Faith and the Florida Frontier
By Joseph Siry
Seeds are conceptual focus of the parables in Mathew 13:1-9 and 13:18-23, The Sower and the Seeds.
During 1885, the year Rollins College was founded, the following events indicate the spirit of the times or mark the period's zeitgeist:
Karl Benz made a single cylinder automobile, George Eastman made coated photographical paper, John Fox of Philadelphia introduced a Scottish game, Golf, at Foxburg, Pa., to theUnited States and É.
There was no:
- Railroad south of Tampa, or paved road south of St. Augustine.
- x-rays or radio
- coca-cola
- plastic or concrete
- electricity, refrigeration, or libraries.
- Statue of Liberty
That year General Gordon was killed in the Sudan and Gilbert & SullivanÕs Mikado premiered in London.
Belgian King, Leopold II, became owner of the Congo, thanks in part to Col. Sanford, for whom Sanford, Florida is named, and Grover Cleveland became 22 President of the USA.
Van Gogh, The Potato Eaters painted in 1885
Ulysses Simpson Grant died in 1885, a hero of Òthe recent unpleasantness,Ó or American Civil War.
1885 was a time, like all times of transitions and retrenchment. Ramakrishna the Hindu mystic would die the following year. Das Kapital was published in English 1886 and Georges Seurat painted, ÒSunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte.Ó
Yet on the remote frontier in central Florida settlers had only seen the hinterlands by steamboats, until that year the railroad from Sanford moved south and west through Winter Park and onto Auburndale. The Tetanus Bacillus had been isolated in 1884. While Thomas Edison had built his first hydro electrical facility at Appleton, Wisconsin the year before, cities had gas lighting, as did urban homes. Electricity was only available for railroad telegraph offices to relay dispatches. In 1888, Nikola Tesla developed an electric motor for George Westinghouse. Physicists wrote there would be no new forces to find.
But for all intents and purposes Maitland and Winter Park were the borderlands where Òan infinity of pinesÓ according to Marjorie Stoneman Douglas covered the high ground. Cypress trees, that had escaped being logged, clung to the sinuous, watery shores of lakes, swamps and rivers. Moreover, everywhere scrub –impenetrable rosemary, scrub oak and saw palmettos—impeded inland movement where mud and shallow water did not already stifle passage.
Life was hard, nasty, if not brutish but mosquito infested. The air was hot and humid for half the year, yet often brining insufficient rainfall for the remaining months. The woods provided lumber for shelter, utensils, furnishings, buckets, crates, barrels, wagons, bridges, warfs, docks, medicines and caskets. Springs provided a safer water source. Turkeys, quail, deer and wild boar roamed at the dual sufferance of innumerable black bears and stalking panthers.
On this frontier, Protestant churches competed to bring the faith to Òsand-poorÓ farmers with scads of children. As one pioneer woman Mrs. Molly Whidden recalled, ÒFather and Mother were married in Tampa. They had ten children.Ó Of the seven girls and three boys, Molly was the oldest. Here father fought in the civil war and the Indian wars. She recalled, ÒOur home was four miles from where the New Zion Church now stands. Most of our children where born there and Ma and Pa died there.Ó In describing frontier conditions Molly reminds us, ÒWe had a church under a brush arbor,Ó and the at the children went barefoot all winter around home and saved our shoes for Sunday to where to church.Ó The small Carpenter Gothic churches were yet to take root on sandy knolls.
Her descriptions of the surroundings and her trek of four miles she walked to school reveal the spirits of this world we have lost. ÒSour oranges and lemons grew wild in some of the hammocksÓ the native name given to either high or low ground cluttered with tall trees. She tells us ÒPa always raised enough rice to do us.Ó Adding Òthat is what we lived on until Pa could put out another garden, and it grew up.Ó Precariously the families clung to the land for as she recalled, Òone Spring there was a late frost, April I think it was, and everybodyÕs gardens and truck patches were killed.Ó Her mother made their clothes from the cotton they grew and wool purchased from a general store. ÒMa cooked in a fireplace and used a long iron rod to hang pots on called a crane.Ó
But the seeds of learning were placed beside the shoots of a Church in what must have been like another Protestant Reformation. For who, other that land developers working with the railroads, would anticipate that sufficient numbers of people would buy homes, second homes even, in a place with a College? Can you tell what seeds we must sow now in order to nourish our visions without devouring the seed corn of our children and grandchildren? Where lies the fertile ground in which we as a people seek to dwell?
