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It's All Relatives

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By JAN HOLLINGSWORTH

The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 28, 2008

"Tell ye your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation."

Joel 1:3

PLANT CITY - Before there was Plant City, there was Hopewell.

Just south of State Road 60, off State Road 39, a white steeple rises among great grandfather oaks, marking the spot where the community was conceived.

Behind the simple, unadorned Baptist church, the families who attended Hopewell's birth rest in a small cemetery maintained by descendants who have honored their memories for more than a century.

The ancestors are well-tended, their graves manicured, the headstones polished, the vases regularly freshened with new silk bouquets.

Beyond ensuring this perpetual care, the descendants of the founding families have labored to preserve the history, heritage, traditions and legends passed from one generation to another. They strove to construct a monument even more enduring than the names etched in granite.

The result, unveiled this month, is "Pioneers of Hopewell Community," a 400-page book that tells the story of one of Central Florida's oldest settlements.

"I didn't really think about it until I started getting older, but there were some really special people ahead of us," said Sara Beth Frierson, who married into one of Hopewell's founding families some 50 years ago.

The pioneers came from Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas, on horseback and in covered wagons, trickling into eastern Hillsborough County after the third and final Seminole uprising in 1856.

The earliest known settlement in the area, according to the new book, was a 200-acre antebellum estate known as the Turner Plantation, which likely didn't survive the War Between the States.

A post office named Callsville was established around 1870, when the Turners sold out and moved on to Manatee County.

The Hopewell era would begin soon after with the arrival of John Robert McDonald, who emigrated from Morgan County, Ala., and started Missionary Baptist, the area's first church.

The McDonald family would figure prominently in the development of the community, donating 2 acres for the cemetery and the chapel.

To this day, McDonald descendants own and operate a funeral home beside the hallowed ground that serves as the epicenter of Hopewell.

"The McDonalds were always very generous," said William Mangum, who came with his family to Hopewell from Georgia in 1931 at the age of 5. He is, by Hopewell standards, a newcomer.

An 1860 U.S. Census was a starting point for those who researched the book.

"The community and the church are so closely bound together, we compared the church minutes with the census, which started out with 14 families," said Lynda Fuller, who directed much of the effort to complete the book.

By 1883, there were 21 families farming in the area. Today, Hopewell is a community of many cousins, a complex web of genealogy meticulously charted in "Pioneers of Hopewell Community."

Fuller, a Frierson by birth, has identified 25 first cousins from both sides of her family tree. Among them: Sara Beth Frierson's husband, Samuel Lloyd, who serves as a director of the Hopewell Church Old Cemetery Inc., the organization that manages the historical burial ground.

The Friersons are among 31 families featured in the intriguing account of the men and women who carved an enduring legacy in the Florida wilderness before and after the Civil War.

Trapnell, Evers, Wiggins, Holloway, Bugg: Travelers in this part of the county may recognize them as the names of area roads. For the descendants of Hopewell, however, they are mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, grands and great-grands, each with a story to tell.

"We owe this link between the past and the future, to our children, and all the children to come," wrote Martha Sue Hawkins Skinner in her foreword to "Pioneers."

Skinner is one of five descendants on the Pioneers of Hopewell Historical Committee who pored over county documents, genealogies, census records, deed abstracts and records of births, deaths and marriages to piece together the history of Hopewell.

She is the historian of the group - a Hawkins who still lives on the plot of land at Trapnell and James L. Redman Parkway homesteaded by her great-great-grandfather in 1855. Folks in these parts still know it as Hawkins Corner.

Donna Hull Jones, Ellouise Ackerman Wynn and Norma Gayle Ackerman Ham round out the committee credited with publishing the book.

It was a labor of love, said Fuller, who recruited many more cousins to help with the task of proofreading and assembling the tome, which is filled with long-forgotten photos gleaned from attics and family albums.

"We just kept begging and carrying on with the people of the community," Fuller said.

No one was as aggressive, though, as Helen West, a teacher who launched the Hopewell history project and pursued it with a vengeance until her death in 2005.

"We were the best of friends since childhood," Fuller said. "I think she knew if she died I'd take care of it."

Fuller accompanied West when she called on Hopewell descendants to collect oral histories and family photos.

"She wasn't at all bashful about saying, 'Hey you must have pictures in that old trunk over there. Mind if I go through that?'"

After West's death, Fuller continued pressing families for photos. She assembled her research and transcribed the oral histories West collected, which add a rich and colorful dimension to the Hopewell tale.

The book is dedicated to West, who is buried at the Old Hopewell Cemetery beside her aunt, Isabel Preacher, a prominent Turkey Creek history teacher. It was Preacher who encouraged her niece to pursue the Hopewell project. Both are descendants of the pioneer Martin family.

Each year for the past 27, the descendants gather at Hopewell Baptist Church for a pot-luck lunch and fundraiser for the cemetery's perpetual care fund. Business is conducted, meeting minutes read and approved and ancestors visited on this one auspicious day when the cousins converge.

This year they gathered on May 17 in the church's new fellowship hall.

Jan Mount, a McDonald and a Sparkman, journeyed from Vermont to break bread with her many living relations and pay her respects to the ones long gone - a task that entailed visiting three area cemeteries.

The McDonalds, including her father, Judge Harry McDonald, are buried at Old Hopewell. The Sparkmans rest at Oaklawn. The Wrights, on her husband's side, are at Myrtle Hill.

Her daughter, Mindy Mount, also has made the cemetery rounds. She stopped in Waldo on the way down from Micanopy to visit another relative.

At 50, Mindy Mount is one of the youngsters in the crowd of silver-haired relations in the midst of their golden years.

Most everyone here has bought more than one copy of "Pioneers of Hopewell Community," hot off the press - one for themselves, others to be given to children and grandchildren.

There is talk of passing the torch.

"The more young people we can get involved in this, the better we all would like it," said Don Kilgore, another of the many cousins who helped with the book.

It was hard work, Fuller said, but it was infinitely rewarding.

"All of us are very close and we got so much closer as a family, as cousins, as friends, doing this," she said.

PIONEERS OF HOPEWELL COMMUNITY

PUBLISHER: The Pioneers of Hopewell Historical Committee; soft cover, 400 pages

PRICE: $14, or three for $40

AVAILABLE AT: The 1914 Plant City High School Community Center, 605 N. Collins St., or Plant City Photo Archives, 119 N. Collins St.

INFORMATION: Contact Lynda Fuller at (813) 986-4844 or (813) 716-0558, or e-mail Lynda.f @comcast.net.

THE CHURCH'S INFLUENCE ON COMMUNITY LIFE

From the minutes of the South Florida Baptist Association of 1899, held at Hopewell Baptist Church

"Unbelief, in our opinion, is the first sin of all sins. Procrastination, we believe, is twin sister to unbelief. King Rum, we think, comes next. Tobacco, some will say, you had just as well let alone, for that is not an evil. God said, "Thou shall have no other gods before me." He has said that we should have no idol. Brethren, there are men and women all over this part of God's footstool, who have made tobacco an idol. I have known professors of religion to go to their table and sit down to dry bread and water, but the tobacco had to come for father and snuff for mother. Snuff is tobacco in its filthiest form. Ladies, quit it!!! It is an idol, it is an evil, and will rob your children. Brother, don't use it."

Prominent Evils Confronting the Churches Report, by chairman J.R. Frier

Reporter Jan Hollingsworth can be reached at (813) 865-4436 or jhollingsworth@tampatrib.com.

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