Untold Stories of Mount Dora: East Town
What is now called the Northeast Community has for too long been sidelined from the city’s main narrative.
History is written by the victors, it is said. “I came, I saw, I conquered,” said Julius Caesar. It also helps to have hand in the work. (“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it,” said Winston Churchill.)
Perhaps because so many love this town, Mount Dora is awash in histories. The first account is History of Lake County Florida (1929) by Prof. William T. Kennedy; the most recent, A Brief History of Mount Dora by Gary McKechnie and Nancy Howell, releases in a few weeks.
For some of Mount Dora’s black residents, too much of their story has been omitted from the city’s main narratives. This is perhaps why what is now called the Northeast Community lives in such isolation from the rest of the city. As in many small Southern towns with a past, including the Northeast Community’s tale may be the only way Mount Dora’s history can be fully accounted for.
Vivian Owens’s history The Mount Dorans; African American History Notes of a Florida Town (2000) is one such attempt. (The same year, R. Eugene Varley published another African-American history of Mount Dora titled Mount Dora: The Rest of the Story Plus!)
Owens, an educator and writer, is also the founder of Eschar Publications, which is dedicated to helping parents improve their children’s academic performance. She grew up in East Town and lives now in Eustis.
The framing quote of Owens’ account comes from Booker T. Washington: “The true measure of success is not what a man has completed, but rather, the obstacles he has overcome trying to succeed.” Perhaps this is why The Mount Dorans is an oral history, careful to name names — much of their achievement is in that they endured.
In Owens’ account, freed slaves remarkably well among white settlers in the earliest years of Mount Dora (1850–1870), what was then a tiny but successful farming community located roughly in what is now downtown. There was work in pulp wood, citrus, dairies, turpentine mills, saw mills and farming.
Nancy Page was one of the first black settlers, and she and her granddaughter Lottie Ebert bought up much property both downtown and in an area just to the north, which would later be called East Town. Of the grandmother, it was said she was smart in real estate, had the most beautiful skin, and could pick oranges faster than any man. The granddaughter shared all of the same qualities (plus a certain weakness for gambling).
Many other African American families owned houses downtown; Lee and Ruth Bennet owned one on the spot where the first police station was later built in 1923. There were the Butlers, the Codys, Adams, Harts, Bowmans and Williams. A number of black families rented small houses in what is now Gilbert Park; back then is was called Stokely’s Bottom, and was for workers in the Stokely sawmill. The Lakeside Inn property was first homesteaded by the Reverend P. W. Adams, who died in 1984.
Then comes the money. Up into the early 1920s, blacks lived all over Mount Dora — downtown, Pistolville, Wolf Branch and East Town, sharing black schools and churches. Then came the land boom of the second decade of the twentieth century, with wealthy white people looking for winter residences in Florida, as well as professional and other middle-class whites looking to re-settle here. Downtown land became valuable — and a easier without black neighbors.
Mount Dora’s Redevelopment Project forced all of the blacks downtown to relocate to East Town. It wasn’t without some resistance. Vannie Monroe faced the Redevelopment Group to voice her opposition; she was supposedly threatened with lynching and her house was loaded up on a flatbed truck to take it to East Town, with her cursing her ex-neighbors all the way.
Owens writes,
Perhaps this relocation procedure awakened the first political instincts in Mount Dorans. Heretofore, they had lived with relatively little disturbance from the white community. A peaceful co-existence had attracted a growing number of historically disenfranchised people to this small Florida town with its lake that flowed through the heart of a burgeoning highway.
No doubt, after the Redevelopment Project, individuals looked around themselves and thought how vulnerable they were in such a scattered assembly. What they had accepted as “peace” was perhaps only isolations. … With new realization, the Mount Dorans reassessed their standing in the territory and came to grips with their situation.
East Town would become a community in itself, enjoying for decades a sense of economic independence which, perhaps, may not be as evident there now. There was James’ Fish Market, Calbert’s Grocery Store, Burke’s Restaurant and Dance Hall. According to Owens, the front streets of East Town bustled with eateries and saloons. There were many churches, including St. Mary’s Baptist, Mount Olive A.M.E., the Primitive Baptist Church and Apostolic Faith Church. Folks attended church several nights a week and also Sundays without fail. School classes were first held at St. Mary’s, followed by Mt. Olive A.M.E and then the Masonic Hall until Milner-Roswenwald Academy was built in 1926.
The Donnelly Subdivision brought a new housing concept to East Town. Formerly, houses were built some distance apart to allow for farming; the Donnelly housing plan built houses close together, and many more people were encouraged to buy homes. Hamp Jackson, who worked closely with J.P. Donnelly to build the subdivision (and whom Jackson Street was named after), once said, “land ownership is important to family stability.”
The book has chapters profiling leading citizens, the importance of churches, business entrepreneurs, accounts of racism and injustice, community leadership, the beginnings of political influence, and anecdotes of old Mount Dora from folks still living in the area.
For several decades after the relocation, East Town settled into relative independence. On Saturday nights, while wealthy whites danced to combos at the Lakeside Inn, blue-collar whites came from Pistolville to dance in East Town speakeasies, which had the best music around. It was said that a white man could ask a black woman to dance but not the other way around.
In the ’20s and ’30s, Mount Dora’s black residents had relative security from Jim Crow violence in surrounding areas. One night, in the same year as the 1923 Rosewood massacre, the KKK rode into East Town brandishing shotguns, looking for a black man who had danced with a Pistolville woman. (A white man could ask a black woman to dance at East Town speakeasies, but the reverse was forbidden.) The man was shot and killed, but when the white-masked riders threatened to riot through East Town, residents then took to their porches with their own guns and stood fast. The KKK never rode back in and quiet returned to the city.
Tensions heightened again In the late ’40s during the trial of the Groveland Four. When Klansmen rode into Groveland emptying buckshot into buildings and then setting them on fire, black residents headed for the woods or escaped elsewhere, many into East Town. The Klan rode through East Town, too, burning logs on yards and keeping the locals inside their houses with lights dim and shotguns by their sides. Owens writes, “They were afraid to go to jobs in white neighborhoods or to downtown stores, for one never knew the identity of klansmen. Your boss or other seemingly respectable passerby may have been klansmen.”
The unsettled business of the Groveland Trial and continued racial tensions in the ’50s and ’60s stirred by Brown vs. the Board of Education, the heavy hand of Lake County Sherriff Willis McCall, and deep Klan affiliations in law enforcement throughout Central Florida kept East Town apart from Mount Dora. It was a different world with a harsher reality than the white idylls of small-town Mount Dora life of that era.
A truly chilling incident, not included in Owens’ book, but which she later shared with me, was the 1949 arrest of the son of a deacon of St. Mary’s Church on the charge of rape. A ministers’ group went to city council to ask for them to intercede on the boy’s behalf. A number of ministers went on a fast awaiting their decision; Owens remembers as a child participating in the fast. But before council could decide, the boy was allegedly taken out into the woods and killed by Sheriff McCall’s dogs.
Mount Dora’s eventual integration did go more smoothly than elsewhere in surrounding Lake County, due in part, Owens says, to the influence of some of the city’s leading families seeped in more progressive Yankee roots. However, while white teachers in Mount Dora schools may have been compliant in spirit, they were discriminating in attitude. The black students were tracked into low-ability groups with lower expectations and lowered academic challenges. “The general perception was that black students were under-educated,” Owens says. “White students didn’t believe that black students their age were of their ability.” Until black teachers began to populate the school, poor performance was expected and ordained.
A continuing bone of contention in East Town is the Milner Rosenwald Academy that became named Mount Dora Middle School in 1970. The change of name has always been resented, as the community cherished that institution and felt taking away its name did a disservice to the quality education it had provided.
The book praises some of the East Town leaders who were staunch defenders of education, family and community — the educator Cauley O. Lott, principal of Milner Rosenwald Academy from 1947 to 1970, Mamie Lee Gilbert whose Helping Hands Club provided immense assistance to families in need and who was president of the Lake County NAACP at the end of the Second World War, and Robert E. Terrrell, Jr. who founded the Ne Plus Ultra Civic Club which sponsored community events and provided social services for fifty years.
The gradual and late involvement of black Mount Dorans in city government is described as “political seeds taking root.” In the city’s early days, the most influence a black could have in his town was through relations with powerful whites, as Hamp Jackson had with the city’s first mayor, J.P. Donnelly. According Lavond Clayton, proprietor of the Orange Blossom Inn — who ran for city council in 1982, personal bonds back then were political: “An unwritten agreement existed which said these people would promote legislation, ordinances, or any ideas needed to improve your general welfare. Their sense of civil rights became personal, if they valued you. If you discovered you were employed by a rich bigot, you cut your ties.”
Clayton, who failed to get elected, remained active in local politics, attending council meetings and serving the city’s planning and zoning committee, fighting a certain creep — gentrification, maybe — that changed business zones and historically African American properties like Milner Rosenwald and the East Town Swimming pool into city functions that still violated civil rights. (In 1984, Clayton requested burial plots in Pine Forest Cemetery and was told no black were buried there. Clayton pointed out that the cemetery indeed had black residents — before J.P. Donnelly donated the land for use by the city, 52 blacks had been buried there (including one who had apparently been lynched downtown.) Clayton died this year at age 97.
Cauley Lott was the first black to serve on council, elected in 1970 and serving 8 years. In 1978 he was succeeded by Nathaniel Bell, assistant principal at Mount Dora Middle. Bell served on council for four years. Faye Brooks won a council seat in 1981, and for a year, there were two blacks serving on Mount Dora’s then-seven-seat council. The city’s charter was revised in 1984 to incorporate a single-member districting system that would better allow for minority representation; Brooks resigned her at-large seat, ran for the newly-created District 2 seat and won, serving on council for the next eight years.
There were other achievements. Mount Dora got its first black city manager, its first black police chief, its first black homecoming queen.
Unfortunately, these firsts have not been repeated. And with the Second District enlarged to include the Mount Dora Country Club, Mount Dora hasn’t had a black representative on council since 2000.
At the book’s close, Owens mentioned concerns in the black community about the city trying to acquire desirable East Town properties through punitive liens. She also listed internal needs to be addressed, like reducing teen pregnancies, ridding the area of drugs, providing places to socialize and activities, encourage entrepreneurship, increase communication between black residents and the city and maintain strong community connections through church and community organizations.
Owens says that when the book was published in 2000, it received a warm reception both from the city’s black and white residents.
Asked how she thinks things have fared for Mount Dora’s black community in the 15 years since, she says that since economic opportunities are still scant, the talent drain has been huge. And with a dropout rate currently around 50% for for black males, improved education strategies are critical. Black citizens could use leadership training to help them present their concerns to council. And there is a continued fear — enhanced, perhaps, by news of the coming Innovation District — that gentrification will creep more deeply into the community and taking more homes away from the black community.
Still, the words of hope that conclude The Mount Dorans still ring true:
Children of previous generations have triumphed over the hardships and moved toward greater hopes and dreams. They extend a vision of hope to those who now claim childhoods in the city.
Mount Dorans look forward to the future by plucking values from their past. They will use these values as they embrace a new Century and new Millennium, adding new values and ne goals to build a strong, multicultural society.”
Vivian Owens’ The Mount Dorans is available at Amazon.
— David Cohea (djcohea@gmail.com)
Originally published at www.mountdoracitizen.com on December 12, 2015.
