Belmont De Villiers Documentary Trailer

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 According to the book’s accompanying photo, the Plummer family members consisted of Mary Elizabeth and William Alexander Plummer, their daughters Bessie Plummer Frazier, Mary Plummer Matthews and Willie Bell Plummer Gilbert, and their son, James.

The Plummers were members of Pace Temple Colored Methodist Episcopal Church at 226 North Reus Street.  The church, built in 1910 and whose cornerstone bore the name of W.E. Plummer, has since moved farther west and outside of the neighborhood.

As late as 1931 in the Polk’s Directory for the City of Pensacola, Mary Plummer is listed as the resident. 

Source: The Ebony Tale of Pensacola, Georgia M. Smith

Originally and sometime between 1890 and 1915, the furniture store was at the corner of Romana and Railroad Street, just two blocks north of the Palafox area, according to the souvenir booklet edited by Tony McCray, Sr. entitled “Pensacola Black History.”  It stood as Pensacola’s oldest and largest Negro furniture store and may have been forced to move from the downtown area because of the new racial segregation caused by the Jim Crow laws.

Joe Morris Funeral Home has stood at 701 North De Villiers Street and is spread from Gadsden Street to Cervantes Street since 1913.  It began as a home-styled funeral parlor and, according to Rhonda Pierce in her book De Villiers, was first operated by Joe’s father, Prince, who passed it to his two sons, Richard III and Joe.

This funeral home was the second in Pensacola operated by a colored mortician and was said to have opened after the death of the first colored mortician in the city, Wade Harvey. 

For Dr. Washington, the impact of the church on the blossoming city was evident:

The edifice now occupied is a large frame building, but a contract has recently been let for the erection of a brick structure with a seating capacity of one thousand. The membership of this church is 600 and, under the leader of their pastor, Rev. Thomas Bellinger, has become, I am informed, a force for moral and social betterment in the communty.

All that remains of the building today is the foundation.

The first endeavor of the new organization was to purchase a lot and erect the first Greek Orthodox Church of Pensacola, The Annunciation of the Theotokos, at the northeastern corner of Wright and Reus Street.  The Church was completed on August 17, 1910.  The monthly dues were set at $.50.   From these dues, the membership derived, among other things, the benefit of a $4.00 weekly welfare allowance to each sick member.  Soon after, a home for the priest was built next to the Church.  When the Church was first built, the parish membership numbered 120 communicants, with 8 families.  The remaining parishioners were either single men or married men who still had their families in Greece.

From the www.annunciationgoc.org

One of the trustees listed on the lodge’s cornerstone is J.R. Polkinghorne, one of two J.R. Polkinghorne’s that appear in the neighborhood’s history: Dr. James R. Polkinghorne, Sr., a pharmacist, owned the Palace Pharmacy at 509 W. Belmont and Lt. James R. Polkinghorne, Jr. a Tuskegee Airman and Dr. Polkinhorne’s only son, was declared missing in action after his plane vanished on May 5, 1944 near Sezze, Italy during World War II. 

 Sources:

The Era Druggist’s Directory of the United States, Canada, Cuba, Porto Rico, Manila, Hawaiian Islands and Mexico (1916) by D. O. Haynes & Co, Inc.

“Lt. James R. Polkinghorne disappears in clouds” (St. Louis Times, September 26, 2009 ) by Erica Smith

The Ebony Tale of Pensacola by Georgia McCorvey Smith

 Blues music had been banned from her parents’ house, so of course the girls would get into it the moment the folks went out, a guard posted at the door. “Whenever we’d see my father or my mother coming back home, the girl be saying, ‘There come Mr. Goodson’,” she recalled. “And they’d beso close up on us, we’d change the blues, singing ‘Jesus keep me near the cross.’ After that my mother and father would join us and we’d all get to singing church songs.

In Belmont De Villiers, Ms. Goodson taught music to children, played the local scene (like the Belmont Theater), and struck a gospel chord at churches.  She also played piano for Bessie Smith (Ma Rainey) in the early 20^th century.  Her skills were captured in the movie “Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues,” a video that included rare footage of Bessie Smith and rarer footage of Ida Goodson.

Hear Ida Goodson sing “Precious Lord,” “Something’s Got a Hold of Me,” and several other gospel standards, with a little twist of blues.  This recording was made in 1980 as a part of the Florida Memory Project.

Ida Goodson photo courtesy of the Florida Photographic Collection

Mr. Lewey came to Florida from Maryland and was educated at Howard University Law School in Washington, DC.  He is thought to be one the first African American lawyers in the State of Florida.

In 1904, the headline of the Tenth Edition of The Florida Sentinel Annual declared “Unprecedented Growth” for Pensacola and captured a photo of the Mayor Wells of the City of Pensacola.