in understanding, something we so desperately need today.