Finding through Footwork
This week, we began with a walking tour through Maitland and Eatonville. It was a great opportunity to learn more about the development of both communities, especially to contextualize Zora Neale Hurston and her environs before the upcoming Zora! festival. For the project, it was an excellent way to gain historical information before delving further into the written record.
A few site observations:
o The physical proximity of Maitland to Eatonville certainly reflects their concurrent development. They were founded by many of the same people, with Eatonville initially comprised of an African-American labor force which supported Maitland’s industries and development. Our tour began where much of this labor force resided—living in simplistic or improvised housing around Lake Lily. Eatonville was created to provide those living around Lake Lily a permanent home from themselves and their descendants. A wall also divides Maitland from Eatonville in some places. Often, physical sites bear witness and act as reminders to illustrate how the communities co-developed closely but separately.
o The Thomas House—the oldest structure in Eatonville—has a wonderful rough patina and vibrant character. It is so beautiful, so Florida. It requires stabilization, restoration, and preservation, but it will be worth it for its contribution to a built environment which contains examples of Eatonville’s early history. Learn more about the Thomas House, including opportunities for supporting its restoration, at Ms. Antoinette Scully's Black & Bookish website.
o The site of Hurston’s home is just across the street from Club Eaton. While structures associated Hurston are now gone, her work goes a long way in recreating what life was like while she was living there. Its proximity also speaks to how small, yet tight-knit and interconnected Eatonville was as a community.
Initial Goals
For our first internship meeting, we discussed project goals and expectations. Our initial goals are focused on building out the site’s narrative as a form of crafting a statement of significance. Numerous oral interviews are cited in the registration form for Eatonville’s National Register of Historic Places designation. Additional sources of information might be found through contacting local repositories such as the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO), the Orange County Regional History Center, and Orange County Library’s Downtown branch, and the Wells’Built Museum. The latter held a similar position in Orlando’s Black nightlife, just as Club Eaton did in Eatonville. John Beacham mentioned the club's inclusion in a Green Book, so the two locations are likely to have shared many patrons in common. Investigating if the two organizations were patronized by performers on the Chitlin’ Circuit as they moved along tour routes might be an interesting thread. We plan to contact such repositories throughout the course of the project.
Given that much of Eatonville’s history remains undocumented, implementing public history methodologies which invite and incorporate community participation is crucial. Public historians play an integral role in preserving community knowledge—the first step to constructing narratives of local history. Before engaging with the public, it’s important for public historians to establish a narrative base to best identify relevant information and sources for further exploration. To do so, I began to examine newspaper articles to determine how Eatonville residents perceived Club Eaton. Special Eatonville editions of local Central Florida newspapers such as the Orlando Sentinel, Winter Park Sentinel, and Orlando Evening Star mention upcoming Club Eaton events—often with a degree of anticipation as the venue attracted many notable Black performers. Newspaper articles also testify to emerging moralistic concerns as a few events and (sometimes tenuous) associations with Club Eaton led to community concerns. In Club Eaton’s later life as Heroes Nightclub, these concerns had eventually evolved into a questionable reputation—a reputation related to us by a lifelong Central Florida resident we met on our first site visit. Further exploration of newspaper articles will continue to yield information about the site, and it remains a significant aspect of the project to collect these stories for incorporation into the site’s narrative.
We discussed other avenues of information such as Sanborn and city maps—all vital to understanding how the site relates to the community around it. To establish how the site and Eatonville related to one another throughout their histories, we must first identify and define the venue’s different eras: What time periods marked these eras? How did the site reflect the start and end of these eras? What themes define them? For this aspect, we discussed utilizing a tagging system to organize information before compiling it into the site’s narrative. From a digital history perspective, this will be useful for further data extrapolation in the form of a word cloud or other modes of visualization.
Until Next Time...
Bringing together disparate and scattered pieces of knowledge into a cohesive narrative is an essential element of being a historian, and certainly one of the most exciting. As I continue with this project, I look forward to the prospect of conducting original research, finding hidden fonts of information, and compiling information into a narrative which shares the stories of Club Eaton and its surrounding community.
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