As mentioned last week, much remains unclear about the Hungerford School. This obfuscation is the result of several factors: the narratives of the land donation and transfer, the nature of the Hungerford school system as a whole, and the loss of specific details regarding the ownership of the school and land. All these factors combine to inform Hungerford's past, present, and future.
In an effort to begin building a base of understanding the complexities associated with the Hungerford School, I began at the beginning with Robert C. Hungerford’s association to the property on which the original school sat. Last week, I mentioned that much of the land for the original school was donated by a Hungerford relative in memory of a deceased loved one and family member. Some like Orlando Sentinel columnist and unofficial Orlando historian Jean Yothers maintain that the land was donated by Edward C. Hungerford in memory of his son Robert Hungerford, a doctor who worked in Eatonville when most of his local colleagues refused. [Figure 1] Others believe it was donated by a son whose father was a doctor. Setting aside the issue of the land’s original donor and reason for donation for the time being, where did the land donated by the Hungerfords originally come from?
There is an 1884 record from the General Land Office (GLO)—a precursor to the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM)—of Robert Hungerford’s ownership of land within the Tallahassee Meridian. [Figure 2] Using the legal description given on the document, we can place the land owned by Hungerford onto a more recognizable landscape. The document states the land parcel as located in "the north west quarter of the north east quarter of section two in township twenty-two south of range twenty-nine east of Tallahassee Meridian" for a plot of land constituting "forty acres and fifty-one hundredths of an acre." Using both a physical copy from the GLO and the BLM's Land Catalog digital tool, we can place Hungerford's land onto a modern landscape. Well…almost…
To reduce the legal description into terms applicable to the digital mapping tool, we are looking for land in the upper right corner of section 2 in 22S 29E of the Tallahassee Meridian. Checking the legal description against a land grant plat map contemporary to the document [Figure 3] shows that we are looking in the correct area. [Inset—Figure 4]
Using the Land Catalog digital tool, we can see the present Hungerford school complex just north of the area parameters outlined in the land grant’s legal description. [Figure 5] There are a number of reasons for this, and they reflect the clouded nature of the school’s present and future. For the donor, his land holdings likely expanded over the years, especially as he laid roots in the area. For the school, as it both expanded and shifted focus, the Hungerford name was removed and applied to a series of schools and educational institutions—serving as a name for the teaching and technical school, a high school, and an elementary school, and creating what I referred to earlier as the “Hungerford school system.” Did the original Hungerford School fall within the boundaries described in the document? How close was the original school to the other schools that now carry its name? Thus, it becomes necessary to find and document the original location of the school and to map its spatial landscape onto a physical one.
Separating the land deals made for the various Hungerford institutions certainly complicates the history of the land ownership. Often, name changes, especially those that closely resemble previous iterations, produce tangled records that blur boundaries and obscure connections. Additionally, as demonstrated by the original land grant, boundaries also expand—necessitating further inquiry and investigation into the many research threads connected to the Hungerford school system and its place within Eatonville’s cultural, social, and physical landscape.
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