As of the current moment, I have not been able to meet with my supervisor to discuss what the grant she announced last week means for the digital cemetery project, so I have no news to report on that front. I will hopefully be meeting with her as soon as she is available since I have some questions for her on the content production side of things.
During the City Clerk’s meeting, she made a comment that the tour content that I am writing will be able to be “mixed and matched” to create the themed tours down the line. However, as I’ve discussed previously, the idea of writing twenty-five to thirty individual essays was discarded since that would be too time consuming to produce during the semester of this internship. Now that the grant has come through, it is entirely possible that I will be staying on in the position, so the writing could be stretched out so that each topic would have its own Clio entry and provide more than just a cursory overview. I am waiting to hear back from her regarding this question before continuing on to writing. I have, however, begun creating detailed notes for each of the six more general location based stops I was planning and gathering the sources I want to use, along with images, and links for further reading. I would also like to add documentaries and podcasts to the list of links to appeal to a broad range of visitors.
If my supervisor does decide to have me write individual entries for each topic, what I will likely do for the purposes of this internship is to do one main topic from each planned location so that I still produce just six strong entries. Then, if I continue on with Greenwood through the grant, I can continue to add the rest as time moves on.
I have completed the notes for the first location, which covers topics relating to African American history in the cemetery. The uniqueness of the segregated sections within the same cemetery walls is one topic, as is the Ocoee Massacre and July Perry. Additionally, I also researched the Jonestown neighborhood and some prominent local figures buried in the segregated sections. Among those explored are Gus Henderson, publisher of the Winter Park Advocate as well as Dr. William Monroe Wells, first African American doctor in Orlando and owner of the Wells’Built Hotel which hosted Chitlin’ Circuit acts such as Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.
My research on the second location is yielding less historically grounded results, however, I know it will be a popular stop. The second main stop will cover some of the Orlando paranormal community’s favorite “haunts.” These include Babyland, “pauper” burials, and Sunland Center burials. Memorializing the patients of the Sunland Center was a part of the grant, so it is particularly vital that I present their story with care. Sunland looms large in Orlando’s urban myths and ghost hunters are very active in their discussions of the fate of those buried in Greenwood Cemetery. I will not go into any detail here, but suffice it to say, there are many angles to view the Sundland story with and almost all of them are heart wrenching. One connection the three topics of location two have is tragedy.
I hope to have more to report next week! Stay tuned!
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