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  • Florida History Today
    • TB Times: St. Augustine coming to grips with civil rights history
    • Strawberry Festival organizers collecting material for new history book
    • Tarpon Springs' Greektown added to National Register as Traditional Cultural Property
    • Volunteers begin cleanup of historic Ocala cemetery
    • Jax museum presents 'Megalodon,' biggest-ever shark
    • Proposed museum switch generates anger in St. Pete
    • Report: Ocala's original cemetery lying in ruins
    • Rock and Roll Hall of Fame seeking camera-wielding Elvis fans
    • Service of Florida Jews in World War II focus of new WLRN doc
    • Seventeen honored for Big Bend preservation efforts
    • Long dresses, long pants, no shorts: Life before AC was uncool
    • Sunken shipwrecks are being turned into "parks" off Florida coast
    • Run-down Dunedin hotel to be rebuilt in same architectural style
    • Painting at Ringling Museum leads scholar to discover slavery roots of Spanish painter Juan de Pareja
    • Hampton Inn in downtown Bradenton gets state historic preservation award
    • Civil War re-enactment draws criticism in Holly Hill
    • New documentary spotlights Anna Maria Historic Green Village
    • Tampa-area NAACP launching effort to save historic rooming house
    • Ride on "America's Movie Train" this weekend in Ocoee, Winter Garden
    • Tampa's historic Kress building set for reimagination
    • 67-year-old shipwreck off Florida identified
    • Florida History Today - Project studies South Florida native communites
    • Florida History Today - Tarpon Springs halts Sponge Docks upgrades
    • Florida History Today - Compromise reached on Tequesta circles preservation
    • Florida History Today - Sears homes remembered in Sanibel
  • On this day in Florida history - August
    • Aug. 15, 1887 - Eatonville becomes one of first all-black towns in U.S.
    • Aug. 13, 2004 - Hurricane Charley kicks off unusually active 'cane year
    • Aug. 12, 1981 - Developed in Boca Raton, first PC released by IBM
    • Aug. 11, 1987 - Santeria church vows to sacrifice animals despite Hialeah ban
    • Aug. 10, 1981 - Tragic discovery confirms death of missing Adam Walsh, 6
    • Aug. 9, 1956 - Reporters look down noses covering Elvis in Daytona Beach
    • Aug. 8, 1896 - Cross Creek, Yearling author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings born
    • Aug. 6, 1868 - Great Seal of the State of Florida adopted by Legislature
    • Aug. 5, 1763 - Britain takes over Pensacola, expands slavery over two-decade Fla. rule
    • Aug. 4, 1842: U.S. gives free Florida land to settlers willing to fight Seminoles
    • Aug. 1, 1939 - Florida Highway Patrol formed; to begin with 60 troopers
  • On this day in Florida history - July
    • July 31, 1962 - Actor, tax evader Wesley Snipes born in Orlando
    • July 30, 1956: Delta Burke, star of tabloids and television, born in Orlando
    • July 28, 1896: With railroad into town, city of Miami incorporated
    • July 27, 1816: U.S. forces obliterate 300+ free blacks, Indians at 'Fort Negro'
    • July 26, 1876 - Daytona incorporated, named after founder Matthias Day
    • July 25, 1884 - St. Petersburg Times debuts as West Hillsborough Times
    • July 25, 1957 - Country star, actress Pam Tillis born in Plant City
    • July 23, 1836 - Cape Florida Lighthouse attacked by Seminoles
    • July 22, 1964 - First 536 home lots sold in new city of Coral Springs
    • July 21, 1821 - St. Johns and Escambia become first two Florida counties
    • July 20, 1969 - U.S. astronauts walk on the moon
    • July 19, 1952 - Skynyrd guitarist Allen Collins is born; stardom and tragedy await
    • July 18, 1940 - Winners of St. Pete mayor's safety slogan contest announced
    • July 17, 1821 - Spain officially transfers Florida to United States
    • July 16, 1943 - Former 'Canes, Dolphins, Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson born
    • July 15, 1997 - Killer gigolo guns down Gianni Versace at South Beach mansion
    • July 14, 1921 - Florida's most famous 'cracker cowboy' dies at 58
    • July 13, 1927: Officials dump $250k in liquor into Gulf Stream
    • July 10, 1972 - First of two major party conventions opens in Miami Beach
    • July 9, 1957 - Pass-a-Grille and three other towns form St. Pete Beach
    • July 8, 2011 - Last space shuttle launched from Cape Canaveral
    • July 7, 1983 - 'Operation Everglades' drug bust rocks Everglades City
    • July 6, 2003 - 'Hillbillies' star Buddy Ebsen, raised in Orlando, dies at 95
    • July 5, 1928 - Elks begin arriving for 1st Florida national convention
    • July 4: Florida celebrates America's Independence Day
    • July 3, 1971 - Doors singer, Melbourne native Jim Morrison dies
    • July 2, 1961: Key West icon Ernest Hemingway dies; cats live on
    • July 1, 1951: St. Pete woman's burning death baffles investigators
  • On this day in Florida history - June
    • June 1, 1937 - Amelia Earhart leaves Miami to begin final voyage
    • June 2, 2008 - Bo Diddley, 79, dies at his home in Archer
    • June 3, 1961 - Arrest made in case that leads to 'right to an attorney'
    • June 4, 1939 - Jewish refugee ship turned away from Florida coast
    • June 5, 2013 - Zephyrhills woman, 84, claims $590 million Powerball jackpot
    • June 6, 1990 - Broward Judge rules 2 Live Crew album 'obscene'
    • June 7, 1928 - Two elections workers shot in Tampa ballot box heist
    • June 8, 1888 - First train rolls into terminus "St. Petersburg"
    • June 9, 1903 - Flagler's Breakers Hotel burns down in Palm Beach
    • June 10, 1991 - South Florida learns it will get new major league baseball team
    • June 11, 1953 - Sabal Palmetto palm becomes Florida's state tree
    • June 12, 1913: With first bridge, Miami Beach is open for business
    • June 13, 1974 - Askew appoints first female Cabinet member
    • June 14, 1966 - FSL's Miami and St. Pete set record for longest baseball game
    • June 15, 1822: City of Jacksonville founded, named after Andrew Jackson
    • June 16, 1955 - Judge Chillingworth and wife go missing
    • June 17. 1942 - German U-boat saboteurs land at Ponte Vedra Beach
    • June 18, 1983 - Sally Ride becomes first American woman in space
    • June 19, 1972 - Hurricane Agnes makes landfall in Panhandle
    • June 20, 2003 - Non-profit Wikipedia established in St. Petersburg
    • June 21, 1926 - Miami barbers don't want to be called 'chirotonsors'
    • June 22, 1990 - Florida bans thong bikinis in state parks
    • June 23, 1938 - Marine Studios, 'world's first oceanarium,' opens
    • June 24, 1987 - S. Fla's most famous resident, Jackie Gleason, dies at 71
    • June 25, 1981 - Dolphins QB Bob Griese retires after 14 seasons
    • June 26, 1964 - Governor orders extra police to riot-torn St. Augustine
    • June 27, 1964 - State tells Daytona: Stop price-gouging your tourists
    • June 28, 1911 - Big Cypress Indian Reservation created by President Taft
    • June 29, 1931 - Monticello hits 109 degrees -- hottest-ever for Florida
    • June 30, 1975 - Cher marries Daytona Beach's favorite son Gregg Allman
  • On this day in Florida history - May
    • May 1, 1562 - Jean Ribault arrives at St. Johns River, claims Florida for France
    • May 2, 1936 - Panama City Beach incorporated in Bay County
    • May 3, 1901 - Jacksonville burns to the ground
    • May 4, 1990 - Execution goes awry as flames, smoke shoot from head
    • May 5, 1961 - Alan Shepard becomes first American in space
    • May 6, 1965 - Rolling Stones play Clearwater, write 'Satisfaction' riff
    • May 7, 1940 - Voting machine shortages create long wait at polls
    • May 8, 1923 - Killings of work camp prisoners detailed in hearing
    • May 9, 1981 - Sinkhole swallows house, five Porsches in Winter Park
    • May 10, 1781 - Spanish Gen. Bernardo de Gálvez captures Pensacola
    • May 11, 1996 - ValuJet Flight 592 crashes into Everglades
    • May 12, 1997 - Tornado hits Miami, poses for photos, videos
    • May 13, 1955 - Jax fans chase Elvis after show, tear off his clothes
    • May 14, 1973 - Skylab launches new era of space study...and toys
    • May 15, 1947 - Florida State College for Women goes co-ed, renamed FSU
    • May 16, 1929 - Lake City mob lynches grocer after wife shoots chief
    • May 17, 1980 - Not guilty verdict triggers three days of rioting in Miami
    • May 18, 1955 - Educator Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune dies
    • May 19, 2004 - Drugstore chain owner Jack Eckerd dies at 91
    • May 20, 1913: Henry Morrison Flagler dies in his home at Palm Beach
    • May 21, 1956 - Police close beach after catching black, white teens talking
    • May 22, 1931 - Canned rattlesnake goes on sale from Arcadia
    • May 23, 1898 - School for Deaf & Blind issues first diplomas
    • May 24, 1931 - Writer develops Planet of the Apes storyline for Miami
    • May 25, 1961 - JFK challenges nation to land on moon within decade
    • May 26, 1845 - Florida holds first statewide election
    • May 27, 1965 - Mysterious land deal near Orlando revealed
    • May 28, 1935 - Now controversial "Old Folks At Home" becomes state song
    • May 29, 1967 - Woman jailed after 25 kids found in station wagon
    • May 30, 1989: Claude Pepper dies after 60 years of public service
    • May 31, 1539 - DeSoto comes to Florida, changes continent forever
  • On this day in Florida history - April
    • April 1, 1926 - Air Mail service begins in four Florida cities
    • April 2, 1513 - Juan Ponce de Leon lands in Florida
    • April 3, 2006 - Gators basketball team win first-ever national title
    • April 4, 1933 - NASCAR 2nd generation leader Bill France Jr. is born
    • April 5, 1925 - 'Great Miami Tornado' kills 5, destroys 250 homes
    • April 6, 1959 - Seminole Tribe votes to support building "Alligator Alley"
    • April 7, 1890 - Author, Everglades crusader Marjorie Stoneman Douglas born
    • April 8, 1923 - News of "lost" Tamiami trail blazers heats up
    • April 9, 1921 - Whites kicked out of West Palm Beach "colored" town
    • April 10, 1766 - John Bartram ends journey through Carolinas, Ga., Florida
    • April 11, 1986 - FBI shootout in Dade prompts cops' need for more powerful guns
    • April 12, 1981 - Space Shuttle launched for first time
    • April 13, 1951 - Marion County sheriff killed by forged check suspect
    • April 14, 1528 - Bumbling conqueror Pánfilo de Narváez lands near Tampa
    • April 15, 1896 - Henry Flagler's railroad arrives in Miami for first time
    • April 16, 1915 and 1917 - Aviation takes two steps forward
    • April 17, 1961 - U.S. launches failed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba
    • April 18, 1957 - Florida to U.S.: Integration ruling unconstitutional
    • April 19, 1930 - First Publix store incorporated in Winter Haven
    • April 20, 1967 - Orange Juice becomes official state beverage
    • April 21, 1924 - NY's infamous 'Bobbed Haired Bandit' caught in Jax
    • April 22, 2000 - Elian Gonzalez seized in raid, returned to Cuba
    • April 23, 1982 - Keys secede from Union, create Conch Republic
    • April 24, 1965 - Orlando honors hometown astronaut with John Young Day
    • April 25, 1966 - Gov. Haydon Burns says his plane trailed by UFO
    • April 26, 1920 - Crop shippers seizing ice, creating shortage
    • April 27, 1969 - 1,000 students help during FSU admin building fire
    • April 28, 1985 - World's tallest sand sculpture built at Treasure Island
    • April 29, 1980 - U.S. braces for magnitude of Mariel Boatlift
    • April 30, 1915 - Broward County created, named after former governor
  • Hontoon Changling: The ancient owl carving that represents the wrong tribe
  • The Fierce Competition for Rollins College
  • The Hidden History of Everglades City
  • The Legend of Jose Gaspar
  • Burdine's: Sunshine Fashions & The Florida Store
  • Follow the Dollar - Horse breeding brings big money to Central Florida
  • In Cassadaga, the Seance Room is where they talk to the dead
  • St. Petersburg leaders worked overtime to promote their city
  • Paradise for Sale: Florida's Booms and Busts
  • Feature - The Curtiss-Bright Cities
  • Feature - Collected Works of South Florida pioneer Byrd Spilman Dewey
  • Facebook links - Spring Breakers riot in Fort Lauderdale
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Picture


A town vanished:
Little remains
beyond memories
of the post-slavery
settlement of
Freemanville

By Denny Bowden
Volusia History - Retracing

Florida's Past
Picture
State landmark denotes the location of the abandoned community of Freemanville, settled by 500 freed slaves near the Halifax River in Port Orange in 1866. Click to zoom and read. Below, Mt Moriah Baptist Church, the last remaining structure in Freemanville.
Freemanville, the site of the first African-American community in Volusia County, remains generally unknown, but once a year those who cherish history gather in Mt. Moriah Baptist Church to celebrate this settlement that decades ago was nestled in what is now the northeast area of Port Orange.

     Other than a rusty water pump back in the woods on the south side of the church, little else remains of what local historian Harold Cardwell referred to as a “ghost settlement.”

    Yet, as late as the 1970s, this quiet community was lined with dirt roads and recent memories of “Miss Baby” (Rosa Bugman) who would shoot rattlesnakes with a .22 and collect their rattles in a bag.
   Disaster struck the sawmill business when a boat carrying equipment and funding for the sawmill sank in 1866. 
   Today the streets of “Freemanville” can be considered to be a rectangle of roads just west of U.S. 1 in Port Orange, bordered on the south by West Ocean Avenue, on the west by Alexander Avenue, on the east by North Orange Avenue, and on the north by Valley Street.

   Each of the past two Februaries I’ve attended the Freemanville Day Celebration, sitting on the firm pews at Mt. Moriah (established in 1911 and rebuilt in 1956), listening to the history of Freemanville and its long-gone residents.

   I learned about Adam Freeman, who would keep his grassless yard neatly raked so the straight lines in the dirt yard would reveal if any snake or human intruder had come near his home.  

   Current Port Orange Mayor Allen Green who grew up in Port Orange says that residents of Freemanville also kept guinea hens that worked as “watchdogs,” sounding alarm with loud shrieks if anyone would come near.

   I've heard “Mother Alberta McCloud” reminisce about what Freemanville was like when she and her husband, Rev. Nathaniel McCloud, first made a home together there more than 60 years ago.  She said that she had to convince her family to move there because, as she said, “This was out in the woods.”

   Known as “Mother McCloud,” the church mother, she recalled raising 11 children, along with pigs, geese, and guineas in this quiet community.  One day her husband brought home a goat, and another day he brought in a gopher tortoise and said that they could eat it, but she quickly corrected him – that HE could eat it.

   Freemanville may have been named for the Freeman family – Adam, Major, Frank, and a sister -- but their grandparents were not among the first settlers who had come to the area in 1866.      
   The settlement was created immediately after the Civil War, when John Milton Hawks, an abolitionist and former Union Army surgeon, brought 500 freed slaves, many who had fought for the Union, with their families to the area to establish a sawmill business in nearby Ponce Inlet.  Financial assistance was provided by the U.S. Freedman Bureau and another 1,000 freed slaves settled in the Port Orange area six months later.

   Dr. Len Lempel, a Daytona State College history professor who specializes in local and Florida African-American history, researched the beginnings of Freemanville, and I’ve learned so much from his presentations, including three (2009, 2011, and 2013) specifically about Freemanville, Hawks, and Esther Hawks who, like her husband, was a school-trained and certified physician.

   Esther established an integrated school in November 1866 for the sawmill workers’ children on the beach in the area of Ponce Inlet, and she wrote to The Freedmen’s Record that she and the students gathered “about a big fire” before the school was built. 

   Eleven months later she wrote, “My school flourishes” and that her school included five white children, fifteen Blacks, and two “mulattoes,” making it the first integrated school in Volusia.  
Picture
All that remains of Freemanville today are the Mt. Moriah Baptist Church and this rusty pump in the woods near the church. Photo by Denny Bowden.
Lempel lauds Esther Hill Hawks’s book A Woman Doctor’s Civil War Diary as well worth the reading, though it’s only about her pre-Freemanville years.

   Disaster struck the sawmill business when a boat carrying equipment and funding for the sawmill sank in 1866. Thousands of 1866 silver dollars went to the bottom with the ship.

   Vital equipment was lost, and Hawks’s sawmill business was too big to be profitable and soon failed. In addition, the assistance from the Freedmen’s Bureau was inadequate, so the majority of the workers moved away or to the Port Orange mainland to form their own community. 

   Of the approximately 1500 Blacks who had come, only 142 adults remained by 1867, and they supported themselves with farming, fishing, and working in orange groves of others. 

   Among the Black laborers who moved to the mainland, Henry and Anna Tolliver, though both were illiterate, became the most successful of the original Freemanville settlers, buying land enoughto share their eight-acre homestead

The 11th Annual Freemanville Day Ceremony is Feb. 11 at the Mt. Moriah Baptist Church, 941 N. Orange Ave., Port Orange, at 4 p.m.
Photos courtesy of Greg Milliken, Vintage Daytona. vintagedaytona.wordpress.com
Picture
Mt. Moriah Baptist Church site at 941 N. Orange Ave., Port Orange. The Freemanville settlement was located just west of the church.

View Larger Map
 later with the 11 children they had had separately in marriages during the time when they had been slaves. Henry and others are buried in Freemanville’s Gadsden Cemetery.

   Local historians Priscilla and Harold Cardwell have added much to the history of Freemanville, especially when they were interviewed by Bethune-Cookman University professors Mary Corliss and Dorothy Dobbins for their short book A Free Man’s Dream: The Rise and Fall of a Community, Freemanville, Florida (2003), which I bought at the Halifax Historical Museum. 

   The Cardwells report that in the 1890s John Tolliver, son of Henry, sold the Tolliver land “back to Charles Daughtry” [sic] and that housing “lots were then traded and sold to build small cabins” in the horseshoe-shaped roads of Freemanville. John went on to successful endeavors, working as what today would be called  an engineer. 

   Lempel has researched John Tolliver’s two contracts with Daytona between 1879 and 1886 to “open” a portion of Ridgewood Avenue (later becoming part of today’s U.S. 1) – an accomplishment of local African-American business and engineering history that, thanks to Lempel, is recognized again today.
By 1910, Freemanville had two churches, businesses, boardinghouses for Blacks, and the Freemanville School.
Picture
Mt. Moriah Baptist Church. Photo courtesy Greg Milliken, Vintage Daytona.
   By 1870, the Freemanville area had 250 residents, and new jobs became available in the 1880s when the Florida East Coast Railroad laid tracks close by Freemanville.  When the railroad came to town, the Freemanville School was moved from the Dunlawton site to the north part of Port Orange’s Orange Avenue. 

   Hard times came again with the hard freezes of 1886 and the winter of 1894-95, killing many orange trees and reducing work prospects in the groves, which caused many residents of Freemanville to move to Daytona to live in three now generally forgotten Black communities –Waycross, Newtown, and Midway.

   By 1910 only three families remained –Alexander, Smudge, and Drummond, but by the 1920s Freemanville was at its largest, extending to both sides of two-laned Dixie Highway (later to become U.S 1). Lying just north of Port Orange, Freemanville by then had two churches, businesses, boardinghouses for Blacks, and the Freemanville School.

   In the 1950s, 10 to 15 families lived in the community, working in boatbuilding, netmaking and hotel work, Port Orange Mayor Allen Green recalled.

   Subsequent years, however, whittled away at Freemanville. Residents left to go to war or find jobs.  The community shrank to become what Harold Cardwell called a “ghost settlement.”

    Valley Street, once a main road of Freemanville, was still unpaved as late as about the year 2000. Settlement Road led to Gadsden Cemetery where, according to the Cardwells, three Black union soldiers were buried: Watson, Tolliver, and Alexander. 

   Alexander Avenue memorializes one of those Black Civil War veterans, but no tombstones remain today because wooden markers have been lost over the years. As the Cardwells have noted, poor residents, instead, would dig up wild coontie plants or cedar trees and transplant them to mark a gravesite, knowing that they would withstand drought and freezing winters. 

   According to Mary Corliss and Dorothy Dobbins’s book about Freemanville, A Free Man’s Dream (2003), Alberta McCloud said, “You can tell where the graves are because of the cedar trees. We found one tree with [cinder] blocks around it.”  

   Gladys Smith, wife of Leroy, told Corliss and Dobbins that she had moved to Freemanville when she was 17 and that she avoided the cemetery because of rattlesnakes. In 2003 she said that the graves’ locations are lost, saying, “You couldn’t find them if you had to.”

Denny Bowden, Ph.D., writes about Volusia County history on the blog,
Volusia History - Retracing Florida's Past.
His work is reposted here by permission.
Read more of his Denny's blogs at 
http://volusiahistory.wordpress.com/
Previous posts
Daytona Beach ends Stan Musial's pitching career
and aims him to the Hall of Fame
How Daytona Beach teens' lives changed during World War II