History Day in Mount Zion
What it was like growing up next to the little church on the hill
Hoping to gather more of the human story which might fill in some of the shadows of an empty church’s 150-year legacy, members of Mount Zion’s extended community — family and friends, residents of nearby Tangerine — were invited to a History Day at Mount Zion on Feb. 18.
Attending were Beaulah Babbs, Mount Zion’s remaining parishioner; her sister Edith Jackson, who lives in the Northeast Community; their brother Eddie Torrence and his wife Mary Ann, seasonal residents in Leesburg; Jack Harris, assistant pastor at Mount Carmel Missionary Baptist in Tangerine; Tangerine residents Stanley Barton and Emily Carlton; and Ann Whittington Neely, a long-time friend of Beaulah and a seasonal resident of Mount Dora.
Annelise Kouns-Warbourton was also there to help, with two young daughters also pitching in.
It had been cool the day before, but that Saturday warmed nicely, and the sanctuary was filled with sunlight. Workers were draining the septic of the convenience store behind the church, and trucks could be heard rumbling past the opened front door.
I had a list of questions I wanted to ask about the church’s beginnings and changes over the decades, as well as questions about growing up and school and work and daily life.
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No one had any memories of the church’s earliest days as an arbor church. During Reconstruction, churches were one of the first structures built in black communities; prior to that, plantation slaves and their immediate descendants gathered in wooded areas, first secretly and then by choice, to worship in freedom. Brush arbors (also called hush harbors) was the name given by whites to camp meetings, revivals and places of worship created in burns or groves on the frontier. The message in these wooded sanctuaries was unfiltered (often the preachers in white-sanctioned churches taught obedience and acceptance of one’s earthly lot), and participants could sing and pray as they wished.
Mount Zion’s earliest beginnings as an arbor church makes sense as it was originally located in woods near fields which continually evolved for agriculture.
Perhaps the arbor church formed after the cemetery which began edge of the wood. Many African-American cemeteries are called Edgewood because it was the habit of slave cemeteries to be placed just off of the fields in which they worked. (Other African-American cemeteries in the area — Simpson-Mount Carmel, Tangerine-Zellwood and the unnamed cemetery off Wolf Branch Road next to the Country Club of Mount Dora — are similarly placed near what was once large agricultural concerns.)
In an earlier interview, Beaulah Babbs recalled attending services at the Mount Zion church on the hill, saying that when they had communion and washed each others’ feet, emerging from the eastern-facing door of the church they “walked into Eden” — as if the wooded area around the church was a sanctuary.
No one recalled anything about the original church except that it was built by the Woodbury family, hauling lumber by cart from Sanford. No one knew when the original church burned down or the reason why.
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Just as we were getting started, Mount Zion received a visit from the police. J.D. Hicks with the Orange County Sheriff’s office saw the front door open, so he parked his patrol car and came in. As it turns out, Hicks was one of two officers called to Mount Zion in November 2015 to help seal the empty church. They were photographed with Beaulah for a story Trish Morgan wrote about the church which was posted on her Mount Dora Buzz website. Eight months later, when I was asked by the Mount Dora historic preservation board I sit on to investigate the plight of the obviously-declining building, its was the Mount Dora Buzz piece I found online which prompted me to contact Beaulah and figure out what could be done.
Hicks had noticed that work on Mount Zion had begun and hoped to see it come to fruition. “The younger generation has no clue any more,” he said, “This is history.”
“I can’t wait to see the continued progress (on this church),” Hicks added. “It makes me happy. I’m glad the good Lord put me in that place to come out that specific day. So much has happened since. There’s a reason for things. The Good Lord looks out over us. It makes my heart feel good.”
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The earliest recollections of the group were of attending the second church when it was up on the hill in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The door of the church then faced east, with the cemetery to its north side. A fence line from the south ran close to the church, down to a dirt road which headed toward Mount Carmel in Tangerine. People drove up the dirt road and then walked up to the church along the fence line. Orange groves surrounded the church.
Eddie Torrence, who was born in 1941, remembers walking up the hill to the church. Around the church there were watermelons and cateloupes growing. After that there was a citrus nursery, grafting them to different varieties.
Mount Zion held services on the third Sunday of every month. It was a long day, with Sunday school, worship, and meetings after.
Minsters were brought in from elsewhere. Beaulah remembers Reverend Harris making the 200-mile trip from Delray Beach to preach at Mount Zion for 26 years. Paid a stipend. Members in 1949 each paid $1.50 a month to help pay Reverend Harris’ stipend.
To help raise money for expenses, the Mount Zion community would hold a variety of eating affairs — “fish fry’s cake bakes and lemon squeezes.” They’d raffle off lemonade, and the won who ended up with the most seeds in their cup would win. People from the entire community — both black and white — would came out for these events.
Such a racially ecumenical spirit would be remarked upon many times as participants remembered times gone by at Mount Zion.
The church looked much the same back in the 1950’s as it does now, albeit without power or indoor plumbing. Hand-held fans and open-backed benches helped congregants weather the withering heat, and heat was provided by a wood stove still located in the sanctuary.
So far, no photos have been found of the first church that burned, or of second church when it was up on the hill. (“No one could afford a camera then,” offered Ann Neely.)
Eddie said when he was 11 or 12 he became ready to accept Christ as his savior. He remembered being taken down to Lake Ola to be baptized there wearing a white baptismal robe.
Edith remembers attending another baptism at Lake Ola when she was still little. “Someone was driving by and yelled, ‘get ’em, alligator!” White churches baptized their faithful in Lake Ola too, but always at a different time. (No one remembers seeing any gators in Lake Ola.)
Beaulah’s memories of the church were all positive. “We enjoyed going to church and learning about the Lord,” she says. “Father was deacon, we were like the preachers’ kids. We had to toe the line. I was the good one.”
“Since our father was a deacon, we had a lot of ministers over the years had dinner with us” says Edith. “I remember how we children had to sit around and wait and hope they weren’t going to eat that last piece of chicken.” Dinner was always fried chicken or stewed chicken with dumplings, and collard greens and macaroni and cheese.
“Sometimes we would bring the food and eat under the trees in back of the church,” Edith says. “As time went on, the preacher would just come to our house.”
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No one remembers the first time the church was moved in 1953. Nor did anyone recall the reason why it was moved, leaving the graveyard behind on top of the hill. Ann Neely again: “They moved it because I’m guessing they were told to. They didn’t have any voice. Blacks just didn’t fight a white man coming in and telling them.”
Memories about that cemetery and the one at Simpson-Mount Carmel are vague. Kids avoided going near the old cemetery atop the hill when they were growing up.
Stanley Barton remembered one day being chased by some white kids into the Simpson-Mount Carmel cemetery where he tripped and fell on a grave. “I’d like to have had a heart attack,” Barton says.
Most residents are now interred in the black cemetery in Zellwood. No one visits the abandoned cemeteries.
A few years back, Eddie Torrence walked up Terrell Road with Sam Sadler and Deborah Burchhill looking for the old cemetery, “but but we didn’t find a single headstone.”
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Eddie remembers the church being moved the second time in 1960, when US-441 was re-directed to the east and north of the city. “They picked it up and put on a truck and moved it about 100 feet to the west to where it presently stands.”
Some day I’ll get over to the Eustis library to check the microfilm archives of The Mount Dora Topic (Mount Dora’s weekly paper which shuttered in 2009) to see if someone took a picture of the move.
Improvements to the church were made in the 1960s, with an office and bathrooms added to the front and electricity added to the building. As Beaulah has said before, that work was also funded by “a lot of fish fry’s” — events the entire community supported.
The culmination of that work was a community church-painting in 1966 organized by Norma Williams, a black woman living in Tangerine, and Leonard Phillips, a white Mount Dora man with a downtown hardware business (and later Western Auto). Again, the entire community — white and black — came out to help the beloved old church.
A 1968 wedding photo of Joyce Torrence (sister of Beaulah and Edith) the original, open-back benches. Except for a carpet runner down the middle aisle, the floorboards were bare.
Another photo in Beaulah’s possession shows the sanctuary at a somewhat later date. The benches have been replaced by theater seats that were donated from the Princess Theater. (The Princess Theater closed in the late 1970s.)
Eddie remembered a bell-ringing incident. “The local tradition was that when someone passed away, you came to the church on that day and rang the bell,” he said.
“I remember the first day I was asked to do so. I think the bell tolled me, it was so heavy. You had to just do a single toll, and I’ll always remember trying to get it right.”
Eddie also remembered gathering wood to fire up the old wooden stove still in the sanctuary.
Edith remembered getting baptized in Mount Carmel’s pool in Tangerine. Their first church, built in 1911, had the baptismal pool in the church. Except for the pastor’s office, the original church was torn down when the present church in Tangerine was built.
Mount Zion and Mount Carmel had close affiliations over the years. The only real difference in the liturgy is that Primitive Baptists practice foot-washing after communion.
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Asked about what sort of work was available to the Mount Zion community, participants responded that there were only two real options: agriculture or domestic service.
“When I graduated from high school in 1959 you could work in the orange groves, or you could go work the corn fields in Zellwood,” said Eddie Torrence. “Neither of those were right for me. Very hard work for very low pay. I did work in citrus for several summers while I was in high school and then I decided that wasn’t my life, so I joined the Air Force and never looked back.” Eddie served during the most intense years of the Vietnam War, and prently battles health issues he says came from contact with Agent Orange.
Stanley Barton also got out by joining the Army.
Jack Harris’s father picked oranges, but later he and his two brothers worked for the city of Mount Dora, and it was from there he eventually retired. It was steady work but the pay was very low.
Beaulah Babbs’ worked a career as a domestic. “I cleaned, I cooked, I drove, I provided companionship … I did it all.” She also worked in hotels. Dick Edgerton, who back then owned the Lakeside Inn, also owned a hotel up in New Hampshire, and Beaulah worked many summers there. (She found a summer job for her brother Eddie there, and he says it was his first time away from Florida.) For a time Beulah was an elevator girl at the Serena Hotel in St. Petersburg where the Yankees trained.
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Participants were asked what was it like growing up in segregated Florida.
Beaulah said attending black-only schools meant travelling long and longer distances. For elementary school she and Eddie walked two miles through to groves to get to a little schoolhouse next to Mount Carmel. “That was good,” Eddie said. “I got to find where the good oranges were.) After finished grade school, they were bused to Phyllis Wheatley middle school in Apopka and then Hungerford High in Eatonville. “We had to get up early, because the bus driver had to make all the stops to Eatonville.” Everyone graduated from high school.
Jack Harris was born in 1959 in East Town. Before Mount Dora schools were integrated, he attended Roseborough along with a handful of other blacks. “I didn’t have any problems,” Jack said. “There were better books there and it was a better environment to study.” His parents made the choice for him to attend there.
There was one cross-burning in front of Mount Zion in the late 1960s. Eddied also remembered a cross burning on the side of the road by their house.
Participants were careful not to over-emphasize racial problems, but they were also clear it existed. The Princess Theater was segregated, and there were colored drinking fountains marked with signs all over town. Living conditions in East Town lagged behind the white community. Sewage came there long after being made available to the rest of the town, they had clay roads and poor drainage remains a problem to this day.
“I don’t ever remember us as a family or neighbor having racial problems,” Eddie Torrence says. “We were a peaceful, loving people in this community, black and white.”
“The (white) Chester family lived in the yard next to ours,” he said. “My first job was cleaning the Chesters’ swimming pool. They were always kind to us. In fact, on the day my mother was buried, I was sitting in the car when Mrs. Chester knocked on the window and blew me a kiss. They were a very nice family.”
Agriculture did not suit Mr. Chester well, Eddie says. “First he tried to raise chickens, hundreds of Purina chickens, but that didn’t work .Then he tried a peach orchard, but his land was in the bottom and the cold killed it. Then he tried orange groves and the cold killed it. He even tried watermelons. But they were good neighbors.
As a side note, Eddie added this bit of surprising history: Chester was good friends with Fulgencio Batista, the U.S.-backed dictator who was overthrown by Castro during the Cuban Revolution of 1959. For a time during the Revolution, Batista came to live with the Chesters.
Eddie: “When I was a teenager, Mrs. Chester asked me to come help with parties,” Eddie says. “ I thought I was a bartender. One night while I was there working, some cars drove into their yard — they looked like police cars, but they weren’t — and there was a shootout right in their yard. My momma told me that’s the end of my parties, I’m not working there any more.”
Mrs. Chester was very much involved with building Chesterhill, the development on their old property.
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As far as the Tangerine community, Jack Harris was baptized there at 12 years old and has been a member since, serving also now as assistant pastor. All of Jack’s mother’s side was raised in Tangerine; his great great grandfather Oscar Bottom was an early member of Mount Zion. Over the years, many members of Members of Mount Zion drifted to Mount Carmel, where services were offered every week and communion didn’t involve foot-washing.
There is still a strong community around Mount Carmel.
* * *
At the 100-year celebration of Mount Zion in 1896, there were 15 members and six non-members left. By 2004, just one member remains. Most passed away. When Beaulah’s brother Bobby passed away, his wife and 4 kids left the area. Eddie Torrence lived in Maryland half the year, and Edith was living over in East Town. That left just Beaulah alone with Mount Zion.
Participants were asked how they felt about the church becoming something else.
“That’s a very good idea — it would get a lot more people involved, younger kids would have a place that they can remember,” Eddie says.
Edith agreed. “I think its a good idea, otherwise it’s going to fall down and be nothing. At least it’s something.”
Beaulah nodded and smiled but added nothing.
David Cohea is director of Live Oak Collective, a Mount Dora based preservation fundraising group, and project leader for Save Mount Zion.
