2023-24 Speaker Series

Dr. Steven Noll – Saturday, January 21, 2023 –  Ditch of Dreams, in Palm Coast.  
 
This presentation examines the long, convoluted history of an effort to cross Florida by cutting a waterway from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico. Dr. Noll covers topics including steamboat tourism, the first attempted ship canal in the 1930s, the building of the canal in the 1960s, and the stoppage by an environmental movement led by Marjorie Harris Carr in 1971.
 

Lu Vickers – February 18, 2023 – Paradise Park
 
In 1949, during the Jim Crow era, Silver Springs’ owners Carl Ray and Shorty Davidson did something unique: they created a place for African-American tourists. Located downriver, they dubbed their creation “Paradise Park for Colored People”. From 1949 to 1969, the former Silver Springs boat captain Eddie Vereen ran one of the most popular places for African Americans to visit in the country.

Dr. David Head – Saturday, March 18, 2023 – Pirates, Privateers, and the fall of the Spanish Empire
 
Over two hundred years ago, in the summer of 1817, a group of pirates and privateers invaded Amelia Island, Florida, a Spanish colony, in hopes of striking a blow for the Spanish American Revolutions. This presentation tells the stories of these revolutionary rogues and their leaders, how they planned to free Florida from Spanish rule, and how the United States intervened to stop them.
 


Magdalena Lamarre – April 15, 2023 – Southern Road to Freedom: Florida’s Underground Railroad 
 
The nation’s first Underground Railroad was established in Florida in the late 17^th century, servings as a beacon of freedom for runaway slaves from the American south. Existing before the better-known Northern Underground Railroad, enslaved Africans gained their freedom by escaping and earning asylum in Spanish Florida. This presentation focuses on Florida’s early history as a Spanish territory, the escape routes used by runaway slaves, and the black communities they established before the abolition of slavery in the United States.

William Crawford – Saturday, May 6, 2023 – Florida’s Big Dig

This presentation is the story of people of vision and courage, of a small group of prominent Saint Augustine investors who conceived of the Florida waterway and began the first dredging work; of an obscure group of New England capitalists who provided significant financing and obtained a million acres of undeveloped Florida public land in pursuing what was, at best, a speculative enterprise; of innumerable citizen groups like the Florida east coast chamber associations and the larger Atlantic Deeper Waterways Association that demanded at the turn of the last century what they believed was the peoples right-a public waterway, free of the burden of tolls; and finally, of the U>S> Army Corps of Engineers, who conducted all of the Florida waterway’s early surveys and assumed the project’s control in 1929 to convert what was once a private toll way into Florida’s modern-day, toll-free Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway.

Marcia Jo Zerivitz, – Saturday, May 20, 2023 – Jews of Florida: Centuries of Stories
 
Florida hosts the nation’s third-largest Jewish community whose history is surprising! This comprehensive history of the Jews of Florida from colonial times to the present is a sweeping tapestry of voices spanning centuries. This group has been integral to every area of Florida’s growth, from tilling the land and developing early communities to boosting business, industry, education, politics, the arts, tourism, and sending humankind into space.