Last week, Club 436 was mentioned in conjunction with Club Eaton when investigating the Groveland Four. In addition to Club 436, while investigating bolita operations and the criminality of ‘law enforcement’ officials and their relationship to our sites, I found mention of other juke joints: the Two Spot "on State Road 46 in the Sanford Negro community of Midway" and an unnamed “Negro beer spot on Sipes Avenue just east of the city [Sanford] on Midway”—another of Central Florida’s black communities, historically inhabited by laborers for Sanford’s agricultural industries. While they certainly sound to be in the same or similar locations, it is not entirely clear if the Two Spot and the unnamed location are the same or different establishments. Both Club 436 and the Two Spot were owned by Clayton Thomas—allegedly a lieutenant for Harlan Blackburn, a bolita ring operator and an associate/frequent business partner of the Trafficante group who ran organized crime operations throughout Florida.
Looking back on my notes with Goldsboro residents Ms. Bea Martin and Ms. Amanda Alexander, I do see mention of the Two Spot, but I attribute my omission of it thus far as requiring more information to include in the project. However, if I had not found additional information or had not gotten around to it, its existence in the context of this project would not be documented. To prevent a repeat of such an omission, I have added a “Requires More Information” column to our running spreadsheet of Chitlin’ Circuit sites to keep track of other sites I encountered while following research threads. It is my hope that by simply documenting the names, we have a data point to attach further information when it becomes available. This opens the project up to more participatory means of engagement, especially in conjunction with providing contact information of project principals to encourage connections with those who might have local knowledge.
Other sites newly added to this sheet are from a recent article about the Chitlin’ Circuit published in the Spring 2022 issue of FORUM, Florida’s magazine for humanities. This research—along with new grant projects such as the one granted to the new Eatonville Main Street program—promise exciting opportunities for further expansion of collected knowledge and connections to scholarship networks. Connecting and collaborating with partners creating similar projects and compiling similar research is crucial as most of what is documented about the Chitlin’ Circuit comes from local knowledge. Holes in my research might already be answered by someone else’s, and vice versa. Sources collected might contain information that another researcher has long searched for.
With this in mind, I now see the utility of expanding the scope of our visualization to include sites that offered accommodation—not always a guarantee for Black performers in Jim Crow South. There is also the potential of including studios that might have been available to Circuit performers. For Week 8, I mentioned a visit by James Brown to Shamrock Studios. The FORUM article mentions the author hearing the Circuit mentioned at Kingsnake Records—a local recording studio/enterprise in Sanford. Might there be more studios? Were they part of the Circuit’s ecosystem? Again, it is my hope that by documenting these mentions as data points (even if skeletal from lack of information), further information might become available to better fill out the record.
Locating the physical sites of these ‘new’ music venues is not without difficulty. Mentions of locations are geographically vague—often only including reference to nearby roads, such as "on State Road 436 between U.S. 17-92 and Altamonte Springs.” Beyond that, its definitive location is (as of yet) a mystery. However, using digital tools to read the built environment, we can attempt to discover its physical location.
There are a few mentions of the “the Negro beer spot” on Sipes Avenue in Midway, while the Two Spot is frequently mentioned as located off State Road 46. A May 21, 1955 Orlando Sentinel article mentions that the Two Spot is located “on Geneva Ave., east of Sanford.” Looking on a map of Midway, we can find an area that matches what is described by these parameters. Zooming in, Sipes Avenue appears as a branch off State Road 46. Using Google Street View, let’s take a look to find any likely candidates for our site.
A few clicks down the road shows us 2341 Sipes Avenue—a site for social gathering and leisurely congregation evidenced by several notices: No Loitering, No Drug Use, and No Trespassing if instructed to vacate by Seminole County law enforcement. Here the built environment offers clues and potential answers to our research question.
With a potential address, let’s try the Seminole County Property Appraiser website. Typing it into the search box, there are two Sipes Avenues—one that is double named Geneva Ave. Based on this evidence and the last name the site had while open, the Cool Breeze No. 2, I will use this as a tentative address for the Two Spot until further information surfaces.
While the built environment can offer insightful clues and potential answers, they are only potential answers. Until local knowledge steps in, historians writing from the outside cannot corroborate maybes into certainties. Local knowledge is often stored only in memory and present in oral tradition. As digital tools make communication easier and connections wider, historians can use them to ensure these benefits extend to connecting local communities to opportunities to share, collect, and document their histories. In doing so, the inclusion of a variety of voices and lived experiences further enrich local history narratives, sometimes even those still present through the built environment.
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