Interview with State of Florida Archivist

Posted by RL Lucy Carter on

State Archives of Florida Q&A  

Beth Golding, Florida State Archivist

Chief, Bureau of Archives and Records Management

Division of Library and Information Services with Florida Department of State

  • What are the most important skills to have as an archivist?
    • Personal budget (you won’t get rich) 🙂
    • Patience – few things happen quickly on the job or in the profession
    • Willingness to listen/learn – from professional colleagues, researchers, collections
    • Understanding and respecting professional archival principles and concepts, and willingness to see standards and principles evolve over time to meet mission of institution/profession
    • Understanding our responsibilities – to institution, to users, to history – and balancing those sometimes conflicting responsibilities
    • Understanding of recordkeeping – how and why people and organizations created and used records over time
    • Understanding of how history is researched/written/interpreted
    • Understanding of technology – how to preserve and make accessible records created in electronic form, and how to use technology to preserve/promote/provide access to collections
  • What is the most interesting thing that you have archived?

Stephens Sisters jail-in papers – https://www.floridamemory.com/discover/historical_records/stephens_sisters/ –   esp. this letter https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/329142

Major John Andre “boot papers (New York State Archives)

  • Are there any items within the State Archives that have a particular ‘lore’ or mystique about them to patrons? What are their stories?

St. Augustine Map – https://www.floridamemory.com/FMP/selected_documents/large/m81-21_b002_01_01.jpg

Ordinance of Secession – https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/339353

  • Are there particular towns or regions in Florida which seem to have more stories?

See response below from our Archives Historian, Dr. Josh Goodman

  • If someone wanted to submit a story or ‘urban legend’ to the Archive, how could they do so? – contact us at archives@dos.myflorida.com
  • Are there any preservation projects at a national level to specifically save the urban legends, and folklore within individual states and communities?

Best known – StoryCorps –  https://storycorps.org/

American Folklife Center at Library of Congress – https://www.loc.gov/folklife/

Florida Folklife Program – https://dos.myflorida.com/historical/preservation/florida-folklife-program/

WPA Stories in State Archives – https://www.floridamemory.com/discover/historical_records/wpa/

Florida Stories – Response from Dr. Josh Goodman, State Archives Historian 

That’s a dangerous question to ask a Florida historian–you should all be glad I’m not there in person or you’d be parked for hours until someone pulled me offstage with a hook. Every part of Florida has its complement of good stories, but different regions of Florida often produce different kinds of stories, viz:

  • In South Florida, for example, particularly along the Atlantic coast, we see many cases of young families or individuals coming down from the North to start some new large-scale farming operation or (later) a planned real estate community that ends up being one of the better known places in the region. Cases that come immediately to mind include George Merrick and the founding of Coral Gables, the eccentric flamboyant architect Addison Mizner and the founding of Boca Raton,  Carl Graham Fisher turning a bunch of sand and mangroves into Miami Beach and then establishing the Dixie Highway to get people down to it, the establishment of Fellsmere as a planned agricultural complex of muck farms (and its subsequent fame as the first municipality to allow women to vote in 1915 (five years before the 19th amendment goes into effect).

 

  • Central Florida has similar stories, but they tend to be a little more geared toward citrus in the 19th century and tourism in the 20th century. Think about Dick Pope and the magic of Cypress Gardens, the story of steamboats chugging up and down the Oklawaha taking people back and forth to Silver Springs so they could see the “Bridal Chamber” and hear the very creative legend attributed to it, Paradise Park and the beauty contests they’d have every year (with a table lamp as a prize that one time?), the founding of the Bok Tower, Citrus Tower, Spook Hill, and the reams and reams and reams of colorful brochures detailing the virtues of every little town in Polk and Lake and Osceola counties particularly–we have a lot of those on Florida Memory. I think of how incredibly fast the concept of the paved highway evolved in Central Florida: in 1910 they were “paving” major public roadways in pinestraw; in 1920 they were paving the route of the Dixie Highway; and in 1930 the U.S. Highway system had been established and they had US 19, 41, 92, etc.

 

  • To me, North Florida is ironically the most “Southern” part of the state. In the Red Hills region near Tallahassee, the architecture, demographics, foodways and the trajectory of history are very similar to South Georgia and South Alabama. Accordingly, the themes of the stories are often the same–sharecropping, plantation agriculture, Gone with the Wind-esque courtship, big Greek Revival houses, moonshining, general stores at the crossroads, and (if you go back far enough) duels.

 

Of course, none of that waxing nostalgic answered your question directly… so I’ll say this: within each of those regions you often can find communities that just seem to have a knack for having good stories attached to them. I’m probably very biased because I grew up there, but I often refer to Taylor County as the “center of the universe” because so many things seemed to have happened there. Andrew Jackson and Zachary Taylor both set up headquarters there during the Seminole Wars; the largest sawmill in the world was there at one time; during the Civil War it (60 miles from Tallahassee) actually furnished 70 UNION soldiers to the war effort (and the story of how that happened is a nail-biter).

 

For South Florida, Palm Beach and Broward counties are almost unbeatable when it comes to good stories about the Florida Boom in the 1910s and 1920s. Fortunes made and lost virtually overnight; land selling ten times in a day. That phrase “land by the gallon” is TRUE–developers actually sold land that hadn’t even been reclaimed from being underwater yet!

 

If you want to talk about OLD Florida stories, the families who had Spanish Land Grants in northeast Florida along the St. Johns often knew each other and intermarried a lot, and there are some great stories there–especially some of their involvement with sugar planting and the Patriot War and I could go on and on.

 

Amelia Island and Key West are both rife with good stories, including ghost stories. One of my favorites is the nurse in Key West who still haunts the house where she once took care of people – we have a Floridiana article on it called “A Healthful Haunting.”

_____________________________________________________________________________________________