Brevard County is home to an impressive list of important archaeological excavations including a unique prehistoric pond cemetery, numerous Indian mounds, paleontological sites, colonial era shipwrecks, and pioneer homesteads.

Since 1953, members of the Indian River Anthropological Society have been participating in the discovery, excavation, and recording of archaeological sites in Brevard County.

“Operating primarily in Brevard County, we have, over the years, also provided services in Volusia, Seminole, Orange, Osceola, and Indian River Counties,” says Bob Gross of the Indian River Anthropological Society. “IRAS provides, at no cost to the Brevard County government and its municipalities, many tasks required by statute under the provisions of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, as amended, and as directed by local statute and Brevard’s Comprehensive Plan to the Brevard County Historical Commission.”

The Indian River Anthropological Society has been a chapter of the statewide Florida Anthropological Society since 1956.

At the FAS Annual Meeting on Saturday, May 6, in Jacksonville, IRAS was presented with the Arthur R. Lee FAS Chapter Award for outstanding outreach, education, and site stewardship.

“Members of the IRAS were gratified to learn that their years of devotion to the study of Florida’s, and particularly Brevard County’s anthropological and archaeological resources through investigation, documentation, preservation, and education has been recognized at the highest levels,” Gross says.

Thirty-five years ago, one of the most significant archaeological discoveries in the world was made in Brevard County. During construction of the Windover Farms subdivision in Titusville, an ancient pond cemetery was discovered. The site contained 168 intact human burials, carefully positioned and wrapped in the oldest woven cloth found in North America.

The human remains uncovered at the Windover site were between 7,000 and 8,000 years old, making them 3,200 years older than King Tutankhamen and 2,000 years older than the Great Pyramids of Egypt.

The anaerobic environment and ph balance of the pond allowed for remarkable preservation of the remains. Ninety-one of the skulls contained intact brain matter.

Members of the Indian River Anthropological Society participated as volunteers at the Windover Dig. Vera Zimmerman of IRAS wrote identification numbers on bone fragments, and conducted tours of the site for the public.

“I was just extremely lucky to be living here when that find was made, because it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to work on a dig like that,” Zimmerman says. “We had people coming in from all over the world. They had a conference here. It was just outstanding. It told them things that they didn’t know about the Archaic Period. They still believed before that people were living a pretty nomadic lifestyle, following game. The Windover Dig showed they were living a fairly settled village life.”

The origins of IRAS go back to 1951, when sixteen Spanish silver coins were found on Playalinda Beach. Local archaeologist E.Y. “Dick” Guernsey was consulted, and a group of interested residents were inspired to form an archaeology club. The members were mostly newcomers to the area, brought here by the recently constructed Patrick Air Force Base and the long range missile proving ground at Cape Canaveral.

As construction rapidly increased in Brevard County to accommodate the population explosion accompanying the burgeoning space program, a growing number of Indian mounds and other historic sites were being uncovered.

By 1953, the Indian River Anthropological Society was meeting monthly under the direction of Dr. Guernsey. He led the group to become a chapter of the Florida Anthropological Society, as described on the front page of the Melbourne Times on April 10, 1956:

“A chapter of the Florida Anthropological Society has been organized in Brevard County, and persons interested in digging up bones and other objects of the long dead past may soon be invited to join…They are planning to map part of the east Coast and locate ancient Indian mounds which will be explored in a scientific manner.”

The award-winning Indian River Anthropological Society continues its work today.

Funeral services were held for Florida historian Michael Gannon on Saturday, May 6, at St. Augustine’s Church in Gainesville. He died on Monday, April 10, at the age of 89.

Dr. Gannon was author or editor of 10 books, including “The Cross in the Sand” from 1965. It that book, Gannon demonstrated how the “real” first Thanksgiving happened in St. Augustine in 1565, decades before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.

A longtime professor of history at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Dr. Gannon taught several generations of Florida historians who are working in the state today.

Gannon was formerly a Catholic priest, and was working in St. Augustine in the early 1960s, as the town was preparing to commemorate the 400^th anniversary of the founding of America’s oldest continuously occupied city.

Gannon remembered his work on the 400^th anniversary as St. Augustine was preparing to commemorate their 450^th anniversary in 2015.

“At the old mission where the first Parrish Mass was celebrated on September 8, 1565, it was decided to build a cross,” Gannon said. The cross was to be built on the site where Don Pedro Menéndez de Avilés first landed to settle St. Augustine, and where Father Francisco López observed the city’s first Catholic Mass.

“Ultimately it was constructed of stainless steel and rose to a height of 208 feet. I think it’s very impressive. It can be seen 14 miles out to sea. It has become a symbol of the first mission to the North American Natives and the first Parrish established by Europeans in this country,” said Gannon.

Also part of St. Augustine’s 400^th anniversary celebration in 1965 was the expansion and redecorating of the cathedral church, the construction of a contemporary church called The Prince of Peace, and a bridge linking the new church with the historic mission grounds.

Spain controlled Florida for nearly three centuries, establishing an extensive system of Catholic missions throughout the region.

“Everywhere Spain moved politically and economically and militarily, the church moved, too,” said Gannon.

“The church was always a partner of Spanish expansion. The church was on the forefront. If you want to select any part of the Spanish cultural presence in Florida and the rest of North America, you would have to say that the church was in advance of all other institutions.”

The Florida Chamber of Commerce arranged a meeting between Gannon and President John F. Kennedy as St. Augustine was preparing for its 400^th anniversary celebration.

On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was shot and killed as his motorcade drove through Dallas, Texas.

Kennedy spent the week before his death in Florida.

After a short stay at his family’s winter residence in Palm Beach, Kennedy toured the NASA facilities at Cape Canaveral before visiting Tampa and Miami.

On his last day in Florida, President Kennedy met with Florida historian and Catholic priest Michael Gannon. As the first and only Catholic American president, Kennedy was particularly interested in Gannon’s area of expertise, Catholicism in Spanish Colonial Florida.

“It was hoped by the Chamber of Commerce and by the city fathers in St. Augustine, that the president would agree to come down earlier rather than later,” said Gannon.

“It was uncertain if he would be elected to a second term, so they wanted him to come while president and to build up interest in the city that would help generate tourist traffic for the 400^th year.”

It was arranged for Gannon to meet the president at the MacDill Air Force Base Officer’s Club.

“I brought him a photographic copy of the oldest written record of American origin, which was a Parrish Register of Matrimonial Sacrament, a marriage between two Spaniards, a man and a woman, here in the city of St. Augustine, dated 1594,” said Gannon.

“He seemed to be very grateful to receive the gift of the photographic copy that was beautifully framed.”

President Kennedy was intrigued by Gannon’s stories about the oldest continuously occupied European city in what would become the United States.

“As he left he said ‘I’ll keep in touch.’” Gannon said, pausing to recall the moment. “But four days later he was dead.”

Gannon became one of Florida’s most respected historians.

More than three decades before SeaWorld opened in Orlando in 1973, Marineland of Florida was a major tourist attraction, hosting as many as 900,000 visitors annually.

Located between St. Augustine and Daytona Beach, Marineland started out as Marine Studios. Business partners W. Douglas Burden, Sherman Pratt, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, and Ilya Tolstoy (grandson of Leo Tolstoy) envisioned a venue for filming underwater sequences for movies, but quickly realized the potential of the facility as a tourist destination.

“Marineland illustrated the connection between nature and spectacle,” says Florida historian Gary Mormino, author of the book Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida. “They originally conceived as Marine Studios as a motion picture facility for studying and filming sea specimens in an enclosed, oceanlike environment. But when the partners discovered that the blue bottlenose dolphins (also called porpoises) could be trained to perform tricks above water, the oceanarium became primarily a tourist attraction. The public oohed and aahed over leaping dolphins, a porpoise pulling a poodle on a surfboard, and sea lions barking at clowns.”

When Marineland opened on June 28, 1938, more than 20,000 visitors attended. Tourists weren’t the only people attracted to the new theme park.

“I was born in 1940,” says Flagler County historian Sisco Deen. “It closed during the (second world) war, but when it opened up in ‘46, after the war, I visited there as a child. I lived with my aunt and uncle and when they told me they were taking me to Marineland, I thought it was like the Marines in the service. But I really enjoyed it. It had two tanks. It was developed for a film studio but then people would come and look because they had the creatures of the deep in their natural, or pretty natural, habitat. You could observe them through little portholes in the side of the tanks. And so the tourists start coming.”

Marineland had literary connections that helped add to its popularity. The grandson of Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina was one of the park’s founders. Beloved Florida writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was married to Norton Baskin, who managed the Dolphin Restaurant and Moby Dick Lounge at Marineland. Renowned authors Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos also visited the bar at the park.

The original goal of using the facility as a place to shoot movies was realized. Portions of the 1954 film Creature from the Black Lagoon and the 1955 sequel Revenge of the Creature were filmed at Marineland. In the sequel, the captured creature is put on display at Marineland, and trained with a cattle prod.

For several decades, Marineland was one of Florida’s most popular tourist attractions, along with Silver Springs, Cypress Gardens, and Weeki Wachee.

“Marineland attracted huge crowds, in part because of the novelty of ‘spectacular nature,’ in part because of its location on A1A between St. Augustine and Daytona Beach, perfectly situated to snag Miami bound travelers,” says Mormino.

When Walt Disney World opened on October 1, 1971, it had a positive impact on Marineland, significantly boosting annual attendance. When SeaWorld opened a couple of years later, the impact on Marineland was devastating. SeaWorld was in direct competition with Marineland.

The University of Florida established the Whitney Marine Laboratory adjacent to Marineland in 1974.

In the mid-1980s, original owner Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney sold Marineland to a group of investors, beginning a series of resales of the park to new owners. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the park entered a state of disrepair. Eventually a not-for-profit corporation was established to keep Marineland going.

During a two year renovation beginning in 2004, the two original oceanarium tanks from 1938 were demolished. Lifelong Flagler County resident Ray Mercer visited the park as a young man when it first opened.

“It was very exciting for me to see the life in the water through the portholes,” Mercer says. “I went every chance I got.”

Today, the park still exists as Marineland Dolphin Adventure, a “hands-on” educational facility operated since 2011 by the Georgia Aquarium. Much of the former Marineland property is now owned by Flagler County and protected as the River to the Sea Preserve.

The phrase “historic preservation” describes a wide range of activities.

The term is most often used in relation to the restoration and maintenance of historic homes and buildings, but it can also be applied when discussing the conservation and storage of old photographs, the recording and sharing of oral histories, or the collection and documentation of artifacts from archaeological sites.

All of these topics and more will be presented during “The Many Faces of Preservation Conference,” to be held Friday, April 28, through Sunday, April 30, at St. Gabriel’s Episcopal Church in Titusville. Registration information is available at 321-626-5224 or www.pritchardhouse.com.

“Preservation has many faces,” says historic preservationist and conference organizer Roz Foster. “Preserving structures for adaptive reuse, revitalization of downtowns, but also many other elements of preservation such as genealogy, oral histories, the preservation of textiles, documents, papers, photographs. Also the strategies of taking care of making sure that you’re restoring a historic structure properly and maintaining it properly.”

The three day conference will provide valuable information for both professionals and lay people including owners of historic structures, historic house and small museum staff, architectural review boards, realtors, city planners, architects, and others interested in historic preservation.

The keynote speaker on Saturday afternoon is architect Kenneth Smith of Jacksonville.

“Ken is an historic preservation architect,” says Foster. “His firm is retained by Flagler College, but he has also restored lighthouses in Georgia and on the coast of Florida, and many of the historic structures in a lot of the larger towns like downtown Jacksonville, Pensacola, and St. Augustine. He’s very knowledgeable.”

On Saturday, exhibitors at the conference will include Past Perfect Museum Software, Gaylord Archival Supplies, Austin Home Restorations, SPS Restorations, and local not-for-profit organizations.

The venue for the conference, St. Gabriel’s Episcopal Church, was built in 1887 as St. John’s. The following year, three memorial stained glass windows were donated to the church by the mother of Titusville resident James Pritchard. Since the largest window depicted St. Gabriel, the name of the church was changed. The Carpenter Gothic style church was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.

The presentations and restoration workshops at “The Many Faces of Preservation Conference” will cover everything from selecting the correct paint colors for an historic home, to the proper installation of windows, to disaster planning for historic structures. The conference also includes ancillary events each day.

“Friday night we have a Downtown Wine Stroll sponsored by the Titusville Historic Preservation Board,” Foster says. “We’re going to begin at the Pritchard House, and we’re going to some of the structures that have been rehabilitated for adaptive reuse in the downtown historic district. We’ll come back to the Pritchard House, have a tour to take a look at restoration of this beautiful building, and then have a wine and cheese reception here.”

The Pritchard House was built in 1891 by Captain James Pritchard, an active businessman in Titusville who owned a hardware store, established the Indian River State Bank, and built the city’s first electric light plant. His Queen Anne style home was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1990.

The historic Pritchard House will also be the site of a Garden Party on Saturday evening. “There will be food, wine, and sangria,” says Foster. “This gives the general public a chance to mingle with the presenters. You may have a question that you would like answered about your own restoration project, or your papers, or looking up documents, or about available resources.”

The wide range of presenters at the conference includes Wayne Carter of the DeLand Florida Main Street Program, Elaine Williams of the Indian River Anthropological Society, Ben DiBiase of the Florida Historical Society, Michael Boonstra of the Brevard County Historical Commission, Suellen Askew of the Murfreesboro North Carolina Historical Association, Scott Sidler of Austin Home Restorations, Bradley Parrish of the City of Titusville, Joanne Peck of Historic Shed, Sarah Smith of the Foosaner Art Museum, Ruth Akright of Classic Property Resources in Virginia Beach, and Roz Foster of the North Brevard Heritage Foundation.

“Historic preservation” can give character to downtowns and neighborhoods. It can also protect images, objects, and individual stories for future generations.

Surfing has been ingrained into American popular culture since the 1960s. Even people who have never touched a surfboard have been influenced by the music, movies, and philosophy of the surfing community.

Since the mid-twentieth century, Cocoa Beach has been a prominent home for surfing in Florida.

On Friday, April 21, the new temporary exhibition “Surfin’ FLA: Celebrating Surfing in Cocoa Beach and the Sunshine State” will open at the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science, 2201 Michigan Ave., Cocoa. Tickets are $15 and include a wine and cheese reception from 6pm-8pm, with special guests and admission to the museum. Reservations are available at www.myfloridahistory.org.

“Surfing was in Hawaii for centuries, and then it slowly started to make its way over to California,” says Madeline Calise, manager of the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science. “It started to show up in areas of Florida in the early 1900s, mostly as belly boarding, which is lying prone on a board. That’s when we started to get railroads down the coast, which is when Florida became a tourist destination.”

In the early 1900s, beaches became tourist attractions in Florida, with coastal communities building amenities such as hotels, bathing houses, boardwalks, piers and seaside casinos.

“Brothers Dudley and William Whitman first saw someone surfing on a Hawaiian board that they had brought in around 1930, and Bill Whitman actually built the first Hawaiian style board in Florida,” says Calise. “That was out of sugar pine wood, about 10 feet long, so in the beginning it was Hawaiian style boards. Around 1930, you started to see a bit of surfing in Daytona, a little bit on the Gulf Coast, a little bit in Miami, but then in World War II, surfing pretty much disappeared in Florida.”

In the 1940s, Florida became a military training ground. German submarines patrolled Florida’s coast, and recreational activities on the beach were curtailed. After the war ended, tourism in Florida was revitalized, and the population of the state grew exponentially, particularly in Brevard County.

“We had the space program, and Patrick Air Force Base, and you had large populations coming in with families, and of course those kids wanted to pick up the new cool sport, which was surfing,” says Calise. “In California, North Carolina, and other areas, surfing was also gaining pop culture traction. There were movies like ‘Gidget’ in 1959, and ‘Endless Summer’ in the ‘60s, which was the seminal surf movie. It was a cool sport, it was accessible, and almost anyone could do it, especially in Florida where the waves are a bit more modest, a bit more suited for beginners. We still have the hurricane months where the waves can get pretty big.”

As surfing became popular in the 1960s and ‘70s, it inspired a genre of music that included groups like the Ventures, the Surfaris, and the Beach Boys. The name of the Brevard Museum exhibit “Surfin’ FLA,” was inspired by the Beach Boys song “Surfin’ USA.”

As surfing became a part of popular culture, more people wanted to try it.

“In the 1970s, the short board revolution came in,” says Calise. “It was easier for women to carry around short boards than ten foot balsa wood boards, so more women got into it.”

Around the same time, a tradition of making surfboards developed in Florida.

“Most boards came from California, but people started to make their own boards,” says Calise. “They would strip down their boards; they would reshape the cores, and then put more coverings on it, so they eventually kind of redid the skin. That’s how the Florida surfboard makers industry really started.”

One of the featured guests at the Friday evening opening reception of the “Surfin’ FLA” exhibit will be George Robinson of Melbourne, Florida, who is recognized internationally for his hand crafted surfboards. For more than 30 years, Robinson has created a few dozen custom made balsa boards each year.

The exhibit consists of original informational panels and video, along with items on loan from the Florida Surf Museum. Also featured in the exhibit are 11-time World Surf League Champion Kelly Slater, and Ron Jon, the largest surfing shop in the world, both of Cocoa Beach.

The coquina walls of the Bulow Plantation stand in ruins, and only the foundation of the Mala Compra Plantation remains. Both ruins are remnants from early nineteenth century Florida.

The 150 acre Bulow Plantation Ruins State Park is located three miles west of Flagler Beach. Mala Compra is on North Oceanshore Boulevard in Palm Coast.

In 1821, Charles W. Bulow purchased nearly 5,000 acres of land in what is now Flagler County.

“The Bulow Plantation was one of the largest plantation enterprises in territorial Florida,” says Al Hadeed, local historian and Flagler County attorney. “It was very successful because its major crop was sugar. Sugar was very, very expensive and very prized. Sugar was also used to make rum, so it had a lot of different uses. He was very successful, but unfortunately, that success suffered the fate of the Seminole Indian Wars. His plantation, like many of the others in northeast Florida, was burned by the Seminoles.”

Charles Bulow died in 1823, and his 17 year-old son John Bulow inherited the plantation. He managed an operation that grew indigo, cotton, and rice, as well as sugar cane. Bulow coexisted peacefully with the Seminole Indians, and engaged in trade with them. When the Seminole burned the Bulow Plantation in 1836, it was not an attack on Bulow, but was retaliation against the U.S. federal government.

“When the federal troops came in to fight the Seminoles, Andrew Jackson’s idea was he wanted to ship them all west, get all the Seminoles out of Florida” says Hadeed. “The Seminoles adopted a strategy that wherever the federal troops went, they would burn those places so they couldn’t use them again.”

Bulow had such a good relationship with the Seminole that when federal troops attacked, Bulow tried to defend his Indian neighbors.

“He fired a cannon at the Florida militia because he was not happy with what they were doing, and ended up getting arrested and held in his own house, and they used his plantation as a fort,” says community historian Carl Laundrie. “When they decided that it was too dangerous for them to stay there, they removed him back to St. Augustine, and he was under house arrest. He saw a big red glow in the sky, and that was when the Seminoles burned Bulow Plantation.”

In happier times, Bulow hosted a famous visitor. Ornithologist, naturalist, and painter John James Audubon was a guest at the Bulow Plantation from Christmas of 1831 into January of 1832. The Audubon painting of the Greater Yellowlegs included in his “Birds of America” collection depicts Bulow Plantation buildings in the background.

“He had stopped at the Hernandez Plantation, but Audubon and Hernandez didn’t get along so well,” says Laundrie. “On Christmas day (1831), they struck out from Hernandez Plantation and went to visit John Bulow. John James Audubon and his entire entourage walked about 12 or 15 miles to Bulow’s Plantation. Bulow and Audubon became drinking buddies, they had a grand time.”

In 1816, Joseph Hernandez was given a Spanish Land Grant to establish the Mala Compra Plantation. Others who preceded Hernandez had not been successful on the property, which is why it was called Mala Compra or “bad purchase” in Spanish. Hernandez proved that name to be inaccurate, successfully cultivating the land.

When Florida became a United States Territory in 1821, Hernandez was the first Spanish representative in the U.S. Congress, and helped to have Tallahassee named the state capital.

The Mala Compra Plantation was also destroyed during the Second Seminole War.

The Mala Compra Plantation Ruins were first excavated by archaeologists in 1999. The exposed ruins include the foundations of coquina buildings and a well. A covered boardwalk allows visitors to explore the ruins.

“For a number of years there was a trailer park there,” says Laundrie. “The county bought Bing’s Landing, and then they discovered the site. They’ve done several archaeological projects there. They’ve built a big roof over it, and there are interpretive panels there today, so it’s a point of interest. People stop and look. It’s also a busy park. There’s a restaurant there, a boat launch, and people come down there to fish. It’s a combination of history and recreation.”

In the early 1880s, Loring A. Chase and Oliver Chapman bought much of the land that would become Winter Park. Over the next few years a railroad station and several hotels were built, and Winter Park became a popular vacation destination for wealthy northerners.

Rollins College was built in 1885 by the Congregational Church. The college acquired its current emphasis on the liberal arts under the direction of Hamilton Holt, president of Rollins from 1925 through 1949.

Winter Park was incorporated in 1887.

Wealthy benefactors helped contribute to the growth of Winter Park into the twentieth century. Businessman Francis Knowles is remembered in the name of the chapel that is the centerpiece of Rollins College, entrepreneur Franklin Fairbanks has a major road named for him, and industrialist Charles Hosmer Morse is the namesake of a significant museum.

Artist and interior designer Jeannette McKean founded the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in 1942 on the campus of Rollins College. The museum relocated to Welbourne Avenue before finding its permanent home in an expanded facility on the city’s main street, Park Avenue. Morse was McKean’s grandfather.

Jeannette McKean was married to Hugh F. McKean, a 1930 graduate of Rollins College and an art instructor there beginning in 1932. Hugh McKean served as president of Rollins from 1952 until 1969. He was also director of the Morse Museum from its founding until his death in May 1995. McKean died just two months before the grand opening of the greatly expanded museum.

Following his graduation from Rollins, McKean was awarded a fellowship to study with Louis Comfort Tiffany, who was a painter and stained glass artist. Tiffany was the son of the famous jewelry store founder.

“Mr. Tiffany believed very strongly that the more people you could reach with art, the better off everybody would be,” McKean remembered in a 1992 interview. “He thought that it was necessary to know art to live a complete life, or a satisfactory life.”

Tiffany’s Long Island estate, Laurelton Hall, was destroyed by a fire in 1957. Jeannette and Hugh McKean went there to save Tiffany’s artwork, bringing it back to Winter Park.

The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art has the most comprehensive collection of Tiffany’s work to be found anywhere. The collection includes stained glass windows, lamps, candlesticks, paintings, and the reconstructed Tiffany chapel from the 1883 World’s Fair.

A scenic boat tour departs from a dock on Morse Boulevard. The canals that connect lakes Virginia, Osceola, and Maitland were built by Winter Park’s founders to facilitate the transportation of logs and building materials. One of the most impressive estates that can be seen from the boat is the former home of sculptor Albin Polášek, which is now a museum housing many of the artist’s works. Polášek’s best known work, Man Carving His Own Destiny, depicts a male figure still partially embedded in stone, using tools to free himself from the rock.

John Tiedtke was another important figure in the cultural development of Winter Park. Tiedtke vacationed in Florida with his family in the 1920s. In the 1930s, he was very successful in the state’s sugar industry, and he moved to Winter Park in 1948.

The Winter Park Bach Festival was established in 1935. Tiedtke served as president of the event from 1950 until his death in 2004 at the age of 97.

“The Bach Festival was started by a very dynamic woman, a Mrs. Sprague-Smith, and she did a great job of creating it and getting it going,” Tiedtke remembered in a 1995 interview. “In 1950, she died suddenly. I was on the board, and nobody else on the board wanted the responsibility of trying to run it and keep it going, so I finally agreed to do it. Then, for two or three years, Hugh McKean, the president of Rollins, and I kept trying to find somebody to run it, and we couldn’t. He finally suggested that I just take the title of president because I’d been running it anyway.”

The Winter Park Bach Festival continues today, featuring a 160 voice choir and an orchestra performing a wide variety of classical music.

Winter Park remains a haven for culture in Florida.

Bob Kealing is probably best recognized in Central Florida as a longtime reporter for WESH Channel 2. He is also the author of four well respected books on Florida history and culture.

Kealing will discuss his new book “Elvis Ignited: The Rise of an Icon in Florida,” on Saturday, April 1, at 2:00 pm, at the Library of Florida History, 435 Brevard Avenue, Cocoa. The free presentation is open to the public.

In his books, Kealing explores the lives of people with strong Florida connections, who each had a significant impact on popular culture.

“Kerouac in Florida: Where the Road Ends” looks at the life of Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac, who was living and working in Florida when his most famous works were published. “Calling Me Home: Gram Parsons and the Roots of Country Rock” tells the story of a native Floridian who helped to create a new genre of music. “Life of the Party: The Remarkable Story of How Brownie Wise Built, and Lost, a Tupperware Empire” (the 2016 update of Kealing’s 2008 book “Tupperware Unsealed”) is under contract to be made into a film.

The new book, “Elvis Ignited: The Rise of an Icon in Florida,” contains fascinating stories about the singer’s early career in the Sunshine State.

“I became interested in telling the story about young Elvis in Florida because for years I'd been picking up bits and pieces of information about his time here and it fascinated me,” says Kealing. “My interest accelerated while researching my Gram Parsons book because it became apparent Presley really was the Johnny Appleseed of nascent rock and roll in Florida. Turns out Florida and Floridians were crucial to Presley's rise to national prominence. That's why I tell people this book is not just nostalgia, though there's plenty of that in there, too.”

During a pivotal point in Presley’s career, the future superstar did a series of performances throughout Florida that helped to catapult him onto the national stage.

“Presley's four Florida tours, two in 1955 and two more in '56, bookend his rise from hillbilly oddity to the unquestioned King of Rock and Roll,” Kealing says. “Presley's last Florida tour in August of '56 marked the dawning of Presleymania, where the 21 year old kid from the Memphis projects burned hotter in Florida than the midday sun in July. This book explains in detail which Floridians spearheaded the fame, helped make it happen, where in Florida Presley's first million-seller was written and first recorded all in the same day.”

Elvis Presley died in 1977, but his popularity continues today. His influence on more than 60 years of popular music is undeniable. Every year, more than 600,000 people visit Graceland, the singer’s former home in Memphis, Tennessee. The White House is the only private residence to receive more annual visitors.

“Presley's early days represent a kind of liberation in his fans own lives, which to that point were painted in black and white and dominated by their parents conservative views” says Kealing. “Presley's music gave them an art form, and to a degree, an identity all their own. There's also sadness and tragedy in the Presley story, thanks to poor career choices and the suffocating presence of another former Floridian, his manager Tom Parker. Knowing how Presley struggled later in life and left an unfinished career, binds his fans to him even more closely. More than anything else though, it's the uniqueness of Presley's voice and talent. There's never been anyone like him and likely won't be.”

Kealing not only documents Florida history and culture, he helps to preserve it. He was instrumental in establishing Jack Kerouac’s Orlando home as the site of an ongoing writers-in-residence program. He worked to make Derry Down, the Winter Haven venue where Gram Parsons got his start, named a historic landmark and revitalized as a performance venue.

“I also hope to see this research used as the provenance to recognize the historic importance of several Florida sites in the Presley story,” Kealing says. “I'm talking about places tied to Presley's early time as a live performer. Florida was Presley's breakout state and there are places we could recognize as important mileposts along the way.”

The three block area of downtown Sanford has more than 20 buildings listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Most of the buildings were constructed in the late 1800s, and the newest one was built in 1923. All of the buildings in Sanford’s downtown historic district are remarkably well preserved.

The residential area directly adjacent to downtown Sanford is also designated as an historic district, with many early twentieth century houses listed in the National Register of Historic Homes.

Sanford has a turbulent history dating from the 1830s, with periods of prosperity alternating with prolonged periods of economic hardship.

Like many Florida towns, Sanford was built around a fort constructed during the Second Seminole War. Fort Mellon was constructed at the site of Camp Monroe in 1837, named after Captain Charles Mellon, who died defending the camp. Pioneer settlers building homes nearby called their community Mellonville.

As a port for commercial steamboat traffic on the St. Johns River in the 1840s, Mellonville was the major distribution point for building materials and other goods needed by settlers throughout Central Florida.

Henry Sanford came to the area following the Civil War.

“When Henry Sanford came here in 1870, he was looking for an investment during the Reconstruction period, and he had been advised that Florida was a good investment,” says Alicia Clarke, curator of the Sanford Museum. “He was from Connecticut, and he was a diplomat who had lived overseas most of his life. He landed at Mellonville, found out there was a large former Spanish land grant to the west of Mellonville, which he purchased for eighteen thousand dollars. It was over twelve thousand acres, and he founded the town of Sanford, which was a planned city drawn out on paper.”

As a port city and by 1880 a railroad terminal, Sanford prospered in the late nineteenth century. As a transportation hub for several decades, Sanford was actually a more prominent and prosperous town than its neighbor to the south, Orlando. Sanford called his city “The Gateway to South Florida.”

“We had a thousand citizens very early on, which for that time period was a lot,” Clarke says. “We became very quickly the largest inland city in Florida, and also very quickly we were the fourth largest city in Florida.”

After flourishing initially, the city of Sanford faced a series of economic ups and downs.

In September 1887, a bakery in downtown Sanford caught fire and destroyed much of the town. Brick buildings were constructed to replace the burnt wooden structures, and many of them still stand.

The Big Freeze of 1894-95 destroyed the citrus industry in Sanford, but many farmers turned to celery as their primary crop. By the early twentieth century Sanford was exporting $8 million worth of celery per year, earning the nickname “Celery City.”

Henry Sanford lost his fight to have the Orange County seat moved from Orlando to Sanford, but when Seminole County was created in 1913, Sanford was named its county seat.

“Things changed when the automobile was invented,” says Clarke. “Henry Sanford had no way of knowing that was going to happen. The riverboat ceased to be quite as important.”

The Great Depression impacted Florida several years earlier than the rest of the country, and Sanford was nearly crippled. The city was revitalized in 1942 when the Navy built an air station in Sanford, but the town suffered when the station moved to Orlando in 1968.

Historic preservation efforts inspired by the bicentennial of the United States in 1976 resulted in the gradual revitalization of Sanford.

“A lot of comminutes of our size were trying to find something to do to revive interest in their local history,” Clarke says. “What they did downtown was to put the commercial district on the National Register. They hired some researchers to go and research the oldest buildings downtown, and they were submitted to Washington, and put on the National Register. Then a local district was created around those buildings to protect the entire downtown commercial area through special zoning and ordinances. That really started the thinking of revitalizing downtown.”

Historic preservation efforts in Sanford continue to the present. The results provide a glimpse into Florida’s past.

The third and final presentation in the “Second Saturdays with Stetson Series” is Saturday, March 11, at 2:00 pm, at the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science, 2201 Michigan Avenue, Cocoa. The free talk, presented in conjunction with the temporary exhibition “Stetson Kennedy’s Multicultural Florida” will feature Kennedy’s widow, author and educator Sandra Parks.

The items on display in the exhibition “Stetson Kennedy’s Multicultural Florida” include artifacts and images reflecting the diverse Florida communities that folklorist, author, and activist Stetson Kennedy documented throughout the state in the 1930s and ‘40s. Kennedy interviewed Greek sponge divers in Tarpon Springs, Latin cigar rollers in Ybor City and Key West, African American turpentine industry workers, Cracker cowmen, Seminole Indians, and many others.

Also on display are personal items such as Kennedy’s hat, his typewriter, and a letter he received from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the 1940s and ‘50s, Kennedy infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan, exposing their secret activities. He continued fighting for equal rights for all people until his death in 2011.

The note from Dr. King, on letterhead from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, is dated November 3, 1965. In the letter, King thanks Kennedy for his work in “our struggle for racial justice,” and his “great moral support, not only to myself, but to our entire staff.” King goes on to tell Kennedy that, “You have my heartfelt appreciation for such a worthwhile contribution to the Freedom Movement.”

Visitors to the Brevard Museum are fortunate to be able to see the letter.

“About a month before Stetson died, I asked him ‘where did you put the letter from Dr. Martin Luther King?’” says Parks. “I had begged him for the eight years we were together to please put it in the safety deposit box, and he would never do that. About a month before he died, he pointed to his legal documents file and said, ‘it’s in there.’”

A few days after Kennedy died, Parks began the daunting task of going through stacks of unorganized papers that her husband had saved. She started with the box that was supposed to contain the letter from Dr. King. The letter was not there.

“I had two other people go through the box, just in case I could have missed it,” says Parks. “Somewhere in with the takeout menus and the old phone bills there was a letter from Dr. Martin Luther King we hadn’t found yet.”

The letter was eventually discovered among copies of various newspaper articles, several drafts of an unpublished autobiography, and other personal correspondence.

“People think that this is some kind of scholarly exercise, but it is an endeavor for patience,” Parks says.

Eventually, Parks had fifteen years of accumulated papers sent to the University of Florida to be sorted and archived. That collection is being merged with papers already archived at the University of South Florida.

“In 1996, Stetson sold his then papers to the University of South Florida, along with many of his foreign language edition books that are quite rare and things we cannot find anymore,” says Parks.

Some foreign language editions of Kennedy’s books are currently on display at the Brevard Museum.

The entire collection of Kennedy’s papers is now under one roof at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

“Stetson had been a student at the University of Florida,” says Parks. “He and Sam Proctor, who started the oral history center there, were friends years ago, back when they were both college boys. Most significantly, the WPA papers are there, papers of Zora Hurston’s are there, papers of Marjorie Rawlings are there.”

Kennedy was a pioneer of oral history, had worked for the WPA Florida Writers Project, was supervisor of author Zora Neale Hurston for a time, and took a class at UF from Pulitzer Prize winner Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

“Stetson had hoped that his papers would go to the University of Florida,” says Parks.

The Florida Historical Society, which operates the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science, assembled the exhibition “Stetson Kennedy’s Multicultural Florida” with the assistance of Sandra Parks, the University of Florida, the Florida State Archives, and private collectors.

The Brevard Museum will display the exhibition through May.