Bea Leach Hatler knows something about having a legacy stolen away...
Descendant of land donor joins effort to preserve historic Florida
community
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Esther Schrader Read the full piece here
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Friend,
Bea Leach Hatler knows something about having a legacy stolen away.
She was still in her mother's womb in 1951 when her father,
Edward Hungerford Nye, died of a heart attack at 36 and his erstwhile
partner cheated his widow out of her share of their business. The
ascendant life Nye had built for his growing family was suddenly
shattered.
The cascade of tragedies stole away more than money: It frayed the
connection to Hatler's past. As her mother, alone with two
children, struggled through one unhappy marriage after another, the
trio spent more time thinking about surviving than about family
history. But occasionally, Hatler's paternal grandmother would
visit and tell stories.
"I wasn't capturing it back then, but I remember her
words," Hatler said of her grandmother, Constance Hungerford
Fenske. "I remember her saying, 'I know you never got to
see your daddy. But your daddy's family was very
important.'"
It wasn't until Hatler was a teenager that she began to
understand how important.
That's when she became close to her half-brothers from her
father's first marriage. They told her about how her
great-great-grandparents, Edward C. Hungerford and Anna D. Hungerford,
were Connecticut abolitionists. About how their doctor son, Robert
Hungerford, had brought medical care in Florida to young Black
patients in the years after the Civil War. About how the Hungerfords,
after the loss of their son, had donated land to build a school in his
name in a Black community in Florida that was governing itself,
against the odds.
It all seemed hazy and far away from Hatler's life in California
and the Pacific Northwest, from her battles - first with
dyslexia, then, as a young, self-described outcast who had left school
and become pregnant at 17 - to climb her way out of poverty. But
Hatler never forgot. She felt proud that somewhere - in a
faraway community she had never been to - that school remained.
What Hatler didn't know is that the school property, where famed
Harlem Renaissance author Zora Neale Hurston
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had studied as a girl in one of the oldest Black incorporated
communities in the U.S., had been shuttered. She didn't know
that the local school board in Orange County, Florida, had come into
possession of the land on which the school had thrived for more than a
century and had been on the verge of selling it to developers in a bid
to reap millions in profits. She didn't know the sale of the
school property, which makes up more than 14% of the 1.6-square-mile
town six miles north of Orlando, threatened to steal away the legacy
of Eatonville, still 73% Black and still proudly under majority-Black
leadership 136 years after its founding in 1887.
Read More
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