Women's History Month - Day 30

 

Frontierswomen of Central Florida

Emily (Watson) Hull

A Women’s History Month Tribute

By Richard Lee Cronin, CroninBooks.com

30 March 2022

Day 30

CitrusLAND is observing Women’s History Month by honoring extraordinary Central Florida frontierswomen. And as we celebrate Women’s History Month throughout March, we are also featuring each day a History Museum, listing their days and hours of operation.

See also our featured History Museum in this Post

 

Emily #Watson Hull of Orlando

Emily is unquestionably the “Mother of Orlando.” Although she wasn’t the first pioneer to live in the 1856 village, she the kept doors to the abandoned city open during the Civil War. Had it not been for Emily Watson Hull, no telling what might have happened to four acres that had been planned by others as Orange County’s seat of government.

Born at Marietta, GA, Emily Watson married May 21, 1854, and departed soon after for Florida. She was 18 years old when she and her husband, William Hull, journeyed overland to Orange County, arriving at Fort Reid (Sanford) with thirty-two (32) other courageous souls in covered wagons. When the Hull’s arrived in 1855, there was no town of Orlando, and Orange County’s total population had yet to top 300 residents (Volusia, formed in 1854, accounted for more than 50% of the Orange County’s 1850 population).

Families had clustered around old fort sites, places having names such as Fort Mellon, Fort Reid, and Fort Gatlin. There was no railroad, nor would there be for another 25 years. Roads were dirt paths worn a decade earlier by the military in search of Indians.

William and Emily Harriet Hull settled first at Fort Reid, a settlement just over a mile south of Lake Monroe. The family then moved again about a year later, moving further south to become one of Orlando’s first families.

Established in 1856-57, Orlando was barely four years old when the Civil War began, and Emily watched as her husband went to war with most every male of the village. William was wounded twice, then captured at Gettysburg and imprisoned for 23 months at Fort Delaware. He could not return home to Orlando until after War’s end.

While William was away, Emily ran the boarding house she and her husband at Orlando, caring for the occasional guest. Emily also served as the Confederate Postmistress at Orlando. “Mrs. Hull furnished dinner to every man in the county,” says a 1915 biographical sketch, and when provisions ran low, Captain Mizell’s father, David, Sr., butchered a cow and took her a quarter.”

 

Emily and William Hull

While most residents abandoned the village during the War, Emily Harriet Watson Hull stayed, putting up folks in need of a room, feeding hungry guests, managing mail, and keeping up the family farm. In other words, Emily kept the doors to Orlando open, and thereby preventing the village from becoming a Ghost Town.

William and Emily Hull owned “Lots 2, 3, 4 and 11” of the twelve lot Village of Orlando. Lots 2 and 3 are presently the location of the old courthouse, the County’s History Museum. In Emily’s day, this was the location of Worthington House, the boarding house John R. Worthington built (See also Henrietta Worthington in tomorrow’s final Women’s History Month post).

 

Eulalie #Way of Orlando

Central Florida history is chock full of legends, some true, others not so true! One legend has to do with how Orlando’s iconic Lake Eola got its name. Early historian Kena Fries passed along a legend told her that goes as follows: “Sandy Beach was changed to Eola in the early 1870s by Bob Summerlin, in memory of the beautiful young girl, his bride to-be, who died from typhoid fever two weeks before the appointed wedding day.”

The Iconic Lake Eola, Orlando, Florida

Jacob Summerlin brought his family to Orlando in 1873, bought 200 acres east of the tiny village of Orlando, and then platted his land which encircled most all of Lake Eola. During the summer of 1875, Jacob and eldest son Robert attended Orlando’s meeting called to discuss incorporating the town after serving 18 years as the County Seat.

Robert L. Summerlin had graduated from the University of Georgia with a law degree in 1875 and was admitted to the Florida Bar the next year. Leaving Georgia and coming to Orlando, Robert Summerlin then married, but his bride’s name was Texas, not Eola. Nor did Texas die prior to their marriage.

Eola was the lake’s name appearing on the 1874 subdivision plat recorded with the Clerk of Court by Jake Summerlin. So, who was Eola?

Records of the Presbyterian Church of Orlando organized March 18, 1876, tell of its 11 members, including “Mrs. Jacob Summerlin, formerly of Flemington, GA”. Located in Liberty County, Georgia, Flemington had been home to the Summerlin family in 1870. All listed as Floridians, the family moved there after the Civil War.

The Summerlin’s were family #13 in Georgia’s 1870 Liberty County census. Family #6 in that very same census was Widow Sarah A. Way and her daughter, “Eula,” age 16. Robert Summerlin, age 12, and Eula, age 16, were both listed as attending school. 

 

Eulalie Way (1854-1896)

Eulalie Way was born July 22, 1854, at Liberty County, Georgia. Eulalie never married, nor did she die two weeks before Robert Summerlin’s marriage. Eulalie Way died October 13, 1896, at age 42, and was buried in the State and County of her birth. 

As legends pass from one generation to the next, facts often become blurred. Eulalie was a popular name in 1854 when Eulalie Way was born, popular because it was a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. The poem, “Eulalie,” was about a lover becoming a bride, as one verse states: “I dwelt alone, in a world of moan, till the fair and gentle Eulalie became my blushing bride”.

Robert Summerlin, 12 years old, likely did have a crush on an older classmate named Eulalie. And as his father, in 1874, subdivided land around a lake on the east side of Orlando, Robert may have convinced his father to name the lake for Eula, his Georgia crush. But then, as word passed to the surveyor charged with sketching the plat, the name printed was Eola – and it stuck.

Robert and his bride Texas lived in a home fronting Lake Eola, but history did not record if Texas Summerlin had ever been told how Lake Eola’s naming came to be.

 

Narcissus #Wofford Lovell of Apopka

Born 1832 in Georgia, Narcissus Wofford married William Allen Lovell at Habersham, Georgia in 1851. Narcissus and her husband arrived at Orange County in 1856, when the entire county at the time had fewer than 1,100 citizens, and the entire county was at odds over where to have to their country seat. William served as Mellonville’s “Rebel Postmaster”, a lakeside outpost near where Sanford is today, during the Civil War, then after the War, the Lovell’s moved inland, to the village of Orlando.

Narcissus became mother to 11 children, as well as each community she and husband William settled in. At Orlando following the Civil War they established Lovell Hotel at Orlando, and in later years, the family relocated again to Apopka. Although William Allen Lovell was the first Orange County Superintendent of Schools, it is apparent by the achievements of the ten Lovell children who survived to adulthood that education was equally important to the mother in the rearing of their children.

Narcissus (Wofford) Lovell died 12 August 1897. She is buried in Apopka’s old cemetery. Her husband of 46 years, William Allen Lovell, passed in 1903.        

 

Follow Author & Historian Richard Lee Cronin

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Our History Museum of the Day

Umatilla History Museum

The Greater Umatilla Historical Society

299 N. Trowell Avenue

Umatilla, Florida, 32784

352-809-0369

Open Saturday, 1 AM to 4 PM (Call ahead to verify)

(Housed in a circa 1910 schoolhouse)