Mount Zion Update, part 1: A Church In Need with a Yearning Pedigree
After 150 years of service, is it time to retire this little old church at the entry to Mount Dora?
By David Cohea (savemtzionchurch@gmail.com)
Note: 2016 comes to a close with Mount Zion Primitive Baptist Church with renewed hope for a future in the Mount Dora-Tangerine community. Originally reported on last September, this series provides an update on the work done so far.
Last July, toward the end of the monthly meeting of Mount Dora’s historic preservation board, someone asked about the status of the little old church at the intersection of old and new-441. It was obviously falling into disrepair; the sign outside had collapsed and had almost disappeared into tall weeds. A NO TRESPASSING sign was posted on the door; the entire building seemed to be sagging out of existence. I volunteered to look into the situation and report back.
I’m like many Mount Dorans who have had a long passing relationship with the little old church. A 20-year resident, my daily work commute back from Orlando has always ended happily with sight of the little church as I turned off 441 onto the old route into Mount Dora. I didn’t know anything about it, but it always served as a Welcome Home landmark. Often times when driving by with my wife we wondered whether the church was still used, and if not, what it might be purposed toward: a wedding chapel or antiques shop or historical center.
But in the spirit of the commuting suburbanite, I took no more notice — or action — into the little church for almost two decades, until I started taking interest in the history and doings of this little city. I began contributing to the fledgling Mount Dora Citizen, a publication which sadly lasted only for a year. Writing about everything from how utilities go into the ground, the fore- and background of city council meetings, just how pretty the city’s parks system is. Always behind every story a history.
My education was blent between Mount Dora’s quaint historical narrative and Gilbert King’s Devil In The Grove, a searing account of the racial horrors in Lake County in the years surrounding the Groveland Boys trial of the early ‘50s. For every good intention in this town, a sour and surly one existed somewhere in its shadow, an alternate response to history, resulted in a twisted history — not unlike what plays out on our national stage.
I found out that the little church was called Mount Zion Primitive Baptist Church, and that it was seemingly at the end of a very long history. I was connected with Beaulah Babbs, And she agreed to meet me at the church one afternoon in early September.
Up close, the church was in far worse shape than I expected. Behind the collapsed sign was a building fast succumbing to the elements. Beulah said a service hadn’t been held in Mount Zion for three years. (Turns out it was more like a dozen years; at 80, Beaulah’s memory isn’t as strong as it used to be.) That was the wake for her brother Bobby Torrence in 2004, the next-to-last member of Mount Zion. As the church’s last member, legally empowered to decide its next move, Beaulah had been wondering for years what the church’s future would be. With her health starting to fail, time was running out for her to make that decision.
On the day Beaulah and I met, we waded through waist-high weeds to get to the steps of the church, Beaulah steadying herself with a cane. Rocks had been piled on the front steps, apparently by a woman who showed up one day and declared that God had given her the church. Amid the rocks were a crumpled cigarette pack and an empty condom package. (Several of the area’s mentally unstable come and sit on the steps of the church from time to time, they apparently find it comforting.) Beaulah’s son Lenny, who travels around the country with Outback Restaurant openings, came by to help us get in. The problem wasn’t the lock, which was broken (the door was too), but all the wasp nests hovering over the door. After giving them a shots from a spray can of pesticide, he pushed the door open and we walked into the unused church.
At first it looked like any old church — two rows of pews, an altar and podium, an electric organ on one side and a spinet on the other. But it was hot, and wasps were flying in and out of the broken window. Serious piles of termite frack — years of it — lay under fixtures, the color of the wood the drywoods had burrowed into — walnut for the pews, black oak for the altar. Animal nests were everywhere, stuffed into pews around hymnals, the piano and the library. On one pew there was a tube of toothpaste, an uneaten pack of trail mix and an opened 500-pack of napkins. Around the altar there were balls of paper — pages of Scripture which someone had torn out. Water damage to the western wall was visible around the old cast-iron stove, and subterranean termites had done their damage to the wall there. The floor was rickety and around the perimeter you had to step carefully lest your foot go through the floor.
We sat in a rickety pew and Beaulah told me the story of Mount Zion — how it had been moved from across the way, how it had always survived on the largesse of others, how when her brother died there was only her to pray and wait for something good to happen to her church. As the remaining member, she was legally entitled to donate the church to a non-profit to take on care for the property.
“I just don’t want to see it become a honky-tonk,” she sighed.
And the one thing she truly yearned for was to hear singing again in the church.
2.
Behind that anonymous little church I had driven by for years, there was a surprising history.
Mount Zion Primitive Baptist began as an arbor church in the 1870s, a holdover practice from slave days. (All of Mount Dora’s African-American churches began that way.) Reconstruction finally allowed the building of black churches in the late 1880s. Ten African American churches were built from then until the early 1900s; Mount Zion was built in 1896. It originally sat on a hill across from what is now US-441, a beacon to the working poor, with a cemetery just beyond its front doors which opened toward the east.
The church burned down (along with all its records) and was rebuilt in 1926. (Many black churches burned in that racially turbulent decade, though no one I spoke with could remember the cause.) That year Beaulah’s parents arrived in Mount Dora from Georgia, to a make a living in the more hospitable agricultural region of Central Florida. Beaulah was born in 1936 a short distance from Mount Zion, and she has always lived close by.
On several occasions white development shuffled Mount Zion’s congregation down the road. The church was dragged a ways to make room for encroaching citrus groves, and then moved down from the hill and across the way “in the dale” in 1961 when US-441 was re-routed around Mount Dora. A cemetery located next to the original site of the church on the hill had been lost; no one has seen it for decades. (The property is owned by Publix to the north and a fill dirt company to the south).
A few years later it was moved again the property it sat on went up for sale. A number of downtown merchants (including Dick Edgerton, then-owner of the Lakeside Inn) lobbied the owner not to sell; they wanted the little country church there at the corner where people turn toward Mount Dora. But the land was sold to build a gas station/convenience store, and Mount Zion was pushed back a final time on a postage stamp of property so small that you couldn’t walk out the front door without trespassing.
Still, the church hung on, adding on to the building with an office and two bathrooms (prior to that, there was no electricity or plumbing) and an air-conditioning system. They paid for an easement from the same owner, running from the front door to old-441 so people could park. Bennie Torrence, and elder and deacon of Mount Zion (Beaulah considers her father its rock), died in 1974. In the late 1970s, seven families signed a deed transfer of the land from the property owner, finally putting the fate of Mount Zion in their own hands.
But that assurance came late, and with the freezes of the 1980s, citrus employment died out in Mount Dora with the shuttering of the local packing houses. Without that work, there wasn’t much for African American residents to do — no work in the groves, no service employment in the houses of those who owned the groves. Mount Zion’s congregation continued to diminish as old members died, moved away, or drifted on to Mount Carmel Missionary Baptist in Tangerine, which held weekly services.
A 100-year celebration in 1996 was support from churches which had offered material support for Mount Zion for decades, but membership at Mount Zion was now less than 10. Maud Torrence, Mount Zion’s matriarch and Beaulah’s mother, died in 2000 at age 103. A fire in her former bedroom destroyed most of the records of the church. Bobby Torrence, Beaulah’s brother and the second-to-last member of Mount Zion, died in 2004. His wake in Mount Zion was the last formal service in the church. For a time afterwards there were Sunday school and choir practice, but with Beaulah as the only member the church had no more forward momentum.
Someone from Ocoee showed up wanting to fix Mount Zion up to begin services with another congregation; he made some improvements (including putting up drywall on the walls and ceiling and painting), but thieves kept breaking into the church and stealing things — the electric meter, copper tubing on the air conditioning. When he gave up, Mount Zion entered its formal free-fall the present. Windows were broken and animals and vagrants moved in (some vagrants slept under the church). Weeds grew tall and taller; the entire building seemed to sag.
Curious about the old cemetery up on the hill across 441, in September I made two attempts to find the site, approaching first on the Publix side to the north and then again from the south on the empty lot used for fill dirt by Danny Martinez Inc. From the Publix side there wasn’t much — one area strewn with dozens of quart beer bottles — and the south side of the ridge had been gouged into by front-end loaders shoveling out dirt. Had the cemetery been destroyed? Inquiries with the state gave little optimism for historic preservation on private property.
Things weren’t looking any better for Mount Zion. The church is in a sort of no-man’s land, outside Mount Dora city limits and Lake County (it sits in unincorported Orange County) — out of reach of any zoning or historic preservation ordinance which might give it some lasting protection. In 1993 the church was included in a survey of historic buildings in northeast Orange County (the mention is on the site master file of the state’s Division of Historic Resources). An attempt was made to get Mount Zion listed on the National Register about then, but failed because the building had been added onto in the ’60s when they added an office and bathrooms. And in 2010, the Apopka Historical Society added Mount Zion to its register of historic places in northeast Orange County.
Unfortunately, none of this could was helping Mount Zion from decaying out of existence. Even the historic board which had sent me on my errand could do nothing more to help than advocate for its preservation by someone else.
But who?
Next: No Bell, But a Calling (Appeals to help Mount Zion go out)
David Cohea is executive director of the Mount Dora-based Live Oak Collective
