Mount Zion Primitive Baptist Church
2. The Little Church On The Hill
From its earliest days as a rural farming community, Mount Dora was unique for its relative racial harmony. Plantation agriculture flourished in North Florida — at the time of the Civil War, nearly half the state’s population were slaves — but further south, survival in this subtropical wilderness was more egalitarian, and families of free blacks and white farmers lived and worked in close proximity.
During the Second Seminole War of 1842, Congress passed the Armed Occupation Act, offering 160 acres of homestead to any man who would bear arms to protect the area against Seminole hostilities, live on the property for five years and promise to farm at least five acres.
As Gary McKechnie and Nancy Howell relate in A Brief History of Mount Dora, it was around 1850 that such a homestead was granted to William and Dora Drawdy on the shores of Lake Beauclair. They hacked back some of the overgrowth, cut down pine trees, built a log cabin, farmed and planted grapefruit trees. The city may be named after the homesteading woman.
In 1862 the Homesteading Act widened the opportunity for a 160-acre land grant, offering it for a fee of $10 to all settlers, Reb or Yankee, black or white, male or female. Originally intended for development out West, the Homesteading Act became an enticing opportunity for settlers of all stripes in Mount Dora.
According to Vivian Owens’ The Mount Dorans, a vital account of the city’s African-American history, Nelson Williams was the first black child born Mount Dora, around 1850. His family grew up in a homestead in what became East Town, subsisting on agriculture and a few livestock.
Some of Mount Dora’s black population may have been part of the black regiment of the U.S. Army which occupied Jacksonville in 1863, traveled further south after that.
For freed blacks and war-weary veterans, the promise of land in Mount Dora was sweet. In some ways, their pasts weren’t all that different, black slaves and indentured white servants both serving the wealthy landowners from their different stations.
The promise of citrus began in Mount around 1873 with the first orange grove planted by ‘Doc’ Henry. Large homesteads owned by David Simpson and William Stone soon saw orange groves spreading through the area as well. In 1882 Nelson Williams became the first black homesteader, with property in what is now East Town and a large grove going in.
The first school was built in 1886 with white children attending during the school year and black children over the summer.
Mount Dora grew up in disparate communities — downtown, what later became East Town, in Pistolville, Wolf Branch, Tangerine. Originally in Orange County, Mount Dora became a part of Lake County when land was ceded from Orange and Sumter Counties in 1887.
Oran Sadler, who was headed for health reasons for the temperate climate of Cuba, got as far a Mount Dora in 1884 and decided he was home enough. His first homestead is about where Dave Lowe Realty currently is on Highland Ave. Later Sadler purchased 1,200 acres on the south side of Lake Ola in what is now Tangerine, growing vegetables in the rich lake muck soil. Black laborers helped in the fields and loaded produce up for delivery to Sanford where it was boarded on a riverboat and sailed north on the St. Johns. Tangerine’s black community grew.
The big draw for Mount Dora’s more monied settlers was “the gold” — citrus. Taking advantage of those 160-acre homesteads, early settlers began planting groves all over the area. But they soon realized that citrus production was a long-term process, taking 12 years to plant a tree and then raise it to maturity. To supplement their income, they put cattle on some of their homestead, selling off the yearlings.
All the old pine timber came down as the groves were planted, keeping sawmills and turpentine mills busy for several decades. There were also dairies and farms a cannery and box building factory. The first citrus packing house was built in 1891, and business boomed for a while.
With the great freezes of 1894 and 1895, those invested in citrus were wiped out. Anyone who could afford to cleared out of Mount Dora, leaving behind whatever they couldn’t load on a horse-drawn cart. Many laborers also moved on, but those who remained worked in the mills and grew what they could in their own gardens. There were a number of black families in what is now downtown Mount Dora, and a larger black community in nearby Tangerine, with a few families reaching as far north from there into what we know would call eastern Mount Dora.
Many of Mount Dora’s black churches were built in the last decade of the nineteenth century, transitioning from earlier “arbor churches” where the faithful worshipped outside. St. Mary’s Baptist was built in 1890, and Mount Olive A.M.E. in the mid-1890s.
It’s an odd time for church-building, if you consider how many folks had emptied out of Mount Dora and Tangerine following the freezes of ’94 and ’95. Perhaps the added hardship made worship more in need of durable spaces.
The little church on the hill was built in 1896 on a hill just south of what is now Stoneybrook Publix. If it follows the pattern of other black churches in the area, the deep woods it was close by suggests that before then congregants had celebrated arbor services, possibly as far back as the 1870s.
Lumber for the construction was hauled by horse-drawn cart from Sanford by Julia Woodbury, her husband Richard and her brother Archie.
A church on a hill, appropriately named Mount Zion, of the Primitive Baptist denomination, its door facing east, as was the custom with African-American churches, toward Resurrection. The church’s first pastor was Rev. McCarthy.
Tangerine’s black community had more ties with Mount Zion over the years than in East Town, and for years the church was listed in Tangerine. (Look up the address, it’s now listed in Mount Dora.)
Change in Mount Dora was driven by the white community. In 1886 the village gained a reputation as a winter getaway with the founding of the South Florida Chautauqua Sunday School Assembly, located next to Lake Gertrude in what is now Sylvan Shores. The popular annual event provided 10 days of leisure, lectures and entertainment. However, the great freezes snuffed the life out of the annual event, and whatever resurgence might have come ended in 1905 when the 1,500-seat auditorium burned down. The hotels which had been built in downtown Mount Dora in order to house visitors for that event began to market to wealthy winter visitors. The Mount Dora Yacht Club was formed in 1913.
With downtown property becoming too valuable for developers eyeing northern money, in 1920 all the downtown black property owners were forcibly relocated into the swampy land just to the north and east of the city, where the family of Nelson Williams already lived. J.P. Donnelly bought a chunk of land there and built the “Donnelly Subdivision,” housing which formed the neighborhoods of East Town.
The citrus industry in Mount Dora did come back in the decade between 1910 and 1920 as the winters were milder, and more families started their own businesses. Each had their own packing house (by the 1950s, there were a dozen). The process of making vacuum-packed pulp juice wasn’t developed until 1944, so all the packing houses sent their fruit up north to market, loading up at the Lake Jem and Mount Dora rail depots.
The 1920s were a racially tense time in the Jim Crow South. Things were especially difficult in Georgia and North Florida where the remnants of plantation culture were more hostile to free blacks.
The tremors came very close to Mount Dora’s borders. On Election Day 1920, the black community of Ocoee just west of Orlando was destroyed in a riot over a black man who tried to vote in the presidential election. Fifty cars bearing KKK members from all over Central Florida flooded into the town, shooting and burning. As many as 60 African-Americans were killed, with 25 homes burned. July Perry — the offending voter — was hauled out of the jail by the mob, dragged through town behind a car and then hanged from a lightpole; near his body was a sign which read, “This is what what we do to niggers who vote.” More than 500 black residents were forced to flee Ocoee, with some finding harbor in Mount Dora. Not a black vote would be cast in Orange County for the next 18 years, and Ocoee didn’t see a single black resident again until 1981.
Three years later, tensions in North erupted when a white woman living in Rosewood accused a black man of raping her. Newspapers throughout the South quickly picked up the story, and within days a mob of 300 white men converged on the little town, killing six blacks and burning down the entire black section of town. (The death toll may have been much higher.) Fleeing residents again made their way to safer places like Mount Dora.
In Mount Dora, the 1920s were comparatively peaceful, though there were several tense moments when Pistolville men came to party at the Grandview jazz joints. The KKK made several appearances; the first time residents fled for the woods while the second time there was a black man with a loaded shotgun waiting on every porch.
Mount Zion burned in the early 1920s. Was the fire on purpose? No one remembers. St. Mary’s Baptist church also burned in the 1920s, torched by a mentally unstable man who was sleeping there at night.
Whatever the case, all the early records of the church were lost in the fire. History is like that, the partial evidence of what survives.
Mount Zion was rebuilt in its same spot in 1926, the same time that Bennie and Maude Torrrence arrived from Tinsley, Georgia. Bennie found work doing yard work for the owner of Mount Dora Packing, and Maude did work for various white families, washing and ironing.
The Torrences first lived in a house across from what is now the Stoneybrook Publix, later moving into a large house behind where Mount Zion is now located. There was no running water — they pulled water from a nearby well — nor was there indoor plumbing, using a designated outhouse instead.
In that house Bennie and Maude raised four boys and five girls, including Beulah, born 1936. Beulah Torrence Babbs has lived her life within walking distance of Mount Zion. Now 80, she lives across from the church on old 441 with her son Lenny.
The groves kept growing as the citrus industry continued to take off — by 1950, Lake County was one of the richest in the country. In fact, the groves grew so close to the church that at one point it had to be dragged some distance away. In aerial pictures you can still see the track of the church, although the groves are now gone.
A cemetery was located somewhere east of the church. Beulah says her mother only knew of one person who was buried there. She doesn’t remember seeing any markers (the smaller ones made of tin may have been used). She and the other kids she grew up with stayed away from it. No one has seen it in years, and it may be one of the truly lost things about Mount Dora.
The lost cemetery is actually one of four black cemeteries in the vicinity — there’s Mt. Carmel-Simpson, next to St. Patrick’s Church (restored in 2010); Tangerine-Zellwood Cemetery; and a two-acre overgrown abandoned cemetery next to the Country Club which some consider the oldest. (Black residents living in the Wolf Branch area used it before Greenwood Cemetery became integrated.)
Sam Sadler III, a Tangerine resident of whose parents farmed citrus, recalls attending a funeral around 1950 in the church by a black servant who looked after him while his parents were at work. “I remember being dressed in this little suit and hat — like a golfer’s cap — and then walking from Tangerine up 441 to that little church on the hill,” he says. “The woman knew she had to get me back before Mom and Dad got back to work, and in our hurry I left my cap in the church. I remember it just like yesterday — how I wanted that cap — but she was determined to get us back on time.”
In 1946, Beulah’s father Bennie was made a deacon of the church, and he served as its only deacon until his death in 1974. Remembered by Beulah as “a great inspiration,” Bennie is buried in the Tangerine-Zellwood cemetery.
For Beulah, growing up black in the ’40s and ’50s on the border of Mount Dora meant segregated life. She and her siblings walked through the groves several miles to attend grade school in Tangerine, bused to Apopka to attend middle school, and bused to complete high school in Eatonville. It took a long commute for a black person to get an education back then, but Beulah’s parents made sure all their kids finished school.
Not owning a car, on shopping day Beulah’s parents hired someone to drive them into Mount Dora. While they bought their food for the week, the kids ambled over to the five and dime to pick out penny candies. Beulah says she had family and friends in East Town and sometimes visited there, but it was quite a distance to travek back then.
The main social activity was church. Due to the congregation’s small size, services were held once a month on every third Sunday. The larger Mount Carmel Missionary Baptist church in Tangerine had weekly services, so many Mount Zion parishioners also attended church there. Beulah says she had a lot of family in Tangerine, so relatives from Mount Carmel often came up for the monthly service at Mount Zion. There was Sunday school for the kids at 10 a.m., an adult service at 11 a.m., then Baptist Training for Youth afterward.
Visiting ministers presided over the services. There was Rev. Stevenson from Ocala, Rev. Austin from Sanford, Rev. Everett from Lake Monroe, Rev. Johnson from Ormond Beach, Rev. Jones from Orlando, and Rev. Harris from Delray Beach, who served the church for 26 years.
Several features of worship are unique to Primitive Baptists. They served communion every three months, with groups of congregants going up to the table to take communion. After communion, there was a foot washing service. (Beulah says that some of the Mount Zion congregants weren’t too crazy about that part, so they ended up going to Mount Carmel in Tangerine, which was Missionary (not Primitive) Baptist.
All her life, Beulah has worked as a maid, first at the Sadler house on Highland and then for 30 years as maid for a woman in Tangerine who lived on Lake Ola. Her father did yardwork for Old Man Herbert, the man who ran Mount Dora Packaging. All of her brothers all went into the military after finishing school, settling up North afterward where work and living conditions were better.
In the late 1940s, racial tensions grew again in the area over the trial of the Groveland Boys, four black youths accused of raping a 17-year-old woman in Groveland. Irate KKK members from as far north as Georgia drove down to parade through Groveland, shooting up and torching several houses while the black population headed for the woods. When the National Guard stepped in to stop the riot, a leader told a reporter, “the next time, we’ll clean out every Negro section in Lake County.” One was killed by a posse led by Lake County Sheriff McCall, and by using forced confessions the other three were found guilty. KKK motorcades rode through Mount Dora neighborhoods, ending with a cross-burning in East Town.
In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court also ruled to end legal segregation in public schools, thus beginning a decade-long war in the South resisting efforts to put black children in white schools.
Also that year a white fruit-picker named Allen Platt moved to Mount Dora and tried to get his six children enrolled in the all-white Mount Dora School. Some children complained that they “looked like niggers,” and Sheriff McCall stepped in to declare they had too much Negro blood to attend. (Back then under Jim Crow laws, someone with more than 1/16 Negro blood was declared ineligible to attend white school. When Mabel Norris Reese, the editor of the local Mount Dora Topic decided to fight on behalf of the Platt children, the hate brigade began their intimidation, writing “KKK” on the newspaper’s front window and burning a cross in the front yard of the Reese home.
Although the little church on the hill was located in Orange County — and out of the reach of Sheriff McCall — hostilities from the white community reached that far with a cross burning. What a sight that must have been, the darkened church with its little black cross atop its spire in the night, silent as a different cross burned.
Beulah remembers the church in the 1950s as when the largest congregation worshipped there, with some 30 to 40 parishioners attending monthly services and going to the church in Tangerine for weekly services. When people passed away, they were buried in the Tangerine-Zellwood cemetery. The old cemetery next to the church was slowly forgotten, weeds growing in a tall blanket. Beulah says kids were scared to play games close to the shadows of the old cemetery. And she doesn’t remember any burials of Mount Zion parishioners in Mount Carmel-Simpson just a quarter mile down old 441. (The last known burial in that cemetery was in 1966.)
The really hot topic in Mount Dora in the late 1950s was whether to relocate US-441 away from the city’s core on Fifth Avenue. Some merchants feared that they wouldn’t be able to attract customers without it’s proximity; others (including Dick Edgerton, owner of The Lakeside Inn) felt that all the ambiance of a small town was being destroyed by the slowly growing presence of big trucks and fast cars shooting past downtown.
In the end, the city decided to move US-441, and in 1958 engineers began mapping out the new route, heading north right where the little church on the hill stood rather than turning east on what is now “old” 441.
The problem was, the plan for the new highway cut too close to the little church on the hill. Accordingly, the church was moved across “new” 441 to the juncture of the two roads, to a property owned by a white landowner. (It would be interesting to see if archival microfilm of The Mount Dora Topic would offer any pictures of that event.)
As it turned out, engineering for “new” 441 altered the highway’s swath a little further toward the west. It wasn’t necessary to relocate the Mount Zion after all.
In the 1960s the church was added on to with a cement block edifice, a new entrance, office and two restrooms. In 1965 A community painting effort was organized by Norma Walker Williams, a black leader in Tangerine, and Leonard Phillips, a white Mount Dora businessman.
Mount Zion was painted again 9 years later by the same team of Williams and Phillips, who was now head of Mount Dora’s chamber of commerce. Beulah had a clipping from the Orlando Sentinel Star about the event. Sixty people from 20 organizations turned out for the job. Phillips donated all of the paint for the job from his Western Auto store. The rusty roof got a new coat of silver paint, and the walls and bell tower were painted white. The bell got a new rope, and for the first time in years it was rung.
For a time afterward, the yard was landscaped and maintained by the city through an agreement with Orange County. But that eventually stopped.
At that time, the church had six active members.
An air conditioning system was added at some time.
The church was moved yet again in 1982 when the lot it stood on was sold to build a Circle K convenience store. The landowner who sold the land gave a little parcel behind it to Mount Zion, and the church scooted back. That is where it presently stands. The church had to purchase a narrow strip of land adjacent to old-441 so there could be space for parking. A small pond now fills that area.
Mount Dora’s groves had been dwindling for decades as the city grew outward from its core. Freezes in 1957 and 1962 wiped out grove owners further north in Gainesville and Ocala, and those who wanting to stay in the game began buying land in South Florida.
Then came the freezing events of 1977, 1981, 1983, 1985 and 1989 which put an end to the citrus industry in Lake County. The exodus to South Florida began in earnest. Once the second-largest citrus growing county in Florida, now only about 10,000 acres remain in Lake.
For the grove owners who stayed, there was an unintended blessing in the value of their properties for residential development Since 1980, Lake County’s population has more than tripled, and Mount Dora’s east side is on the verge of exploding as the Wekiva Parkway will have an exit there opening in 2021. A 300-acre parcel of citrus owned by the Simpson family is said to be part of the 1,300-acre Innovation District.
For manual laborers, loss of citrus jobs took the heart out of the area’s agricultural economy, and many moved elsewhere.
Others like Beulah continued to find household work. She worked for many years as a maid for wife of the Revd. Aubrey Stanley, who owned a grove next to what is now the Southern Aire trailer park. After he passed away, Beulah drove his wife Ruth to Boston every summer, working herself at a lodge in in Buckhills Falls, Pennsylvania. Later she worked summers in New Hampshire at the Crawford House Inn, a place owned by Dick Edgerton, the former owner of the Lakeside Inn.
As Tangerine’s northern community around the Mount Zion Primitive Baptist church moved or passed away, services at the church continued to dwindle. Services only remained viable because of an agreement where members of Mount Zion and congregants from Sanford and Deland churches rotate their attendance. On every 5th Sunday, the churches would raise money for each other.
In 1995, Stephen Olausen and Sidney Johnson, researchers with Historic Property Associates, were completing a survey of historic places in Orange County. In March 1995 they prepared a report on the Mount Zion church. There’s a fine description of the church and notes of its architectural features and provides this historical context:
The Northwest Orange County Region contains a number of Orange County’s earliest agricultural communities, including Tangerine, Zellwood, Grasmere, Plymouth, Bay Ridge and Rock Springs. White settlement of the region occurred after the passage of the Armed Occupation Act in 1842. The area, with its numerous lakes, low-rolling hills, and vast expanse of fertile land, was an attractive draw for settlers who descended on Florida from other areas of the country to homestead under the provisions of the act Development of the region was facilitated by the construction of the Tavares, Orlando, and Atlantic Railroad (TO&A) in the mid 1880s. The railroad brought prosperity to the communities located along its route by enabling the rapid transport of citrus and vegetable produce and opening them to settlement. The communities share a common history of economic dependence on agriculture and, to a lesser extent, tourism. Many of the areas were home to prominent winter residents from the north, who constructed large homes and estates along the many lakes that dot the region. Relatively unaffected by the excessive development that has occurred in other portions of the county, the Northwest Region remains predominantly rural and contains a high percentage of the county’s significant historic resources.
Some things they didn’t get right — they listed it as the original church, whereas the present one is the one rebuilt in 1926 after the first one burned down. Their report doesn’t mention anything about the former site across 441, nor the lost cemetery there.
Their report is now a part of the Florida Master Site database (site # OR7829), and it’s the only historic information I’ve been able to find with county or state archeology resources. According to Adam Ware, historian and research librarian with the Orange County Regional History Center, there’s nothing in their database which mentions the church.
The 100th anniversary of the church was celebrated on July 7, 1996 in a service led by the church’s last visiting pastor, the Reverend David Diggs of Winter Park. The congregation sang “Holy, Holy, Holy,” Sister Rona Torrence read the Occasion and Welcome, Rev. Diggs offered the scripture, Sisters Rona Torrence and Daphne Nimmons sang a duet, the speaker was Elder Haywood Cleveland of New Hope Missionary Baptist Church, and Rev. Diggs gave the invitation to discipleship:
As we celebrate the 100th year, may we also rejoice in the call of our God to a life of consecration and perfect trust. we must be separate from the world. We must first seek the Kingdom of God and HIs righteousness. We must walk in the world as Christ walked and abstain ourselves from all appearances of evil.
My prayer is that we will be drawn closer to Jesus Christ in unity, while seeking to fulfill the commissioned responsibility of the church in mission. The church can move forward in doing the works of Christ with consecration and dedicated lives.
After a rousing benediction, dinner was served.
There isn’t much about the church after that. Services continued once a month for the dwindling congregation.
Beulah’s mother Maude died in June 2000 and she was buried in the Tangerine cemetery. A later fire in Maude’s old bedroom destroyed much of the remaining papers concerning the church.
Some time after that there was an attempt at some time to get the building onto the National Register of Historic buildings, but the renovations added to the church after it was moved from the hill across the street disqualified it from that recognition.
Failing that, in 2010 the church was placed on the Northwest Orange County Register of Historic Places. A framed certificate sits outside the office; dated 9/12/2010, it was issued by the Preservation Advisory Council of The Apopka Historical Society.
Inquiries to the Apopka Historical Society turned up no further information about the church.
The land on the other side of 441 (where the church one stood, and the old cemetery is lost somewhere) was cleared of citrus groves at some time and there are great gouges where sand and clay for fill dirt have excavated. Sam Sadler relates something similar to the black Tangerine cemetery. He says one day he saw a box (coffin) sticking out next to a tree whose roots had been gouged out by careless operators.
Mount Zion’s congregation was down to two when Beulah’s brother Bobby passed away in 20040. The last service held in Mount Zion was a wake for him, which was followed by a funeral in Tangerine and burial in the cemetery there.
Since then, Beulah has been the last parishioner of Mount Zion, a church no longer on a hill and without, it seems, any future.
Concerned about break-ins into the now-inactive church, in 2015 the Orange County Sheriff’s department sealed it the building.
The Mount Dora Buzz featured the church in a Nov 2015 feature. Response to the story was positive, and several readers offered new pews and a door.
But money wasn’t coming in for major work of tenting, so the building has remained idle.
Sometime this year, two of the windows on the church’s east side were broken and someone got in. There hasn’t been any vandalism, but there are signs someone has been staying in there. Animals have gotten in, nesting in pews and scattering nut-shells across the piano on stage. Vandals tore out the air conditioning system’s copper tubing. The landscaping is quickly growing long in the tooth.
When I talked with Beulah Babbs in August, she said she was now hoping just to find responsible people to take over care of the building. She’s 80, unsteady and has kidney problems, and there’s no one else but her to care for what was Mount Zion Primitive Baptist Church. She doesn’t expect foot washing in there any more, but she’s very much afraid of it becoming a beer hall.
For passerby who know Mount Zion as a fixed landmark heading into Mount Dora, it’s still there, shabbier and dirtier than ever, often making one wonder what happened to that quaint, likeable old fixture en route to the city which calls itself Someplace Special.
—David Cohea (djcohea@gmail.com)
Up Next: What can be done?
In this series about Mount Zion Primitive Baptist Church:
I. A Landmark Disappears
2. The Little Church On The Hill
3. Saving The Music: Preservation Ideas
4. Preserving The History Means More Than A Fresh Coat of White Paint
