A Trip to Mt. Dora, Florida, Part I (History)

     For our annual reunion this year, my sister drove down from Fernandina Beach and I drove up from Delray Beach to meet in Mt. Dora, Florida. Neither of us had ever been before.

   

     Mt. Dora sits 185 feet above sea level, a veritable pinnacle in a flat landscape of lakes northwest of Orlando and west of Sanford. The town was a time warp, consisting of quaint shops displaying artistic, nostalgic, or "gently used" goods, fantastic restaurants, an antiques market the size of a football field, several museums, and a large yellow historic inn that had exploded into several new buildings on the Lake.

Imported shoes, Mt. Dora, Fl.

Mt. Dora Inn, opened in 1883

     Lake Dora provided the scenery, visible around every corner, complete with sea plane and boat rides. Legend has it that the Lake was named in 1848 after Dora Drawdy, living with her family two miles south, who shared their meager supplies with the government surveyors. In actuality, the Drawdys were not in the area until around 1856, and the Lake had already been named by a surveying team.

Lake Dora, with red and white lighthouse through trees

     The original name of the town, when the Post Office was established in 1880, was Royellou, an acronym made from the names of early settler and first Postmaster Ross Tremain's three children - Roy, Ella, and Louis. In 1882-'83, the name was changed to Mt. Dora.
     When white settlers came in the third quarter of the 1800's, they found African-Americans in the area. These black settlers had a friendly relationship with the Indians who continued to travel through.
     The U.S. Census for 1890 recorded 174 people living in the Mt. Dora precinct. Access to the area was limited, via railroad (1887), wagon, or boat along the circuitous water route from Sanford. Residents raised their own livestock, grew vegetables, and supplemented their diet with fish and game from the immediate vicinity. In 1894-95, back-to-back freezes devastated the citrus crop.
     The town was incorporated as the City of Mt. Dora in 1910, with 371 people in the City proper, 42 in the surrounding precinct, and 125 automobiles (1913). The community had no paved streets, no water system, no streetlights, and no sidewalks. Things changed from 1919 until the Great Depression, when Mt. Dora experienced the same building boom as the rest of the state. It was no longer an isolated country town.

Tourists learning to use segways, 2019

To be continued.......




   

Our Guide through the Basque Country, 2018

     In "The Keys Behind Treasured Stops" (NY Times Travel Section, August 19, 2018, p.4), Elaine Glusac writes, "... a great trip should involve a journey, embody a culture, and script a story to tell later." Here is one story of our guide through the Basque Country of France and Spain.


     On a previous trip to France, we'd hired Christian Mayer to take us from Paris through Monet's Giverny and the villages of Honfleur and Bayeux (where the 230-foot-long tapestry resides depicting Norman events leading to William, Duke of Normandy's, conquest of England in 1066). Christian drove us to Deauville, with its grand casino, racetrack, and wide beach, as well as to Ste. Mere-Eglise, where paratrooper John Steele from the 82nd Airborne remained suspended when his parachute got caught in the church steeple on D-Day, 1944. Unlike the depiction in "The Longest Day," the American was taken prisoner and escaped to become a town hero. From Ste. Mere-Eglise where we stayed,  we toured the beaches, cemeteries, and museums of World War II on the Normandy coast.

Bayeux, France

Honfleur, France

Monet's Giverny Lily Pond and House (in background)

Crater Bombardment on Omaha Beach, France

Recreation of parachutist John Steele hanging from church steeple in Ste. Mere-Eglise, Fr., on D-Day

     Our guide, Christian, was an American from New Mexico who'd married a French woman and relocated outside Paris. In June, 2018, we returned to France and hired Christian to guide us from Biarritz, on the Atlantic, through the Basque country of France and Spain in the Pyrenees, close to Christian's home where he and his wife were raising their family.

Christian Mayer with Charley at Chartres Cathedral, France, 2011

     Christian's father's family was French; his mother's family was Austrian. We learned his family story during our rides through the mountains between France and Spain - one of the many personal souvenirs we've collected during our travels.
     Since the name "Mayer" sounded Jewish to the Germans during the Occupation of France, his paternal grandparents were forced to sell their mountain camp for children and relocate in Nice, where they opened a restaurant. They moved on to settle in Cap d'Antibes, where they operated a hotel. Christian's grandmother ran messages to the resistance in a pump tube on her bike. His grandfather was arrested, charged with an "act of resistance," while his granduncle was executed by the S.S. Christian's grandmother washed the linens of a Frenchman sympathetic to the Germans and got her husband released.
     "My grandmother didn't want her two sons drafted into the War," Christian told us. "My uncle Jean and my dad 'Dadou' were members of the French National ski team, so the family was able to make its way to Paris. I remember my dad telling me they heard Allied bombers overhead for an hour before they actually bombed. He described the German revolving machine guns that enforced curfews in the City.
     "A German with the code name 'Ernie Blake' had been a double agent and was rewarded by the U.S. with cheap forest land in New Mexico.There he built a ski lodge and the St. Bernard Hotel in what became Taos Ski Valley. He advertised for a ski instructor/hotel operator. 'Dadou' was the only one who answered the ad. Eventually dad was able to bring his brother Jean, also a ski instructor in France, and the rest of the family to Taos. The two brothers pooled their money and their parents added their savings to become owners of the St. Bernard Hotel. It's still there.
     "My mother was from Vienna and answered an ad for an 'au pere' in Taos, where her brother was the ski lift engineer. That's where my parents met. Eventually dad and uncle Jean split and dad bought out Jean's portion of the St. Bernard. Uncle Jean opened the Eidelweis Hotel there. The two hotels stood side-by-side.
     "My cousins and I grew up on skis and snowboards, despite the fact that snowboards were forbidden on the slopes of Taos at the time. We used to sneak down to the weekly concerts in the hotels and hung out with the musicians. I guess that's how I got started playing the sax. I formed my own band and started touring Europe."
     "How did you become enamored with the sea if you grew up in New Mexico?" I asked Christian.
     "Well, my dad was a U.S. citizen and after my parents divorced, he moved to Hawaii. I loved to surf out there."
     "Did your mother become a citizen?"
     "Well, mom was a proud Austrian. She refused to apply till after the divorce, when she had to go to work."

A Little History of Westport, Massachusestts

We are residents of Westport, Mass., five months a year.  The town snuggles against the coast of Buzzard's Bay, below Cape Cod and above Newport, R.I.  Its residents are primarily fishermen and farmers who remain fiercely independent and protective of their land, their rights, and others' rights.  Swagger here goes only as far as the American flag that hangs outside each front door.

Which makes it surprising that the town has a history of slave-owning.

Westport Historical Society records show African-American slaves named Zip and Violet were property on the Cadman farm in 1762.  George Cadman freed his slave, James, in 1722, and his son freed both Zip and Violet in 1766.

Like many coastal New England towns, Westport had a "significant presence (of people of color) during the colonial period.  Most of these people would have been slaves, and some are specifically identified as such in the records." (www.wpthistory.org/elizabeth-cadman-white/blacks-slavery)

The black population in the areas including Westport, Dartmouth, and Little Compton, R.I., grew after 1720 with the expansion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade out of nearby Newport.  The number of blacks in Bristol County, concentrated in Dartmouth and Taunton, between 1754 and 1776 rose from 61 to 585 (Greene, 82, 342 and Piersen, 164).  They comprised 2.1% of the population in the County by 1776 (Greene, 337). The slave trade was abolished in 1808.

Paul Cuffee montage

Mixed marriages were common between blacks and Indians.  Locals of color were of mixed black and white, black and Indian, Indian and white (Adams and Pleck, 16).  Some Indians were themselves enslaved. Cuffee Slocum, of African descent and freed by one of the largest slaveholders in colonial Massachusestts (Quaker John Slocum of Dartmouth), married the native American Ruth Moses in 1746.  One of their sons, Paul Cuffee (a free black Quaker who became the wealthiest African American and Native American in the U.S. in early 1800's through shipping, established the first racially integrated school in Westport, and became involved in the British effort to resettle freed slaves to the fledgling Sierra Leone) married Alice Pequit, a native American in 1783.

In 1711 in Dartmouth, Mass., there is record of a complaint at the Monthly Friends Meeting against a Quaker woman, Abigail Allen, for "cruel and unmerciful beating or whipping (of) her negro manservant.  The servant died from the abuse.  Abigail Allen was disowned by the meeting but readmitted three years later (Dartmouth Monthly Meeting Minutes index, Worrall, 156).

The Quakers as a group did not begin to officially question the practice of slavery locally until 1715 (Lowry, 21).  In that year, the Dartmouth Monthly Meeting of Quakers "pressed the R.I. Monthly Quarterly Meeting to decide whether Friends should own slaves or participate in the trade." (Dartmouth Monthly Meeting Minutes index, Worrall, 156).  Influential Quakers in R.I. buried the issue temporarily, waiting to see what Friends elsewhere would do.  The local Baptist churches, likewise, didn't actively oppose slavery until after the Revolution (McLoughlin, Soul Liberty, 146).

In the 1750's, American Quakers began to push for abolition.  The last black slave was freed in Dartmouth by Isaac Howland in 1777.  The following month the last Indian held in bondage was freed (Grover, 43).

The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 did not exclude blacks from voting, but custom and tradition "apparently still barred them from exercising the franchise" (Lorenzo Greene, 302-303).  In 1778, Dartmouth records showed no Negro, Indian, or mulatto among its voters.  In 1780, Paul Cuffee and his brother John, after refusing to pay their income taxes without representation, petitioned the Bristol County council for the right to vote.  In 1783 the Massachusetts legislature granted voting rights to all free male citizens of the state.

How ironic that the area in which Roger Williams championed religious freedom still sanctioned the institution of slavery for one hundred years after Williams' death!

This post is based on original research done by the Westport Historical Society and posted on their website as the article, "Blacks and Slavery," at www.wpthistory.org/elizabeth-cadman-white/blacks-slavery.

Rewriting History

It's not the first time history has been rewritten.  In 1976 while we visited Germany, Marvin Chomsky's television mini-series "The Holocaust" was aired in the U.S. Germans under age twenty were shocked at Nazi atrocities. While in Japan visiting our son in 1996, that country's prime minister admitted publicly FOR THE FIRST TIME that his country had bombed Pearl Harbor.  Governments, politicians, corporations, and sometimes families, rewrite history for their own purposes...even school districts.

Last week Ms. Dean-Burren, an African-American from Pearland, Texas, pursuing her doctoral degree in education, called it "erasure."  That was the term she used to describe the World Geography textbook's substitution of the word "workers" in America for "slaves."  Her 15-year-old son had called the terminology to her attention with a sarcastic quip on his cellphone: "we was real hard workers, wasn't we."

Photo of random schoolbooks

To quote the section of the textbook describing America as a nation of immigrants: "The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500's and 1800's brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations." Another page referred to Europeans coming to America as "indentured servants" but did not describe Africans the same way.

Ms. Dean-Burren posted shots of the text on social media, along with her objections. She also made a video flipping through the book and pointing out the many academic consultants, teacher reviewers, and the state advisory board who approved the book. The video received nearly two million hits.

It is estimated there are 100,000 copies of the textbook in school districts in Texas. A spokesperson for a district in south Texas said, "Students use the textbook, but the section with the caption was not part of the curriculum."  Do they skip the entire topic??

McGraw-Hill responded in a statement on its Facebook page that the caption would be updated "to describe the arrival of African slaves in the U.S. as a forced migration and emphasize that their work was done as slave labor."  The digital version will be updated immediately, but the textbook version will be updated in the next print run.

It's not the first time Texas textbooks have come under fire.  Said Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, "We have a textbook adoption process that's so politicized and so flawed that it's become almost a punch line for comedians."  The state is one of the largest purchasers of textbooks.

School photo from 1910

Information in this article is from "Texas Mother Teaches Textbook Company a Lesson on Accuracy" by Manny Fernandez and Christine Hauser, New York Times, October 6, 2015, p. A10.