Pistolville (1) Finding Pistolville
Mount Dora once had a Pistolville. It may have just moved down the road a ways (part one of a three part-series)
The Wrong Side of Town
Back in the day, the other side of the tracks for white folks in Mount Dora was Pistolville (also Pistelville). It was Clayton south to Tangerine and First Avenue east of Highland on the road towards Sorrento. Pistolville was where the poor white folk lived, laborers and grove workers. Before there was blue collar, there was cracker, and Mount Dora’s cracker district was not a place good folks cared to think about, much less dared to visit.
Records about Pistolville are sketchy and anecdotal. Back in the city’s earliest history, East Town blacks and Pistolville whites worked side by side in the sawmills east of downtown and laboring in the groves. By night, the business of Pistolville was shadier — moonshine trafficking and illegal gambling and the sort of hell-raising that sure put brimstone in a Sunday sermon.
Pistolville men loved to shake it up in the Grandview dance halls in East Town. The rule back in the 1920s was that a white man could ask a black woman to dance, but a black man could not ask a white woman the same. In 1923 an East Town man decided to challenge that rule, causing all the white men of Pistolville to leave in a huff. A while later they returned in their Klan robes with a cross on fire.
That first year it happened, folks in East Town fled for the deep woods just beyond the last house on the street. That was usual way to fend off recurrent outbreaks of racial rage. The next year there was another incident: a white man propositioned a married black woman. In the ensuing argument with the woman’s husband, the white man was shot and killed. The men of Pistolville again left and returned in their Klan robes, but this time on every East Town porch there was a black man with a shotgun. That was the last major incident of conflict between East Town and Pistolville.
(Note: This story is about the troubles in Pistolville back then and now, and so while the difficulties of Mount Dora’s African-American Northeast Community may run deeper, it is important to also look at how lack of economic opportunity has affected other areas of Mount Dora as well.)
For decades, Pistolville was a bad place in Mount Dora. It didn’t get much press. Mount Dora’s news belonged to the privileged, its happy tribe of snowbirds, the varied fortunes of Mount Dora’s football team, the Golden Hurricanes, and city council’s wrangling over sewage, annexation of Sylvan Shores and relocating US-441.
When three black men were arrested for the rape of a teenaged Groveland girl in 1949, the fourth was chased down in a Gainesville swamp by a posse led by Sheriff Willis McCall and shot so many times father couldn’t identify son in the morgue the next day. The three survivors were taken to the cellar of the Lake County courthouse, forced to stand barefooted on broken Coke bottles and beaten with lead-filled pipes until two signed confessions to the rape. One of the deputies handling of the “interrogation” was Deputy James Yates, a former Mount Dora police officer who lived in Pistolville.
And when Allen Platt and his family moved to Pistolville in 1954 to work in Mount Dora’s fruit groves, the North Carolina man tried to get his six children enrolled in the Mount Dora School. However, some kids there thought the Platt siblings didn’t “look white enough,” and Lake County’s sheriff Willis McCall weighed in and agreed, saying they couldn’t attend because they were mulattoes (back then, you could have no more than 1/16 black parentage to be considered white.) When a mob showed up at their house on Plymouth Ave. and hurled an incendiary device into the grove next to their house, the Platts chased them off with guns. Mrs. Platt was furious, both at the action of the mob and someone’s attempt to question the Platt’s lineage back in North Carolina. “You don’t call your kin a nigger and get away with it,” she said. Mabel Norris Reese, then-editor of the Mount Dora Topic, became a champion of the Platt family, standing up resolutely against Sheriff McCall. Back then, it seems, calling a white Pistolville family black was almost as bad as being black.
Robert Bowie, author of A Roast For Coach Dan Spear and a Mount Doran who grew up playing football for the Golden Hurricanes in the 1950, remembered Pistolville this way in an e-mail.
I felt that there were four distinct divisions of Mt. Dora in the fifties: (1) middle-class Mt. Dora, including some quite lower middle-class people, located in the center of the town (2) “poor white trash,” Pistolville (3) black Mt. Dora: East Town (4) Rich folks: Sylvan Shores. The great majority of residents back then were supporting themselves by working in the citrus industry.
The snowbirds, some of them rich enough to live in Sylvan Shores, many others not that rich, constituted quite a large percentage of the population back then, maybe 20–30%, so that in the winter there were a lot more people living there than in the summer. Sorrento was another sort of Pistolville, just a bit farther away.
The Pistolville kids were looked down on by the other kids at Mt. Dora School. I recall that many of them in the fifties came to school barefoot, apparently because their parents could not afford shoes. A kid living today would find that hard to conceive of. I can’t think of a single Pistolville kid who was a high achiever at school. It was generally accepted that they were poor and ignorant, and they seemed to have no particular aspirations. A lot of them quit school when they reached the legal quitting age of sixteen. I recall some of them being two-three grades behind by then.
Novelist Pat Frank’s 1959 novel Alas, Babylon, set in a fictional version of Mount Dora, offers one of the few descriptions of Mount Dora’s Pistolville back in the day. Living in a big old house on Lake Beauclaire in Tangerine, Frank looked up the road to Mount Dora and saw a lot of Pistolville. He takes us though it four months after nuclear warfare has wiped out most of the country. Things have fallen a long way in Fort Repose (the fictional setting of Mount Dora) — but somehow the terrain (and even name) of Pistolville has simply become more of itself, the way the worst habits of a life come back to haunt the old:
… They bounced along for a block and then Randy smelled Pistolville. Another block and they were in it.
There had been no garbage collections since The Day. In Pistolville each hut or house squatted in a mound of its own excretion — crushed crates and cartons, rusting tin cans, broken bottles, rotting piles of citrus rusks and pecan shells, the bones of fowl, fish, and small animals. A tallow-faced, six-year-old girl, clad in a man’s castoff, riddled T-shirt, crouched on the curb, emptying her bowels in the dust. She cried out shrilly and waved as the Model-A bounced past. A breaded, long-haired man burst out of a doorway and jogged down the street on bandy legs, peeling and eating a banana, turning his head as if he expected to be followed. At the corner a scrawny boy of eighteen urinated against a lamp post, not bothering to raise his eyes at the sound of the car. Buzzards, grown arrogant, roosted in the oaks and foraged in the refuse. Of mongrel dogs, cats, partihued pigs, chickens and pigeons — all normal impediments to navigation on the streets of Pistolville — no trace remained.
While East Town was separate from the Mount Dora main, Pistolville — the unskilled, redneck, hell-raising white side of town — didn’t get much notice, either, unless there was trouble with the law. And if they sometimes didn’t look white enough, well, it was assumed they sometimes didn’t act white enough, either.
When the wife of a wealthy Leesburg citrus grower was raped in 1958, a black perpetrator was found almost immediately by Lake County Sherriff Willis McCall–an Oklahumpa black youth named Melvin Hawkins. It was frame-up and the charges didn’t stick — Hawkins’ family had an airtight alibi for the boy — and so within days a poor, white, mentally challenged teen named Jesse Daniels was nabbed and held until he confessed, even though the woman insisted that her rapist was black.
Because the likely perpetrator had worked in the family grove, it was easier for the family that poor white trash down the road instead be named. Daniels was convicted of the rape and served a life sentence at a mental hospital in Chattahoochee while Mabel Norris Reese unflaggingly campaigned on his behalf. Fourteen years later he was released and the actual rapist was never nabbed, despite a number more rapes in Lake County.
East Town isn’t what it used to be — all the big dance halls and bars and eateries are gone — but at least it still has boundaries. Pistolville has all but vanished. Some of it was erased when US-441 was relocated east of town, and some of it gentrified into the respectable enough digs in the First District,
You have to look hard to find any traces of Pistolville.
In Mount Dora, that is.
A Tale of Three Cities
Back in 1950’s, Lake County was one of the wealthiest counties in the United States. Frozen orange juice had revolutionized the industry, and Central Florida was one of the prime beneficiaries. Grove labor was cheap (Sheriff McCall and his deputies made damned sure that union organizers stayed out and workers stayed terrified) and the grove owners were powerful. Wherever you drove in Lake County, towering orange groves crowded the roads with orderly rows which receded for miles.
Citrus production peaked in Lake County in 1979 when 44 million boxes were picked. Then came the big freezes of 1981, 1983, 1985 and 1989. Within a decade, Lake County had lost 92% of its citrus production capacity and most of the big grove owners moved south of Hwy. 50. In 2014, 2.82 million boxes were picked in Lake County. Once the area’s biggest employer, citrus (along with other agriculture and mining operations) now employs only 2 percent of Lake County workers.
Absent that big economic gun, jobs in Lake county have been mostly in construction, retail, healthcare, leisure and hospitality and government — or simply elsewhere, as many commute to Orlando to work.
Three cities — the Villages, Leesburg and Mount Dora — tell the approximate story of Lake County after the fall of citrus.
The Villages is a retirement community which represents residential development at its extreme. Beginning in the 1960s as Orange Blossom Garden, a 400-unit mobile home park, developer Harold Schwartz and son Gary Morse evolved the vision to one of an amenity-loaded retirement community. By the mid 1980s the development began booming. The Morse family is now said to be worth $2.5 billion.
With a 2015 population of 118,891, the Villages was the fastest-growing metro area in the entire United States, and for the third consecutive year in a row. Attracting blue-collar retirees from Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan, median household income in 2014 was $55,708. Jubilant to the point of reckless abandon, residents seem intent on leaving not one cent behind as they race their golf courts all over the manufactured coziness, party in the square with something close to the Dionysia of the 1960’s, and vote steadfastly Republican.
Incorporated in 1857, Leesburg was the county seat of Sumter until Lake County formed in 1887. An agricultural town, watermelon was the principal crop until citrus production took over. When the grove owners moved south after the big freezes of the 1980s, Leesburg went into an economic winter of sorts.
Leesburg’s population in 2014 was of 20,512 in 2014, up 28% from 2000. Median household income was $33,846 — up a respectable 30% from 2000 — mostly due to new development a ways south of the city core, around Lake Square Mall. But that belies that 22.2% of Leesburg’s population in 2014 was living under the poverty level, the most in the county. Residential areas close to downtown are in poor condition and housing values continue to fall. Hemmed by sunnier development north in the Villages and Mount Dora to the south, Leesburg is seedier with crime and drugs. Seen as a party town, its major events are Mardi Gras in the fall and Leesburg Bikefest in the spring.
Mount Dora’s early roots were in citrus, but over the years its economy grew around tourism with wealthy winter visitors and snowbirds. Its relative vicinity to Orlando made it attractive to commuters in the 1980s, and the 429 toll road made it more accessible to executives working in Disney.
Mount Dora’s population in 2014 was 12,663, up 34% from 2000. Median household income in 2014 was $48,634, up an incredible 43% over 2000.
The number of Mount Dora households compared between 2000 to 2014 were as follows (showing the percentage change over that span):
The change in median household income comes at the top, with a dramatic increase in the number of upper-income households on the city’s east side.
To wit, in 15 years, Mount Dora’s 1% grew by nearly 250%.
Significant to note that the $15,000-$24,999 household income group shrank 40 percent; while it might be hoped that some of these have moved up to the next income group, households in this income group may instead be finding it harder to survive and have moved on. (Affordable housing in Lake County is a real problem, with average rents over $1,000 a month hardly in range for people working minimum-wage jobs.)
And despite the impressive gain in median household income in Mount Dora, 16.9% of Mount Dora households were living below the poverty level in 2014, compared to 15.6% in 2000. Wealth is dramatically increasing in Mount Dora, but that has been of no apparent benefit for the city’s poor.
Most of those living in poverty reside in all-black Northeast Community and the remnants of Pistolville. When public comment was held on March 1 for the proposed 22% increase in water and wastewater utility rates, several residents of Dora Pines, a trailer park on the east side of town, got up to speak on how every cent counts there, where most of the residents live on Social Security alone and in 35-year-old double-wides.
All of the new growth in Mount Dora’s east side will continue to push the overall wealth needle up, but those left behind in those gains are finding it increasingly difficult to live in Mount Dora. Many end up moving down the road, into poorer communities largely left behind as the state continues is rush after the golden fruit.
(Note: First District representative Laurie Tillett was asked to comment on economic conditions in the district which covers old Pistolville for this article, but she did not respond.)
Guns and Drugs
Thanks to our police department’s excellent work over the past few years, Mount Dora’s 2013 crime rate of 293.0 was running less than half the rate it was in 2001 (654.8); the national average in 2013 was 294. (The crime rate is the number of offenses per 100,000 population.)
Deputy Robert Bell of the Mount Dora police told me that since drug units were put into play in 2000, drug-related crimes have fallen dramatically in the city, with the overall crime rate down 1.25% in 2015 from the year previous. “It took quite a while to clean up certain areas,” he says, adding that he hadn’t seen any uptick in criminal activity that might be drug-related. He knew of no arrests for heroin possession or of any heroin overdoes in the city. “Fingers crossed that’s something we won’t have to deal with,” he said.
For Leesburg, the crime rate has similarly declined, from 860.0 in 2001 to 415.1 in 2013. However, if there ever was a place which deserved the horrific-honorific title of Pistolville, it would probably be Leesburg, where gun violence skyrocketed in 2015. Here’s just a sampling of shoot-em-ups reported in the Leesburg Commerical last year: A man and his brother driving to buy beer are fired upon by men standing by the side of the road. A teen struggling with a man in a vacant lot is shot. Two teenagers get into a fight in an apartment building parking lot and one of has a gun in his waistband; it falls out and a friend of the other guy picks it up and shoots him. An altercation in the Bojangles restaurant parking lot ends up with two men spraying a car with gunfire, killing one occupant and injuring the other. Gunshots were exchanged outside a convenience store followed by a car chase in which more shots were fired. A 23-year old is shot in the back of the head in a wooded area just beyond a crowded intersection. A man looking for someone who he suspected of burglarizing his daughter’s home pulls a knife on three men and swings; when he misses, he calls out to someone else in his truck who opens fire and shoots all three men. A 32-year old man gets into a fight with his ex-girlfriend’s boyfriend and then pistol whips and shoots him. A woman was shot in her bed after gunfire was exchanged outside her home.
Especially galling to Leesburg law enforcement is that residents remain tight-lipped about these shooting crimes; arrests are hard to make. But then, crime in Leesburg precipitates amid a general air of hopelessness. Poverty, lack of jobs, a large number of juveniles, urbanization, no stake the community — no hope. It doesn’t help either that so many inner core streets have abandoned houses, overgrown lots and garbage is everywhere.
There’s also large homeless population in Leesburg, most of them white, male and living outdoors. Many are veterans with drug and mental problems.
Leesburg city commissioners are well aware of the problem and have taken strides to address it as best they can. The police stepped up traffic stops and the city cracked down on code enforcement on abandoned properties. In Jan. 2016 a Lake County drug-dealing sting netted 117 arrests. One investigation was directed at crystal meth dealers, and the other on street-level dealers. One bust netted a pound of crystal meth valued at $56,000.
If Leesburg seems gun crazy, drug addlement is an ever greater thing to behold there. To wit, these stories from the past year: Police caught a 36-year old man cooking meth in his truck. Another man is stopped by police and ignores instructions to get out; his truck is loaded with drugs and paraphernalia, and since he knows he’s going to jail, he spends his last free minutes smoking a cigarette. Three people are busted cooking meth in their house. A man high on meth tries to yank another man from his car in an attempted carjacking; police later found him standing in the middle of the road. A woman motorist is arrested on DUI and drug possession charges after leaving a bar and almost running head-on into a squad car. A man high on meth jumps out in front of a deputy’s car and starts dancing. A homeless woman is cooking meth in a shed behind her grandfather’s house; when a juvenile finds her back there, she asks if he would like to help. When he says no, she flees back into the woods. A 30-year-old man bludgeons his father to death with a hammer and buries the body behind his Leesburg home, making off with his father’s possessions to sell for drugs. A man under the influence of drugs is arrested when he starts changing his clothes in the middle of a Steak ’n’ Shake and then falls asleep while talking to police. A 48-year-old McDonald’s employee with a long rap sheet for drug charges was arrested after being accused of stealing the restaurant’s $1,720 night deposit. Two guys who go to an abandoned house to buy eroin are jumped by two other guys in masked and one is shot in the stomach. Police busted a house after getting a tip about narcotics trade and gunfire and arrest three, taking in a haul of guns, ammo, heroin, Xanax, digital scales and counterfeit $50 bills.
There are also arrests for property crimes whose toll point to drug addiction — retail theft, identity theft, check forgery, car break-ins and house burglaries, petit and grand theft, dealing in stolen property — half the arrests in Lake County were in Leesburg alone in 2014.
Pistolville may have moved down the road, but it cannot go away. Not until we figure out how to face its pain.
— David Cohea (djcohea@gmail.com)
Next: A World of Pain
“Pistolville” is a three-part series:
1. Finding Pistolville
2. A World of Pain
3: Pistolville Comes Home
