Mount Zion Primitive Baptist Church
4. Preserving History Means More Than A Fresh Coat of White Paint
When writing about the Mount Dora Country Club community last January, I heard about an African-American cemetery, now abandoned, wedged in a 2-acre plot adjacent to the property. I visited the cemetery one day and was saddened to see how much of it had simply disappeared under years of Florida wilderness, hard tack growing inexorably back. The story of that encounter —one full of questions but few answers — prompted the following email from Sandy Trzaska, a resident of the Country Club who lives next to the cemetery:
I meet years ago a very nice women all dressed up in her Sunday best and she asked can I go in the cemetery and visit my father grave. She was very elderly. I said yes and I will go with you. She went straight to his grave even with all of the trees and underbrush down. She told me how they used to carry in the wood caskets on the shoulders of their family members from 441 to this cemetery. She stated that there were many people buried in there as this was the first African-American cemetery for Mount Dora. Now, she stated they bury in the Britt Road cemetery (Edgewood).
She said most of the families are all gone now and I am sure she is probably gone too. But what a sweet woman. She would come all dressed up and put flowers on her Father’s grave. I used to continue putting flowers for her but now more trees have fallen and now I cannot find her Father.
Since then, I’ve kept in contact with Sandy and several other residents of the Country Club who want to see that cemetery restored — removing decades of forest debris, locating graves, setting in new markers — the sort of work accomplished in Mount Carmel-Simpson in 2010. Cal Rolfson, who holds the second district seat on Mount Dora council and represents both the Country Club and the Northeast Community, is a strong advocate for the project.
If the community preserves that cemetery — re-creating that hallowed resting place for the dead in a setting of shady trees and calm breezes, apart from modern homes and golf greens — is there a chance that living descendants of these figures from Mount Dora’s history will return?
Similarly, if Mount Zion Primitive Baptist Church can be restored — shored up, secured, tented, repaired and painted, perhaps to much of its former glory — will the congregants return? Will the choir sing those old songs, will the faithful wash each others’ feet again?
A sobering lesson comes from the Mount Carmel-Simpson cemetery preservation project. Six years later, the one-acre lot with its 66 marked graves is the space orderly, tidy, respectful — and still abandoned.
Sam Sadler III spoke of going once a week into the cemetery for several months after the project’s completion, eating a lunch while sitting with his back against the same old virgin pine he had originally rested against when first envisioning the project. Not once did he see any family members come to pay their respects.
“It was sad that no one really seemed to care or ever volunteered their help to keep this little cemetery respectful for their own families,” he says.
Do they not want this history, or is it that that there’s no one left? Whichever is true, both have troubling implications for Mount Dora.
Mount Dora and Tangerine’s black communities are much smaller now— kids finish school and move away; economic opportunities, never great to begin with, don’t even have the citrus industry as a base. So many have moved away, and an ever-smaller remainder live on. (Mount Carmel Missionary Church in Tangerine, where most of Mount Zion’s congregants moved to years ago, itself has few congregants any more.)
Restoring Mount Zion for use again where it stands may prove the same as the Mount Carmel Simpson cemetery — doors wide open, no one coming through.
So be warned: Just because you preserve a past story, that doesn’t mean that it will have any future one to tell.
But preservation is rewarding in a wholly different way, for it enables history to be experienced — felt — by living generations to come who may not even be aware of their connection to the past.
According to the National Trust for Historic Preservation website, “Historic places create connections to our heritage that help us understand our past, appreciate our triumphs, and learn from our mistakes. Historic places help define and distinguish our communities by building a strong sense of identity.”
The problem lies in the decision what to preserve. Mount Dora’s historic preservation district is on the National Register of Historic Places, as well as individual structures like the Atlantic Coastline Depot, Lakeside Inn and Donnelly House. (Witherspoon Lodge, one of the state’s oldest black Masonic lodges, is the only structure outside the downtown historic district on the National Register). Almost all of the city’s recognized historic structures are downtown, but is there no other history to be found elsewhere? What does Mount Zion have to say about the generations of citizens who worked, prayed and died here?
There are parts of history which are difficult to embrace, but selective histories run the danger of selling us short. Life is a big, noisy picture. You can’t separate the history you like from the history you don’ twithout paying a certain cost. Isn’t it time to widen the doors?
Race relations in Mount Dora have a history which may explain why these empty African-American spaces may bedifficult to restore. Granted, Mount Dora’s sins are much smaller in the regional account than in places like Rosewood and Groveland and Ocoee. Refugees from those places came here for shelter and peace. Our history has more good than bad. But promoting one while neglecting the other leaves a stain which the conscience of the city — and its future — cannot afford. It’s whitewash.
Black and whites worked fairly close together in the city’s early history, but then downtown was purged of color to make properties more salable. Blacks and whites danced in the Grandview jazz joints of the ’20s, but there was a code and when it was violated, white men came back in hoods. Black workers were found in white houses, but never the other way around. Black students were finally admitted to white Mount Dora schools starting in 1965, but for years after, black students were treated like inferiors by white teachers. The second district was created to allow more participation in city government by the East Town community, but since the Country Club was built in the 1990s and became part of that district, no blacks have served on council since. No black coffin was admitted in the city’s main cemetery until after 1984. Water and sewer is still substandard in the Northeast community. And all the development surging on the city’s much further east side may make its properties again too valuable for a black community to reside in.
Similar things could be said for Mount Zion. The church was dragged some distance to make room for groves, and then moved again when Mount Dora decided to reroute traffic away from its core. The white community came out to help paint Mount Zion, but when there was a better use for the property it stood on, it got moved again. Its cemetery was left alone after the church was moved, but eventually when the groves were torn down and clay and sand were harvested from there, it may have been destroyed.
Not bad, compared to other communities … but good enough?
Whether the city’s black community can or will resume ownership of this part of its history, the whole Mount Dora community can make an important step toward healing its own divided past by honoring these neglected parts of its history.
And if we don’t get better about how we tell our history, the stain will lengthen. Consider this: while households in the top income tier (earning more than $200,000 a year) was the fastest-growing segment of the Mount Dora population between 2000 and 2015 (increasing nearly 250%), the poverty rate in the city continues to grow, reaching nearly 17 percent in 2015. The Northeast community still doesn’t have adequate storm drainage, but there’s a 115-million gallon reclaimed water reservoir out at Thrill Hill waiting to service all the new development which will double Mount Dora’s size and population in the next 15 years.
What is the true distance from Mount Zion to downtown, the fate of one from the prosperity of another? How many years of privilege separates the abandoned cemetery from the Mount Dora Country Club it is wedged next to?
“One can measure very neatly the white American’s distance from his conscience — from himself — by observing the distance from white America to black America,” James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time, published in 1963. That distance has not closed since then — evidence the massively segregated cities of Detroit and St. Louis and Chicago. It’s also why other places with the same problems — Tulsa, Charlotte — are found almost nightly on the news.
So how far is Mount Dora now from a place like Charlotte, a city which has remade itself for the 21st century as a bustling financial center, named by U.S. News and World Reports as one of the best places in the nation to live? That’s sort of praise was recently heaped by Southern Living Magazine when it called Mount Dora one of five small towns it loved best. But Charlotte’s superlatives don’t extend to its predominantly black West and Northeast sections, which are poor and in the middle of a grueling drug war. Heroin addiction is spreading through the white suburbs, but where black downtown residents are in constant conflict with police over drug enforcement, in the suburbs heroin is treated as a health crisis.
And in Mount Dora, it is still a long, long way from East Town to downtown.
Unequal histories result in divided communities: That remains in Mount Dora, and the division grows even as disenfranchised communities empty out. We’re still left with the stain, and will do so until it’s addressed or it drives us away, too. Mount Dora’s festivals are white as snow, its new development is even whiter, its politics are white and its downtown is white. It can make you feel that Someplace Special is someplace white, and that’s a very dangerous assumption to foster.
Let’s remember that the Smithsonian African-American History Museum opened this past weekend, across from the Washington Monument — a hundred years after government funding for the museum first stalled in Congress. (In 1915—the same year that D.W. Griffith’s racist epic The Birth of A Nation captivated audiences across the United States—a group of black Civil War veterans went to Washinton ask for a memorial for the sacrifices of African-Americans in that conflict; the idea never could clear Congress, and the museum decades late and largely from public-private sources.) The experience of this new museum is said to be both uplifting and unsettling, a reviewer in the New York Times recently wrote. “Its great that the museum mixes everything together: It means you can’t just select a comfortable version of history.”
We should never feel our history is settled. Every new opportunity to restore and preserve it is a chance to stand closer to the real middle of history, to find ourselves a part of a living document we can help write — or simply forget, go our separate ways, hunker down as we do and tune out as best we can.
The choice is always ours, but our fate rests in the way we turn each time.
—David Cohea (djcohea@gmail.com)
In this series about Mount Carmel 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
