Florida Frontiers

The Florida Historical Society is presenting the original theatrical production “Female Florida: Historic Women in Their Own Words,” Sunday at 2:00 pm at the Rossetter House Museum and Gardens in Eau Gallie.

The production was created using oral histories and autobiographical writings by businesswoman Caroline P. Rossetter, writer Zora Neale Hurston, environmentalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and educator Mary McLeod Bethune.

Rossetter and Douglas are being portrayed by Marion C. Marsh. Hurston and Bethune are played by Jossalynn Moukouanga. Both Marsh and Moukouanga are professional actresses from Orlando.

The Rossetter House Museum and Gardens is a particularly appropriate place to perform “Female Florida,” as Caroline P. Rossetter was the last resident of the home, and Hurston spent some of her most productive years living in a cottage just blocks away.

“Performing this work where these women lived adds a bit of wonder about who we will meet after the show and their motivations for joining us in the telling of these stories by such strong women,” says Moukouanga. “It’s thrilling to say the least, and a privilege I don’t take lightly,” adds Marsh.

Caroline P. Rossetter, at the tender age of 23, listened at the keyhole as a debate took place behind closed doors at the Standard Oil Company office in Louisville, Kentucky. Upon her father’s death, Carrie Rossetter requested that she be allowed to take over his Standard Oil Agency in Brevard County, Florida. That request sparked a heated discussion.

The year was 1921, and women had received the right to vote in the United States just months before. The idea of a woman being able to run a business was preposterous to some.

Finally, Carrie heard a decisive voice rise over the din, saying “Let the little lady have it! She won’t last a year and we’ll give it to a man!” With that, Caroline P. Rossetter became the first female Standard Oil Agent.

The loudly stated prediction was at least partially accurate. Rossetter didn’t last a year as a Standard Oil Agent. She lasted 62 years, becoming one of the company’s most successful representatives until her retirement at the age of 85.

Before her death in 1999, at the age of 101, Caroline P. Rossetter, along with her sister Ella, established a trust to secure the preservation of their family home as an historical museum.

On July 9, 1951, writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston wrote in a letter to Florida historian 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.”

While Hurston is most closely associated with the town of Eatonville, she was talking about Brevard County when she wrote that she was “the happiest I have been in the last ten years” and that Eau Gallie was where she wanted to “build a comfortable little new house” to live out the rest of her life.

While living in Eau Gallie in 1929, Hurston wrote her most important collection of folklore, Mules and Men. She returned to the same house in the 1950s.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas was a reporter for the Miami Herald, but is best known for her 1947 book The Everglades: River of Grass. She led the effort to protect and restore Florida’s unique natural environment.

Mary McLeod Bethune was born into a family of former slaves and rose to be a civil rights leader and a confidant to American presidents. She is the founder of Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona.

“Theater is an incredible way to educate people, especially when portraying real, historical people,” says Marsh. “They come alive and one can feel as if they’ve met them in person. It’s magical and thoroughly a joy.”

“It’s one thing to read the story of Zora Neale Hurston collecting work songs,” says Moukouanga, “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.”

Tickets for “Female Florida: Historic Women in Their Own Words” were available at www.myfloridahistory.org and at the Rossetter House Museum and Gardens.
 

More than a century after prehistoric human remains were discovered among the bones of extinct animals in Vero Beach, new archaeological discoveries are being made in the same location.

The site’s lead archaeologist, Andy Hemmings, will give a presentation called “The Old Vero Site: Recent Work and its Place on the Paleoindian Landscape of Florida,” Saturday, March 19, at 3:00 pm, at the Library of Florida History in Cocoa.

When a large drainage ditch was dug in Vero in 1913, the bones of prehistoric animals such as mammoth, mastodon, extinct horses, and giant armadillo were discovered. Two years later, as naturalist Frank Ayers walked along the banks of the canal, he noticed what appeared to be a human skull protruding from the dirt.

Ayers quickly went to get his friend Isaac Weills, and the two men carefully uncovered the skull and additional human bones. The human bones were mixed in with animal bones that neither man could identify. The bones were discovered within undisturbed stratifications of earth, a black layer over a brown layer.

“That piqued the curiosity of the state geologist, Elias Sellards, who came down with his assistant, Herman Gunter, and basically went to work,” says Hemmings. “In 1916, early in April, they found some (human) bones themselves, with the extinct animals. The extinct animal list continued to grow, and it really started to get the interest of the whole scientific community. So, then the critics start showing up.”

With the discipline of archaeology in its infancy, geologists and anthropologists from Yale University, Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, the Carnegie Institution, and the Smithsonian all showed up to offer their opinions.

The geologists, led by Sellards, believed that the human bones discovered at the Vero site were from the same Pleistocene period as the extinct animal bones that they had been found with. That meant that humans were here during the Ice Age, at least 11,000 years ago.

The anthropologists, led by Ales Hrdlička, clung to the prevailing belief of the early twentieth century, that humans did not occupy North America until just 4,000 years ago. They disregarded the geological evidence and relied instead on skull measurements to reach their conclusions. Skull measurements are no longer considered a reliable method of determining the age of bones.

Without modern carbon dating techniques available to them, the scientists were unable to reach a consensus, and the controversy over the true age of what had been named the Vero Man remained unresolved.

“We have reasons to believe that this really is a Paleoindian site, that we have some evidence of human occupation between eleven and fourteen thousand years ago, much like Sellards suggested initially,” says Hemmings. “Whatever the earliest human occupation of the site is, whatever kinds of activities we can demonstrate that they were engaged in while on site, we want to talk about that. Whatever it is, we just want to get it right. We want to end that controversy.”

Discoveries of Clovis points and other tools near the Vero Man Site have proven that people did inhabit Florida at least 13,000 years ago. Hemmings believes that new discoveries at the Vero Man Site could eventually prove even earlier human habitation.

Unfortunately, the original Vero Man bones cannot be tested using modern dating techniques, because they have been misplaced over the past century.

“Material from this site is housed in at least twenty-two institutions around the world that I know of” says Hemmings. “The human remains went back and forth between here, the Florida Geologic Survey, the Smithsonian Institution, and maybe some other places. We think we will eventually turn them up. We don’t think they’re gone, just hidden, filed away.”

Even more controversy emerged from the original excavations at the Old Vero Man Site. It was determined that the Vero Man skeletal remains were actually those of a four foot nine inch tall woman. The bones identified as “skeleton 2 and 3” turned out to be bones from one individual, also a woman. So, while there are two Vero Women, there is no man from the Vero Man Site.

“I think it’s probably safer at this point to just say the Old Vero Site, man,” says Hemmings.

Gotha, Germany, has existed since the Middle Ages. Charlemagne, who united most of Western Europe, mentioned the town in a document he signed in the year 775.

The small community of Gotha, Florida, was officially designated on April 20, 1885. The town is located in Orange County, between Ocoee and Windermere.

While living in Buffalo, New York in 1878, German printer Henry Hempel invented and patented a printing tool that revolutionized the way that pages were set up for printing. With new wealth earned from his invention, Hempel decided to create a German colony in Florida.

Hempel came to Central Florida in 1879, and began purchasing land. By 1883, he had acquired 1,000 acres where he created a town plat. He named the colony after his hometown in Germany, and invited other Germans to join him there.

To generate lumber, Hempel established a sawmill. This allowed for the construction of a general store, a post office, a school, a community hall, and other buildings in Gotha. He supplied wood shingles for some of the first homes in Altamonte Springs, Winter Park, and Maitland. His mill also provided orange crates for the local citrus industry.

“Gotha in the 1890s was a very lively community,” says Kathleen Klare, director of the Gotha Rural Association, Inc. “It had Turner Hall where it had musical events, minstrel shows, and dance events. They taught gymnastics. They even had a bowling alley in the 1890s. Because of the background and the intellect of these German people, they were rebuilding the character of their old German culture, and they were building it in the woods of Florida.”

At the same time that Hempel was organizing his German colony in Florida, the German Freethinkers League was founded by philosopher Ludwig Büchner.

“Hempel was not just building a little town,” says Klare. “Hempel was a freethinker. He was looking to build a colony of people that had similar perspectives.”

Freethinkers believed in individuality of thought, and forming one’s own opinions based upon logic, reason, and empirical data rather than authority, tradition, or religious dogma.

“Secular points of view were what they were espousing,” says Klare.

Horticulturalist and naturalist Dr. Henry Nehrling began purchasing land in Gotha in 1885. At first, Nehrling only visited Gotha for a few months each year.

“At that time he was working for the Milwaukee Public Museum, and he did not officially move down to Gotha until 1902,” says Klare.

Nehrling created Palm Cottage Gardens, a tropical garden that became a popular tourist destination in the early twentieth century. He also developed an experimental testing facility on the property, where he helped to establish Florida’s ornamental horticulture. Nehrling wrote many articles for scholarly journals and magazines, and became best known for his caladiums.

Nehrling Gardens was placed on the National Register of Historic Sites in 2000.

Many of the German families who first settled Gotha in the 1880s made their living in the citrus industry. When the Big Freeze of 1894-95 devastated orange crops in Florida, some of those families left the state. As the citrus industry recovered in the early twentieth century, new families moved to Gotha, but the community began to lose its distinctively German identity.

“As the citrus industry is gradually coming back, it’s offering job opportunities,” says Klare. “What you get is migration from neighboring states like Georgia and Alabama, but you’re getting different groups of people.”

The urban sprawl of the greater Orlando area is encroaching upon Gotha. The Gotha Rural Settlement Association, Inc. hopes to preserve the few remaining historic structures in the town.

“We do have a few buildings,” says Klare. “We have an old Gothic church that was built in 1913, that needs an awful lot of upkeep.”

The organization also wants to share the unique history of Gotha to help revive a sense of community in the town.

“I grew up in the Gotha community,” says Klare. “My family came in 1911. There were always community events, picnics, dinners, and different kinds of things that the Women’s Clubs were doing. It was very active. That has died since the 1990s. There’s a group of us now that would really like to bring back a sense of community.”
 

In early 1965, cartoonist, filmmaker, and visionary entrepreneur Walt Disney began quietly purchasing large tracts of land in Central Florida.

Inspired by the success of his theme park Disneyland in Anaheim, California, Disney wanted to develop his original idea more fully by creating an expansive vacation destination on America’s east coast. Attracted by Florida’s temperate climate and already established tourist trade, Disney decided to build his new “Magic Kingdom” in the center of the state, near Orlando.

By October 1965, Disney had acquired nearly 43 square miles of Central Florida land. Nearby residents speculated wildly that a huge industrial plant or some secret government installation was being built in their backyard.

The following month, Disney held a press conference in Orlando announcing his plans to develop Walt Disney World. It would be a much larger version of Disneyland, and unlike the California property; Walt Disney World would have room for further expansion.

Also explained were plans for the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or EPCOT, a city celebrating world culture where research to benefit humankind would take place.

Disney died in 1966, before seeing his dream for the property realized.

The Disney Corporation continued, opening Walt Disney World in 1971. The project had a profound impact on Florida that continues today. The expansive collection of Disney owned theme parks, attractions, and hotels have made Central Florida one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world.

Long before Disney came to Florida, the state was marketed to tourists as a place where fantasy could become reality. Disney wanted to perfect that idea of creating a new reality for visitors.

“Florida, for a long time has represented this kind of transcendent place,” says Cher Krause Knight, author of the book Power and Paradise in Walt Disney’s World. “In the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, there was a lot of marketing of Florida as a restorative place where you could regain your health, regain your youth. You would live not just a longer life, but a better, happier life by coming here.”

Disney had some personal ties to Florida. His father worked briefly in the state and his parents were married in Kissimmee, just miles from where Walt Disney World would be constructed.

There is an apocryphal story that while Disney’s brother Roy was visiting Cypress Gardens, he was so amazed by Dick Pope’s Florida theme park that he called Walt on the telephone from an office there. Walt Disney was not yet in the theme park business, but Roy reportedly encouraged him to consider it.

“He had been thinking about it, though,” says Knight. “We know that as early as the 1930s he had drawn up some plans and ideas. He wanted to do a small theme park on his (film studio) back lot in Burbank, but he was having difficulty with the city officials there. By the ‘40s and into the early ‘50s, he started to get really interested in other themed environments. There were some places he thought did it all wrong and others that did it closer to right, but he thought that he could perfect it.”

Disneyland was Disney’s first theme park, built in 1955. His park in California was quickly surrounded by urban sprawl, which Disney did not like. To perfect his theme park concept in Florida, Disney made sure that he acquired enough property to insulate his fantasy world.

“If you come to the Florida property, once you enter Disney’s property proper, it’s a bit of time before you actually start hitting any of the attractions or theme parks,” says Knight. “The highways are of different quality in terms of maintenance as soon as you get on the Disney property.”

The Disney Corporation even created its own government in Florida called the Reedy Creek Improvement District.

“It’s really unprecedented,” says Knight. “We don’t really see any other private corporation that’s been able to officially be endowed with those sorts of powers. They have within their rights the ability to build both their own airport, and a nuclear power plant.”

Today, Walt Disney World is the most visited theme park on the planet, bringing more than 50,000 tourists to Central Florida every day.

Mother Laura Adorkor Kofi was assassinated on March 28, 1928, while giving a speech at Thompson’s Hall in Miami. Many in the audience believed that Kofi was a divine prophet sent by God to liberate African Americans and black people around the world.

“She said that she had a revelation to liberate African American people, to take them on the right course, back to the Promised Land, Africa, and to create an independent community, a cultural, independent community,” says Vibert White, author of an essay on Kofi in the book Africa in Florida: Five Hundred Years of African Presence in the Sunshine State.

Kofi came to America in the early 1920s from West Africa, and quickly became part of the Black Nationalist movement. She joined Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, becoming a prominent spokesperson and national field director for the organization. At the time, the UNIA was much larger and more influential than other African American support groups such as the NAACP and the Urban League.

“Within months, she becomes the most popular figure in that group, except for Marcus Garvey,” says White. “They send her throughout the Deep South. Mississippi, Alabama, and everywhere she is going she’s attracting, five, and ten, and fifteen thousand audience members, something that had never been seen before.”

UNIA founder Marcus Garvey was very supportive of Kofi until he was imprisoned for mail fraud in 1925.

While Garvey was in prison, Kofi’s fame and influence grew. Enthusiastic crowds continued filling theaters and auditoriums in Florida and throughout the south to hear Kofi’s passionate speeches about the opportunities available to black people if they repatriated to Africa.

“For many African Americans, it was their first time listening to someone from Africa,” White says. “She spoke about the greatness of Africa. She spoke about the movement from Africa to liberate the people here, and that there was a divine relationship between the Africans, the east blacks, and the western blacks, the African Americans. She spoke of pride and strength.”

From his prison cell, Garvey attacked Kofi’s credibility and encouraged his followers to abandon her. Some members of the UNIA began creating disturbances at Kofi’s presentations, and she feared that her life was in danger at the hands of Garvey’s inner circle.

Kofi relocated from Miami, where she felt threatened, to Jacksonville. She announced her split from the UNIA, and established the African Universal Church. As leader of this new spiritual movement, she became known as “Mother Kofi.”

“She’s from Kumasi, she’s from the Ashanti community,” says White. “The Ashanti community in West Africa has some of the strongest religious beliefs of any people within that region. They believe that they are direct descendants from God, that the Garden of Eden is in Kumasi.”

While still living in Kumasi, Kofi had a vision that she believed came directly from God, identifying her as a divine presence on earth. She came to believe that it was her spiritual calling to liberate black people around the world, particularly in America. Before her murder, she wrote a treatise called “Sacred Teachings and Prophesies.”

On March 28, 1928, Mother Kofi returned to Miami to speak. Thousands gathered to hear her talk about the power of God to help Africans and black Americans. In an unusual move, she asked her bodyguards to sit down. That allowed a gunman to rush the stage and shoot Kofi in the back of the head, killing her.

Mother Kofi became a religious martyr to her followers.

“It took them over a month to bury her,” says White. “When they left Miami, they had a funeral in West Palm Beach. They had a funeral in St. Augustine. They had a funeral in Daytona Beach, and so on, until they ultimately got to Jacksonville to bury her.”

Mother Kofi had identified Eli Nyombolo as her successor in the African Universal Church. He continued and expanded the AUC.

“He was from South Africa and connected to the Zulu community,” White says. “The Zulu community was very instrumental in the development of the African National Congress, the ANC, that ultimately fought to destroy apartheid.”

Today, people still make religious pilgrimages to Mother Kofi’s mausoleum in Jacksonville’s old City Cemetery.

This weekend, residents of Brevard County can celebrate and learn about the people who lived here before us.

The fifth annual Pioneer Day will be held Saturday at the Sams House in the Pine Island Conservation Area, and at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church on North Tropical Trail, Merritt Island. A shuttle will run from 10 am to 4 pm between the two locations.

Pioneer Day is hosted by the Pine Island Preservation Society and will feature presentations about our area’s prehistoric people, craft vendors, educational displays, children’s games, music, and food.

The Pine Island Conservation Area covers more than 900 acres and is jointly owned by the Environmentally Endangered Lands Program and the St. Johns Water Management District. Archaeological excavations of the area have uncovered fossils of creatures who lived on the property between 20 and 30 thousand years ago, including Mastodon, Mammoth, Giant Land Tortoise, and Giant Armadillo.

“Archaeologists have found everything from fossils of the prehistoric mega fauna that used to roam Florida during the Ice Age, to evidence of human occupation by Native Americans that predate even the contact period peoples that were eventually met by people like Ponce de Leon and Menendez and other early Spanish explorers,” says Kevin Gidusko, co-chair of the Sams House Pioneer Day event.

The archaeological evidence indicates that people inhabited what is now the Pine Island Conservation Area as long as 9,000 years ago.

“Like a lot of places in Florida, what was found were things like lithic scatters, stone tools, and lots of shell tools,” says Gidusko. “Animal remains that had been food for these people would show that they were collecting certain types of food in abundance.”

Between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago, people in Florida started using pottery. Styles of pottery change over time, and can indicate trade networks with people in other areas. Styles of pottery found at Pine Island include ceramic sherds of St. Johns Plain and Sand-Tempered Plain.

Archaeological and historic artifacts from the site are on display in the Sams Family Cabin.

In 1878, John H. Sams disassembled his family cabin in Eau Gallie, floated it up the St. Johns River in pieces, and put it back together on north Merritt Island. The cabin is the oldest documented home in Brevard County.

“The EEL program that manages the Sams House has done a great job of not only encouraging stewardship of our natural resources, but also our rich cultural resources,” says Gidusko.

After relocating to Merritt Island, Sams became a successful farmer, growing citrus, sugar cane, and pineapple crops. In 1880, he was named the first Superintendent of Schools in Brevard County, a position he held until 1920. As his stature in the community and his family grew, Sams decided to build a larger home directly adjacent to the family cabin.

The 1888 Sams House has a wraparound porch, an office on the first floor where Sams kept track of his business interests and superintendent duties, a family room with a fireplace, three bedrooms upstairs, and a metal roof.

“During Pioneer Day, visitors will get a short tour through the Sams House,” Gidusko says. “You’ll get to see what it was like for this pioneer family as it grew, and what they had to live and work with on a day to day basis.”

The Sams family helped to establish St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Courtenay, a congregation that remains active today. Before the church was built, services were held in the Sams cabin.

“We’re partnering with St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, right down the road from Sams House,” says Gidusko. “The Sams family was instrumental in starting that congregation and getting the church going, and many of them are buried in the cemetery there.”

Pioneer Day activities at St. Luke’s include presentations on local prehistoric people by Rachel Wentz, author of the book “Life and Death at Windover: Excavations of a 7,000 Year Old Pond Cemetery,” and Patrisha Meyers, director of the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science and the Florida Historical Society Archaeological Institute. The church will also host their popular Fish Fry.

“It’s a great opportunity for people to have fun and learn about our particular part of Brevard,” says Gidusko.
 

February is Black History Month.

A new exhibit at the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science in Cocoa is recognizing the accomplishments of two internationally known Floridians with strong local ties.

On display are panels featuring rare photographs, letters, and information about educator, activist, and civil rights martyr Harry T. Moore; and writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. A video component produced by the Florida Historical Society includes commentary from scholars and oral history interviews with friends and relatives.

On Christmas night 1951, a bomb exploded under the Mims home of 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, died on October 26, 2015. In a video interview included in the new exhibit, Moore remembers that she 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. “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 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.

On July 9, 1951, writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston wrote in a letter to Florida historian 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. 

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.

Zora Neale Hurston called Brevard County “home” for some of the most fulfilling and productive years of her life, first in 1929, and again for most of the 1950s. It was here that she wrote her most important collection of folklore, Mules and Men.

To find out more about the lives and accomplishments of Harry T. Moore and Zora Neale Hurston, visit the Black History Month exhibit at the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science in Cocoa. Museum hours are 10am to 5pm, Wednesday through Saturday.
 

Professional archaeologists, archaeology enthusiasts, and concerned citizens from throughout the state are opposing legislation currently being considered in Tallahassee.

House Bill 803 and Senate Bill 1054 would allow anyone who purchases a $100 permit to dig for historic artifacts in state owned waterways using a trowel. After dislodging the artifacts, a person could remove them, take them home, and even sell them.

Any context that archaeologists could provide for the artifacts and important opportunities to educate the public about our shared history could be lost.

“To understand the past in the fullest way possible, what is significant is not a particular object that we find, it’s what we find out about that object,” says Theresa Schober, president of the Florida Anthropological Society.

Seeing firsthand how an object is situated and documenting what other objects may be around it provides archaeologists with the contextual information they need to draw meaningful conclusions.

“It’s from context that we can determine what people were doing, how they were behaving in the past, what their social systems were like, and we lose that information as soon as an object is taken up and ends up in private hands or it ends up somewhere where it’s disassociated with its original context,” Schober says.

Some of Florida’s most significant archaeological discoveries have taken place in Brevard County. Artifacts and human remains discovered in Windover Pond were determined to be between 7,000 and 8,000 years old.

Patrisha Meyers is director of the Florida Historical Society Archaeological Institute at the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science. Meyers points to an artifact on display at the museum in the People of Windover exhibit.

“This beautifully incised bird bone was only found with the burials of women,” Meyers says. “This contextual knowledge allows us to explore the question of gender roles in the past and helps us understand the differences and similarities between past populations and our own. Ultimately, anthropology is the study of our shared human experience, the study of that intangible element which makes us who and what we are today. By allowing this history, this context, to be taken by those seeking personal enrichment through ownership and sale of public artifacts, we are allowing the theft of knowledge regarding our cumulative past.”

The idea of allowing “citizen archaeology” in Florida is not new.

Between 1996 and 2005, the state operated a voluntary program called Isolated Finds, which allowed individuals to keep historic artifacts that they found if the objects were not part of a larger archaeological site. Individuals were supposed to report from where they removed an artifact and provide maps.

“An untrained person might not have those discerning identification skills to be able to tell whether they’re removing something from an intact archaeological deposit or not,” says Schober. “The reports from these isolated finds were analyzed and it was determined that there was widespread non-compliance. The majority of reports were from a very small number of individuals and what came out of a later investigation in the last few years by Florida Fish and Wildlife is that some of the individuals that are taking artifacts from Florida waters illegally, knowing that they are violating the law, would use this particular program as a way to bypass that legality.”

The proposed bills currently being considered are more aggressive than the Isolated Finds program, allowing individuals to use tools to dislodge artifacts. Archaeologists are concerned that if passed, these bills would essentially legalize treasure hunting at the expense of preserving history.

“We certainly encourage people to get in touch with their legislators,” Schober says. “There’s nothing more meaningful than a member of someone’s district weighing in on a piece of legislation.”

By opposing this pending legislation, the professional archaeology community is not trying to discourage public participation in the process of archaeological discovery.

“For non-professional individuals who are truly interested in archaeology, there are a variety of opportunities to engage in supervised archaeological activities and learn about the process of archaeological investigation,” says Meyers. “The Florida Public Archaeology Network often has volunteer opportunities as well as frequent public archaeology days. The Florida Anthropological Society has 17 chapters statewide. Many of these chapters assist professional archaeologists in their work.”
 

In 1948, Earl Tupper introduced a new brand of airtight containers called Tupperware that allowed for food to be preserved and stored for longer periods of time.

No one really cared.

The revolutionary plastic containers with the patented “burping” seal sat on store shelves, and the company based in Leominster, Massachusetts saw little growth.

A woman named Brownie Wise came up with a marketing strategy that involved hosting home parties to demonstrate the many uses of Tupperware in a fun setting. She would train other women to host parties themselves, providing them an opportunity to earn money based on their sales.

Tupperware sales exploded around the country and in 1951, Wise was named vice president of marketing for the company. She spearheaded the effort to move the company headquarters to Central Florida, where it is still located today.

“Brownie was arguably the most important American businesswoman of the twentieth century,” says Bob Kealing, author of the book Tupperware Unsealed: Brownie Wise, Earl Tupper and the Home Party Pioneers. “Brownie made it okay for women to make their own money.”

Wise became a symbol of the idealized, all-American suburban housewife of the 1950s, but was actually empowering women. Her home party system allowed women to work on their own schedules. Wise did not consider herself to be a feminist. She said that she was just a single mother trying to make money to raise her child.

“She gave women a road map to their own liberation in a way, getting them out of the kitchen, giving them an opportunity to make a financial contribution to their family’s well-being,” Kealing says.

Wise’s cult of personality became as important to the success of Tupperware as the quality of the product itself. Her celebrity grew throughout most of the 1950s, and she was the first woman to appear on the cover of Business Week magazine.

Tupperware’s Florida based operation began in 1951, in a World War II era hangar at what is now the Orlando Executive Airport. Within a year, the company relocated to a large facility in Kissimmee. Wise began hosting extravagant “jubilees” on the property to recognize the Tupperware Party hosts making the most sales.

“Brownie Wise had this remarkable ability to communicate with her dealers and inspire them,” says Kealing. “They would compete to win her dresses and lose all kinds of weight to fit into them as prizes, because that recognition from her was so important. She had this almost mystical power and connection with her dealers.”

Although the company no longer has a charismatic leader to equal Wise, Tupperware continues hosting “jubilee” rallies in major cities, rewarding outstanding participation in product sales.

Despite incredible sales figures for Tupperware products in the early and mid-1950s, Earl Tupper began to resent the fact that Wise was the public face of the company.

“Earl Tupper thought with her growing celebrity that she was taking her eye off the ball a little bit, and forgetting that his baby, Tupperware, was the real star of the show,” Kealing says. “That’s where the trouble started.”

Tupper unceremoniously fired Wise just before he sold his company in 1958, and essentially wrote her out of the corporate history. Wise was largely forgotten until Kealing wrote her biography in 2008.

Kealing’s book “Tupperware Unsealed: Brownie Wise, Earl Tupper and the Home Party Pioneers” is being made into a film starring academy award winning actress Sandra Bullock. This summer, an expanded and updated version of the book is being published with the title “Life of the Party.”

Wise paved the way for other pioneering businesswomen.

“She had the template for what most successful businesswomen do today,” says Kealing. “She was known by one name, Brownie. She was pre-Oprah Winfrey, she was pre-Martha Stewart. These days it would just be accepted that you write your own self-help book and that you’re on the cover of all sorts of magazines.”

Wise did not graduate from high school, but went on to become a successful leader in a multi-billion dollar corporation. Perhaps her greatest legacy is the impact that she had on others.

“She would inspire women to go out and do things that they never felt capable of doing,” Kealing says.
 

Since 1906, the city of Tarpon Springs has held a unique Epiphany celebration every January 6. Thousands of people converge in Tarpon Springs each year to participate in this religious tradition of the Greek Orthodox Church.

Tarpon Springs has more Greek people per capita than any other American city. Hundreds of Greek sponge divers and their families were brought to the town in the early twentieth century. While tourism has replaced sponge diving as the primary economic driver, the sponge docks remain active and the town retains a distinctly Greek character.

“This is like a Greek village here in America,” says Father James Rousakis, dean of St. Nicholas Cathedral in Tarpon Springs. “The people are very much in tune to their culture and their heritage. Adults that came from Greece passed it on to other generations. Even the younger generations still appreciate that.”

St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Cathedral has been an integral part of the Tarpon Springs community since Greeks first came to the area. The Neo-Byzantine style cathedral was expanded in 1943, to include colorful stained glass and marble from Greece in a domed basilica.

The Greek Orthodox Church can trace its roots back to the earliest church established during the Roman Empire. At its height, the empire encompassed the entire Mediterranean basin including what are now Europe, Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa. When the empire collapsed in 476, Christian centers in the East and West gradually began developing separate traditions.

“Up to the year 1054, there was only one church,” says Fr. Rousakis. “Finally, the church severed. The West became known as the Roman Catholic Church, and the East became known as the Eastern or Greek Orthodox Church.”

In the Greek Orthodox tradition, Epiphany is the commemoration of the baptism of Christ by John the Baptist in the Jordan River. In Tarpon Springs, the celebration begins with a morning of special services at St. Nicholas. A procession leaves the cathedral around noon, walking a block to the shores of Spring Bayou.

Thousands of spectators are already waiting for the procession to arrive. Ten small boats are tied in a semi-circle in front of a platform that extends out over the water. About 50 young men will dive from these boats, trying to retrieve a cross that will be thrown into the water.

“His Eminence the Archbishop will bless the young divers,” says Fr. Rousakis. “They are boys ages 16 through 18. The boys will make their way to the water and onto the small boats, the dinghies that are there. We will go onto the platform where his Eminence will do a short service and throw the cross into the bayou.”

As the cross leaves the archbishop’s hand, the boys dive from their boats into the water, trying to retrieve it. The young man who emerges from the water with the cross will receive a special blessing for the year.

“There’s a gold cross placed around his neck which he will wear until he leaves this earth,” says Fr. Rousakis. “It’s a wonderful time for that young man.”

At the 110th Epiphany celebration last week, Anderson Combs emerged from the 62 degree water with the cross raised high above his head. It was the second year that the 17 year-old high school senior attempted to retrieve the cross.

“I dove because my yiayiá (grandmother) always told me to dive, she was always into it,” says Combs. “Sadly in 2013, she passed, and I felt that in her honor, I should always dive for the cross.”

As a member of the swim team at his high school, a lifeguard, and a scuba diver, Combs was well prepared for his attempt this year.

“Being able to retrieve the cross today is such an honor, in her name and for my family,” Combs says. “It’s just a great feeling.”

Anderson’s grandmother worked at the sponge docks, and his mother Anna Combs instilled in him a love and respect for their Greek heritage.

“It’s the biggest blessing we could ever have in our family,” says Anna Combs. “Other than the day he was born, this is the most wonderful day of my life, and his.”