The Historic Rossetter House Museum and Gardens, 1320 Highland Ave., Eau Gallie, is hosting the presentation “Zora in Brevard,” Saturday, March 4, at 10:00 am and 2:00 pm. The $15 ticket includes a discussion about Zora Neale Hurston’s life and work, a portrayal by actress Lila Marie Hicks, and a tour of the Rossetter House. Reservations are available at 321-254-9855.

On July 9, 1951, writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston wrote in a letter to literary agent Jean Parker Waterbury: “Somehow, this one spot on earth feels like home to me. I have always intended to come back here. That is why I am doing so much to make a go of it.”

It would be natural to assume that Hurston was writing about her adopted hometown of Eatonville, Florida. Growing up in Eatonville, the oldest incorporated municipality in the United States entirely governed by African Americans, instilled in Hurston a fierce confidence in her abilities and a unique perspective on race. Eatonville figures prominently in much of Hurston’s work, from her powerful 1928 essay How It Feels To Be Colored Me to her acclaimed 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Since 1990, the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community has celebrated their town’s most famous citizen with the annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities. Hurston will forever be associated with the historic town of Eatonville.

Hurston, however, was not writing about Eatonville when she spoke of “the one spot on earth [that] feels like home to me” where she was “the happiest I have been in the last ten years” and where she wanted to “build a comfortable little new house” to live out the rest of her life.

Unknown to most, Zora Neale Hurston called Brevard County “home” for some of the happiest and most productive years of her life.

Hurston first moved to Eau Gallie in 1929. Here she wrote the book of African American folklore Mules and Men (published in 1935), documented research she had done in Florida and New Orleans to fill an entire issue of the Journal of American Folklore, and made significant progress on some of her theatrical pieces.

After returning to New York in late 1929, Hurston came back to Eau Gallie in 1951, moving into the same cottage where she had lived previously. While living in Eau Gallie between 1951 and 1956, Hurston staged a concert at Melbourne High School (its first integrated event); worked on the project that became her passion, the manuscript for Herod the Great; covered the 1952 murder trial of Ruby McCollum (an African American woman who killed her white abuser); and wrote an editorial for the Orlando Sentinel arguing against the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Her controversial disapproval of public school integration reflected her belief in the need to preserve African American culture and communities.

While working as a librarian at the Technical Library for Pan American World Airways on Patrick Air Force Base, Hurston was unable to purchase her much loved Eau Gallie cottage, so she moved to an efficiency apartment in Cocoa. In June, 1956, Hurston moved from the apartment to a mobile home on Merritt Island. She was fired from her job in May 1957, because she was “too well-educated for the job.” She then left her happy life in Brevard County to take a job at the Chronicle in Fort Pierce, where she died three years later.

Zora Neale Hurston is remembered as a controversial figure of the Harlem Renaissance, a talented anthropologist and collector of folklore, and a beloved novelist. While she will always be closely associated with Eatonville, Brevard County is where Hurston spent some of her happiest and most productive years, in her cottage on the northeast corner of Guava Avenue and Aurora Road in Eau Gallie, just blocks from the Historic Rossetter House Museum.

Hurston returns to Eau Gallie this Saturday in the form of actress Lila Marie Hicks.

“It’s one thing to read the story of Zora Neale Hurston collecting work songs,” says Hicks, “but to hear her singing a line song as she struts onto the stage does more than any letters on a page could ever do."

There is a road in downtown Orlando called Division Street. It has traditionally been the dividing line between the predominately white community to the east, and the African American community to the west.

As downtown Orlando was established in the late 1800s, a separate but parallel black community emerged. By the early twentieth century, the Parramore neighborhood included several blocks of prosperous black owned businesses including a tailor shop, a theater, and attorney’s offices. There were African American physicians, dentists, photographers, and other professional people. Churches were integral to the community.

In 1929, a prominent black physician named William Monroe Wells opened the Wells’Built Hotel on South Street.

“He came here in 1917 from Fort Gaines, Georgia, and records show that by 1921 he was listed in city directories as a physician and owner of a ‘notions’ store, and by 1926 he obtained a permit from the City of Orlando to build a hotel,” says former Florida State Senator Geraldine F. Thompson, founder of the Association to Preserve African American Society, History, and Tradition (PAST, Inc.) “During that time, when African Americans visited the Central Florida area, they did not have lodging available to them at any of the major hotels in the area because of segregation.”

Directly next door to the Wells’Built Hotel, Dr. Wells built the South Street Casino. This was not a gambling establishment, but a community center. There was a basketball court inside, and people held graduations, wedding receptions, and other gatherings at the venue.

Today, the Amway Center on South Street hosts popular musical acts. In the mid-twentieth century, it was the much smaller South Street Casino that brought well known African American performers to the area. Musicians including Erskine Hawkins, Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, B.B. King, and many others would perform at the South Street Casino and stay next door at the Wells’Built Hotel.

Legendary drummer David “Panama” Francis played in the South Street Casino many times. Francis was born in Miami in 1918, and was playing in nightclubs by age 13. Shortly after arriving in New York in 1938, Francis played with Lucky Millinder’s Orchestra for six years at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. He played and recorded with many great artists of the day, including Duke Ellington, John Lee Hooker, James Brown, Buddy Holly, the Four Seasons, and the Platters.

Before his death in 2001, Francis remembered playing in the South Street Casino.

“I played there about twice a year,” Francis said. “The old timers remember the band that used to come up from Miami, George Kelley’s band. That place was so hot. Until, I mean the perspiration was all down in my shoe. I could hear when I walked, I’d hear the squish, squish, squish of the water that was in there ‘cause, you know, there was no air conditioning or nothing like that. And it’d be packed.”

The South Street Casino had a creative marketing strategy to entice people to attend the Saturday night dances there.

“Back then, you know, there was no radio and TV and all that, so what happened—if the dance would, say, start at nine o’clock, they’d let all of the people in [earlier] for free to listen to the band, and you’d play about half an hour of music,” said Francis. “All of the good dancers would be standing around—who, you know, were the critics. If they gave the nod that, you know, that the band is all right, they’d let all of the people out—and then they had to pay to come in and hear the band. So that’s how they used to do. A lot of times they would get on a truck and ballyhoo.”

In the second half of the twentieth century, the Parramore neighborhood entered a period of economic and social decline. The South Street Casino burned down in 1987, and the Wells’Built Hotel was abandoned and threatened with demolition.

In 2001, the building was refurbished by the Association to Preserve African American Society, History and Tradition, and transformed into the Wells’Built Museum of African American History and Culture. The museum is part of a larger effort to improve and revitalize the Parramore neighborhood.

Imagine you are on a boat traveling south along Florida’s east coast. A brief but violent storm hits and your boat sinks. You manage to swim to shore. Exhausted from fighting with the sea and believing you are now safe, you fall asleep on the beach.

When you wake up, you realize your ordeal has just begun.

The hot Florida sun has already burned your skin. You are covered with bites from sand fleas and mosquitoes. You stumble inland to find undeveloped scrubland as far as the eye can see, and no source of fresh water in sight.

It’s the late 1800s, and the entire population of Florida is less than 270,000 people.

Luckily for you, one of those people is the keeper of a remote House of Refuge, and he is patrolling the shoreline nearby. He will find you soon, and take you to safety.

Ten Houses of Refuge were built by the U.S. Life Saving Service between 1876 and 1886 to help shipwreck survivors. They were exclusively built in Florida.

Sandra Thurlow has written a series of books about the history of the Indian River region of Florida, including “Gilbert’s Bar House of Refuge: Home of History.” Her new book, co-authored with Timothy Dring, is “U.S. Life Saving Service: Florida’s East Coast.”

“It’s surprising how sparsely it was populated,” says Thurlow. “They called it ‘a howling wilderness,’ especially the lower east coast. So when shipwrecks happened, the survivors usually came to shore and got to survive that far, but then their life was in question because there was no way to find civilization to get food or water, and they didn’t know which way to go. So after storms, keepers of the Houses of Refuge would walk in either direction, and look for survivors.”

Sumner Increase Kimball led the U.S. Life Saving Service from its creation in 1871, until it merged with the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service in 1915, to form the U.S. Coast Guard. Under Kimball’s direction, the activities of the Houses of Refuge were well documented.

“He was a brilliant bureaucratic supervisor,” says Thurlow. “There’s voluminous paperwork surviving.”

While written records for the Houses of Refuge are plentiful, photographs are not. Thurlow and Dring managed to assemble hundreds of photographs for their book from a variety of sources.

“Each one is precious,” Thurlow says.

Of the 10 built, Gilbert’s Bar House of Refuge in Stuart is the only one still standing. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places and is preserved as a museum.

“Coincidentally, the most exciting time ever in a House of Refuge was right there, at Gilbert’s Bar,” says Thurlow. “In October, 1904, there were two shipwrecks back to back. There were 22 men put up in the House of Refuge as a result of those shipwrecks. There were quite a few casualties involved. One (of the shipwrecks) has become an underwater archaeological site right off of the Gilbert’s Bar House of Refuge. People dive on it, and on a calm day you can see a bit of the wreckage from the House of Refuge porch. Two ships, the Georges Valentine and the Cosme Calzado wrecked within 24 hours.”

Shipwrecks didn’t happen every day, of course. The Houses of Refuge were mostly occupied by the families of the keepers, and daily life could be slow paced. Thurlow tells many stories of individuals associated with the Houses of Refuge, but her favorite is about a shipwreck survivor named Axel Johansen.

“He was Norwegian and he was in a shipwreck off of Chester Shoal House of Refuge,” says Thurlow. “He washed ashore with little life left in him. He passed out as soon as he got to the sand. Two daughters of the House of Refuge came and discovered him, and told their parents, and they nursed him back to health. He went back to Norway. It was the days of sailing ships dwindling, and his life had changed. He remembered Florida and the good reception and care he got on Cape Canaveral, and he came back and married one of the daughters.”

After World War II, Florida’s coastline was becoming much more populated, and the Houses of Refuge went out of service.

Cultural figures from Florida history including Stetson Kennedy, Zora Neale Hurston, and Harry T. Moore will come to life in a performance by the Young Minds Building Success Readers Theater from Jacksonville.

The original production “Stetson Kennedy Legacy: Man in the Mirror” will be performed at the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science, 2201 Michigan Avenue, Cocoa, Saturday at 2:00 pm. The presentation is free and open to the public.

Young Minds Building Success Readers Theater is part of a larger effort to provide educational outreach.

“Young Minds Building Success was formed in an endeavor to encourage the individual potential for children and young adults, assist in the needs of families and communities, promote a realistic link between educational services and the needs of the business community, partner with educators, businesses, community leaders, and other organizations,” says executive director Tangela Floyd.

The free performance of “Stetson Kennedy Legacy: Man in the Mirror” is possible because of sponsorship provided by the Stetson Kennedy Foundation.

“Our mission is to do all we can to help carry forward mankind’s unending struggle for human rights in a free, peaceful, harmonious, democratic, just, humane, bounteous and joyful world, to nurture our cultural heritages, and to faithfully discharge our commitment of stewardship over Mother Earth and all her progeny,” says foundation director and Kennedy’s widow, Sandra Parks.

Saturday’s performance is part of the “Second Saturdays with Stetson” series being presented in conjunction with the temporary exhibit “Stetson Kennedy’s Multicultural Florida” at the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science. The exhibition commemorates Kennedy’s documentation of our state’s diverse cultural heritage, and his work to foster equality for all.

Folklorist, author, and activist Stetson Kennedy lived from 1916 to 2011.

From 1937 to 1942, Kennedy traveled throughout Florida recording the oral histories, folktales, and work songs of the state’s diverse population. He spoke with Cracker cowmen, Seminole Indians, Greek sponge divers, Latin cigar rollers, African American turpentine still workers, and many others.

This work resulted in Kennedy’s book “Palmetto Country,” originally published in 1942.

The exhibition includes personal items such as Kennedy’s typewriter, hats, and the handwritten lyrics to the Woody Guthrie song “Stetson Kennedy.” An interview filmed with Kennedy in 2008 is part of a video display.

Kennedy worked for the Works Project Administration’s Florida Writers Project as head of the unit on folklore, oral history, and socio-ethnic studies.

“Well, it was the Great Depression, for one thing, and I didn’t have a job along with tens of millions of other Americans,” Kennedy said in 2008. “At the same time, President [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt had organized something called the Federal Writers Project, and I thought this would be an opportunity for a twenty-one-year-old to start a writing career, so I signed up for the Florida Writers Project.”

In addition to being a folklorist and author, Kennedy was a social activist. In the 1940s he risked his life by infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan and exposing their secrets. Using the name John Perkins, Kennedy was able to gather information that helped lead to the incarceration of a number of domestic terrorists. He wrote about his experiences in the 1954 book “I Rode with the Klan,” which was later republished as “The Klan Unmasked.”

“When I went overseas some years later, I thought I’d get away from my nightmares, you know, of being caught,” Kennedy said. “But in Paris, it was raining frequently, and the traffic cops wore white rubber raincoats with capes and hoods, and their hand signals were very much like the Klan signals, so I kept on having nightmares.”

Kennedy continued working until his death in 2011, at the age of 94. His last book, “The Florida Slave,” was published posthumously. His other books include “Southern Exposure,” “The Jim Crow Guide: The Way It Was,” “South Florida Folklife,” “After Appomattox: How the South Won the War,” and “Grits and Grunts: Folkloric Key West.”

“Most people are disgusted when they see or hear about prejudice and injustice,” says Tangela Floyd, director of the production “Stetson Kennedy: Man in the Mirror.” “The difference between Stetson and most people is, he did something about it. Readers Theater is our small way of helping to continue his legacy.”

The 28^th annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities was held January 21-29.

The event was presented by the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community, and included a series of presentations called “Communities Conference: Civic Conversations Concerning 21^st Century American Life in Communities of Color” in venues at Rollins College and Eatonville.

Elizabeth Van Dyke performed in “Zora Neale Hurston: A Theatrical Biography” at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts in Orlando, and the ZORA! Golf Tournament was held at Metro West Golf Course. There was a tour of yards and gardens in Historic Eatonville.

The three day Outdoor Festival portion of the event featured vendors selling original arts and crafts, food vendors with fried fish and other festival food, and musical performances throughout each day including headliners The Whispers, and Jonathan Butler & Friends.

Eatonville is the oldest incorporated African American municipality in the United States. Growing up in the all black town had a profound effect on Zora Neale Hurston’s attitudes about race that can be seen in her work.

“We say that Zora Neale Hurston and the Eatonville community are two sides of the same hand,” says N.Y. Nathiri, executive director of the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community. “For Zora Neale Hurston, Eatonville represents the quintessential cultural impact that people of African ancestry, particularly rural southern people in this country, contribute to the culture of the United States.”

In the 1930s and ‘40s, writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston was a celebrated figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston is best remembered for her 1937 novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” the story of Eatonville resident Janie Crawford and her attempts at self-realization.

“’Their Eyes Were Watching God’ is history, it’s fiction, it’s pathos, it’s tragedy, all rolled up together in one incredible literary gem,” says Florence Turcotte, literary manuscripts archivist at the University of Florida’s P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History. “Making history come alive is sort of what I like to do, and that’s what excites me about Zora, is that she fictionalized real life and said a lot about the human condition, and a lot about life in Florida during her stay here.”

Hurston’s other novels include “Jonah’s Gourd Vine,” the story of an unfaithful man with an understanding wife; “Moses: Man of the Mountain,” a retelling of the biblical story of Moses; and “Seraph on the Suwanee,” Hurston’s only book that features white people as main characters. Hurston also wrote dozens of short stories, essays, and dramatic works.

Hurston’s literary career began even before she graduated from Barnard College in 1927. In 1925, her short essay “Spunk” was included in a respected anthology called “The New Negro.” While attending college in New York, Hurston worked with Harlem Renaissance contemporaries including Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman on the literary magazine “Fire!”

After earning her Bachelor of Arts degree in anthropology, Hurston continued her graduate studies at Columbia University. As an anthropologist who studied under the renowned Franz Boas, Hurston published two collections of folklore. “Tell My Horse” looks at life in Haiti and Jamaica, including the practice of Voodoo. She wrote the book “Mules and Men” while living in Brevard County, in Eau Gallie.

“The book ‘Mules and Men’ was published in 1935, and was essentially a non-fiction account of Hurston’s adventures and experiences as a folklorist and anthropologist, in the late 1920s and early 1930s,” says Virginia Lynn Moylan, author of the book “Zora Neale Hurston’s Final Decade.” “The first section is devoted to her experiences in Eatonville collecting folklore, and includes 70 of her glorious folktales, including ‘Why Women Always Take Advantage of Men.’ The second section covers the period that she did research in New Orleans, into Hoodoo religion and practices. Today, it is still considered the preeminent collection of African American folklore.”

By the time Hurston died in 1960, she was broke, forgotten, and her books were out of print. Today, she is recognized as an important writer whose work is taught in classrooms around the world.

“Work that is truly of merit, lives,” says N.Y. Nathiri. “Today, Zora Neale Hurston’s work, her literature, her genius, is acknowledged and celebrated throughout the literary world.”

Since they were first published in 1591, the engravings of Theodore de Bry have been the most enduring images of Florida natives at the time of European contact.

“The de Bry engravings that were always thought to be based on Jacques le Moyne’s paintings have become the epitome of the best source for what Florida Indians looked like,” says Jerald T. Milanich, one of the most respected historical archaeologists in the state.

For more than four centuries, historians, archaeologists, artists, and the general public have relied upon de Bry’s images to provide information about the clothing, weapons, hair styles, headdresses, jewelry, tattoos, housing, baskets, canoes, cooking methods, and traditions of Florida’s Timucua Indians.

While some of what de Bry depicts in his engravings is supported by written historical descriptions, much of the content now appears to be the product of imagination, or based upon images of non-Floridians.

As Milanich and other modern scholars began to notice problems with the de Bry engravings, the list of discrepancies continued to grow.

“One was that the French soldiers portrayed in these engravings had their helmets on backwards,” says Milanich. “Another thing is that some of the engravings show Timucua Indians in north Florida drinking a sacred tea called Black Drink out of nautilus shells from the Pacific Ocean. We know that they drank it out of big whelk conch shells. So something was funny, something was weird about this.”

Another image shows Indians fighting a gigantic alligator with human-like ears and muscular arms.

De Bry was born in what is now Belgium, in 1528. He moved his family to London in 1585, before settling in Frankfurt in 1588. De Bry was a skilled engraver, known for his detailed images. Although he published books of images depicting Florida Indians and other native people of the New World, de Bry never visited the Americas.

“Everyone thought, including me, that although there were mistakes in these engravings, that they were based on paintings done by Frenchman Jacques La Moyne, who came to Florida in 1564 and did watercolors, probably after he returned to Europe,” says Milanich. “Those watercolors are lost, and may have never existed. Jacques le Moyne [may have] died before he did what he wanted to do. He talked with Theodore de Bry and gave him ideas.”

Close inspection of the 42 Florida engravings created by de Bry show that he borrowed imagery from a variety of sources, including books that his company published on other native cultures. Elements found in the Florida engravings were lifted directly from illustrations of Brazilian Indians.

“Not only did he do that for the volume he published on Florida, but he did it on volumes he published about other native peoples in the Americas,” Milanich says.

De Bry was also inspired by the work of artist John White, who visited North Carolina and painted the Indians there. White’s paintings of the Carolinian Indians are displayed at the British Museum. White also painted a Timucua Man and a Timucua Woman, and de Bry borrowed imagery from those pieces.

“John White never saw a Timucua man or a Timucua woman in his life, and what we know now is that he used his Carolinian Indians as models to do the Timucua Indians,” says Milanich. “He also used a French account by Jean Ribault that described the Indians as being heavily painted and the women wearing moss dresses.”

The de Bry engravings of Timucua Indians have been used repeatedly in books about the indigenous people of Florida, and inspired museum exhibits. Artists depicting Florida Indians have been influenced by de Bry’s images when creating their own work.

“I wrote a book about the Timucua Indians [published in 1996] and a lot of information I put in that came from those engravings,” says Milanich. “I got lucky, because I also used other historical documents.”

Milanich says that we must now question all of the conclusions reached using the de Bry Florida Indian engravings as a source.

“We thought we had a wonderful source, a code, a portal into the past, and suddenly things aren’t as we expected or as we thought,” says Milanich. “That often happens. Maybe someday we’ll find another source.”

Two people with extensive careers documenting the history and culture of Florida will be in Brevard County this week discussing their new books.

On Friday, January 13, at 7:00 pm, author and archaeologist Jerald T. Milanich will discuss his new book “Handfuls of History: Stories about Florida’s Past” at the Library of Florida History, 435 Brevard Ave., Cocoa Village.

On Saturday, January 14, at 2:00 pm, author and folklorist Peggy A. Bulger will discuss her new book “Stetson Kennedy: Applied Folklore and Cultural Advocacy” at the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science, 2201 Michigan Ave., Cocoa.

Dr. Jerald T. Milanich is Curator Emeritus of Archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida, and one of the most respected historical archaeologists in the state.

“The past is fun to think about and to learn about,” says Milanich. “I love to do both. I also enjoy writing about the past. When we study and consider history, and when we write about it, we are making the past new again, which, of course, leads to more history. Florida is a state with a history like no other. People have been living here for as many as 14,000 years, maybe more.”

In his new book, “Handfuls of History: Stories about Florida’s Past,” Milanich discusses pre-Columbian Florida, Colonial Period people and events, and the nineteenth century shipwreck of the steamship City of Vera Cruz.

Milanich explores the origins of archaeology in Florida with Clarence B. Moore, and offers advice to future archeologists. He may even stir up some controversy as he questions the authenticity of the Miami Circle.

“My goal is to make history something people will value, even though the events of the past certainly were not necessarily pleasant experiences for those who lived them,” says Milanich. “If there is one thing that history tells us, it is that greed, fear, ignorance, and the quest for power have contributed to the demise of people and societies. Maybe the past is not all that different from the present. But by understanding the past perhaps we can enjoy a better future.”

Dr. Peggy Bulger was the state’s first folklorist, serving as Folk Arts Coordinator in 1976. From 1976 to 1989 she held senior folklore positions at the Florida Folklife Program, and created the Florida Folklife Collection. Bulger served as Folk Arts Director and Senior Program Officer for the Southern Arts Federation in Atlanta from 1989 to 1999, when she then became Director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Since 2011, she has been back in Florida, working with other folklorists throughout the state.

Bulger has been gathering material for her book “Stetson Kennedy: Applied Folklore and Cultural Advocacy” for forty years.

“I started really delving into materials that were done during the WPA,” says Bulger. “Stetson Kennedy, Zora Neale Hurston, Alan Lomax, Herbert Halpert, all of them were folklorists who had worked in Florida back in the ‘30s and ‘40s. I was 25-years-old in 1976, and I thought that anyone who had lived in the 1930s and ‘40s was dead, because that was ancient history.”

Bulger was shocked and pleased to discover that Stetson Kennedy was alive and well and living in Jacksonville.

“I went to see Stetson and I started interviewing him about the WPA and the work that he had done here in Florida,” Bulger says. “Over the course of the years, we became fast friends, from ’76 to when he died in 2011. He really informed the work that I did in Florida.”

Stetson Kennedy was born in Jacksonville on October 5, 1916. From 1937 to 1942, he traveled the cities, towns, and rural backwoods of Florida documenting the cultural heritage of the state’s diverse populations. Using the name John Perkins, Kennedy later infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan, exposing their secrets. He was an activist for positive social change, working to make life better for Floridians until his death on August 27, 2011.

Bulger’s talk is presented in conjunction with the exhibition “Stetson Kennedy’s Multicultural Florida” at the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science.

The presentations of both Milanich and Bulger are free and open to the public.

Since 1906, people have gathered at Spring Bayou in Tarpon Springs each January 6th to watch young men compete to find a submerged wooden cross. Today, thousands attend the ceremony. The unique Epiphany celebration is one example of the Greek culture that is still prevalent in Tarpon Springs.

In the city of Tarpon Springs you can listen to Greek music played on a bouzouki, try the pastry baklava, have a meal of lamb stew or a Greek seafood dish, sip the licorice flavored alcoholic beverage ouzo, and enjoy many other aspects of traditional Greek culture.

You can see the Neo-Byzantine style architecture of St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, and watch the sponge divers unload their catch on the city dock downtown.

Tarpon Springs has the largest percentage of Greek Americans of any city in the United States.

“Even today, after people have been here four or five generations, there is still a big segment of the population that speaks Greek,” says Tina Bucuvalas, curator of arts and history for the City of Tarpon Springs.

When the first Greeks came to Tarpon Springs in 1905, a thriving town was already in place.

When Hamilton Disston bought 4 million acres of land for 25 cents per acre in 1881, it included the land that would become Tarpon Springs. To stimulate development, Disston brought businessman Anton Safford to Tarpon Springs.

The Victorian home that Safford lived in can be visited today. The Safford House Museum features period furniture and original family artifacts that present the home as it was in 1883.

The Orange Belt Railway came to town in 1887. The train depot is now a museum.

“The building we’re in was built in 1909 because the original railroad station burned down in 1908. This was restored in 2005,” says Sharon Sawyer of the Tarpon Springs Area Historical Society.

“The railroad was brought here by Peter Demens. He brought the railroad from Sanford to Tarpon Springs and then on down to St. Petersburg. Before the railroad came, everybody had to get here by boat or wagon, so the railroad in 1887 made a big difference here in town.”

It was the sponge industry that really put Tarpon Springs on the map.

By the mid-1800s, there was a thriving sponge industry in the Florida Keys, but by the early 1900s, Tarpon Springs was the largest sponge port in the United States.

While sponges in the Keys were harvested with long poles, in Tarpon Springs, Greek sponge divers donned canvas suits with round metal helmets.

“John Cocoris realized that the way that sponges were harvested in Greece would produce far more than the hooking methods they were using in Florida,” says Tina Bucuvalas.

“They brought over Greeks. At first 500 came in 1905, and then within a couple of years there were 1,500, and there were a lot of boats. It very quickly made Tarpon Springs the Sponge Capital of the World. Tarpon Springs was a big, important town at a time when St. Petersburg was a wide spot in the road.”

With the large influx of Greek sponge divers and their families to Tarpon Springs, businesses and institutions to serve them were established, including restaurants, grocery stores, bakeries, and coffee houses.

Today, Tarpon Springs retains a distinctive European flavor.

“They get up in the morning and have Greek food, and sweep out their courtyards which have various plants you might see in Greece,” says Bucuvalas. “They’ll have their coffee outside. The old ladies in their head scarves will be going over to St. Michael’s Chapel or St. Nicholas, or down to the bakery.”

St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church was constructed in 1907 and expanded in 1943 with marble imported from Greece.

The unique Epiphany celebration held each January 6th attracts people from around the world. Following a ceremony at the church, the congregation walks to the dock at Spring Bayou, where a wooden cross is thrown into the water. The young man who retrieves the cross is believed to bring special blessings to his family for the year.

The Patriarch of Constantinople, the Greek Orthodox equivalent of Catholicism’s Pope, came to Tarpon Springs in 2006 for the 100^th anniversary of the town’s Epiphany ceremony.

On Christmas night 1951, a bomb exploded under the Mims home of educator and civil rights activist Harry T. Moore. The blast was so loud it could be heard several miles away in Titusville.
Moore died while being transported to Sanford, the closest place where a black man could be hospitalized. His wife Harriette died nine days later from injuries sustained in the blast.
The couple celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary on the day of the explosion, and Harriette lived just long enough to see her husband buried.
The Moore’s daughter, Juanita Evangeline Moore, was working in Washington, D.C. in 1951, and was scheduled to come home for the holidays on December 27th, aboard a train called the Silver Meteor. She did not hear the news about her family home being bombed until she arrived.
“When I got off the train in Titusville, I knew something was very, very wrong,” Moore said in an interview before her death in October 2015. “I had not turned on radio or television, so I didn’t know a thing about it until I got off the train. I noticed that my mother and father were not in front of all my relatives to greet me and they were always there.”
Moore was given the news by her Uncle George, who was home on leave from Korea.
“We got into his car and got settled, and the first thing I asked was ‘Well, where’s Mom and Dad?’ No one said anything for a while, it was complete silence. Finally, Uncle George turned around and he said ‘Well, Van, I guess I’m the one who has to tell you. Your house was bombed Christmas night. Your Dad is dead and your Mother is in the hospital.’ That’s the way I found out,” said Moore.
“I’ve never gotten over it. It was unbelievable.”
Moore insisted on being taken to her parent’s home. The blast had done extensive damage. She saw a huge hole in the floor of her parent’s room, into which their broken bed had collapsed. Wooden beams had fallen from the ceiling. Shards of broken glass covered the bed in the room she shared with her sister, Peaches.
Harry T. Moore was born November 18, 1905, in Houston, Florida, located in Suwannee County. At age 19, Moore graduated with a high school diploma from Florida Memorial College where he was a straight-A student, except for a B+ in French. Other students called him “Doc” because he did so well in all of his classes.
Moore moved to Mims in 1925 after being offered a job to teach fourth grade at the “colored school” in Cocoa. He met Harriette Vida Sims. They married and had two daughters. Moore, his wife, and both of their daughters graduated from Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona.
As a ninth grade teacher and principal at Titusville Negro School, Moore instilled in his students a sense of pride and a solid work ethic. A popular and skilled educator, Moore was fired for attempting to equalize pay for African American teachers in Brevard County.
Moore led a highly successful effort to expand black voter registration throughout the state, dramatically increased membership in the Florida branch of the NAACP, worked for equal justice for African Americans, and actively sought punishment for those who committed crimes against them.
“I do remember a lot of NAACP work with my Dad from the time I was able to understand what was going on,” said Juanita Evangeline Moore. “I helped him a lot with his mailing lists. We had a one-hand operated ditto machine. He usually typed out the stencil and he ran off whatever material he wanted to send out.”
Although the murders of Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore have never been solved, it is believed that members of the Ku Klux Klan from Apopka and Orlando planted the bomb on Christmas night.
Moore and his wife were killed 12 years before Medgar Evers, 14 years before Malcolm X, and 17 years before Martin Luther King, Jr., making them the first martyrs of the contemporary civil rights movement.
The Moore Cultural Complex in Mims features a civil rights museum and a replica of the Moore family home.

The statewide headquarters of the Florida Historical Society is in Cocoa, but the organization hosts their Annual Meeting and Symposium in a different Florida city each year. In recent years the event has been held in Orlando, St. Augustine, Fort Lauderdale, Tampa, Jacksonville, and Pensacola.

In 2013, to commemorate the 500^th anniversary of the naming of our state, the Florida Historical Society hosted their annual meeting aboard a cruise ship that sailed out of Port Canaveral. The return voyage from the Bahamas followed Ponce de León’s path of discovery, sailing up the east coast of Florida.

“That cruise was the most popular conference we’ve ever had,” says Tracy Moore, president of the Florida Historical Society. “We’ve been around since 1856, so that’s really saying something. People enjoyed it so much they began asking us right away when we were going to do a conference cruise again.”

The answer is here. The Florida Historical Society will hold their next Annual Meeting and Symposium aboard the Carnival Sensation cruise ship, May 18-22, 2017.

“We’ll be leaving out of Miami, and spending a day in Key West taking tours of historic sites and museums such as the Harry S. Truman Little White House, writer Ernest Hemingway’s House, and other exciting places,” says Moore. “From there we’ll travel to Cozumel, where we’ll take a tour to the breathtaking Mayan ruins at Tulum. This ancient city sits high on a cliff overlooking the ocean. It’s really spectacular.”

The theme for the conference is “Islands in the Stream: Exploring History and Archaeology in Key West and Cozumel.”

“While we’ll be on a cruise ship and having a lot of fun, all of the scholarly elements of our annual meeting that people expect from the Florida Historical Society will remain intact,” says Ben DiBiase, FHS director of educational resources. “In addition to the historic tours on land, we will have fascinating paper presentations and round table discussions on a wide variety of Florida history topics while on board ship.”

One of the keynote speakers for the conference will be Robert Kerstein, author of the book “Key West on the Edge: Inventing the Conch Republic.”

“Dr. Kerstein’s book is a thoroughly researched study of this unique town that we’ll be visiting,” says DiBiase. “It follows the development of Key West from an isolated outpost of people who salvaged shipwrecks, to an important military installation, to the tourist mecca it is today.”

Another keynote speaker for the conference will be Sandra Starr, senior researcher emerita from the Smithsonian Institution. She will be giving a presentation called “Maya Mariners, the Yucatan, and Florida: A Researcher’s Tale of Seduction into the Cross-Gulf Travel Theory.”

There has been speculation for decades that the ancient Maya may have used boats to cross the Gulf of Mexico to visit Florida. Some have argued that evidence of this contact can be found in the language, pottery, and earthen mounds of some of Florida’s indigenous people.

“The possible connection between the ancient Mayan people and the indigenous people of Florida is a fascinating topic for discussion, and Sandra Starr will help us to explore those possibilities before we tour one of the most impressive Mayan cities,” says DiBiase.

The Florida Historical Society Archaeological Institute is based at the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science in Cocoa, and archaeology has been a primary focus of FHS for more than a century.

To participate in the Florida Historical Society Annual Meeting and Symposium cruise, you must register through the FHS website at myfloridahistory.org, or call 321-690-1971 ext. 205. A $100 per person deposit will hold a cabin for the conference.

The cost of the event varies based on what kind of cabin a participant wants, but all registrations include the cruise, meals, the featured tours at Key West and Cozumel, symposium registration, taxes, fees, and port charges. Inside cabins start at $699.99 per person, double occupancy.

“Last time that we did a conference cruise, we filled all of our allotted cabins quickly,” says Moore, who also owns Robinson Cruise Planners in Cocoa. “We suggest that you contact the Florida Historical Society right away to reserve your cabin. This conference cruise would make a really wonderful holiday gift.”