The Brick That Left Bartow

In 1887 the trustees of Jacob Summerlin's school fund — Summerlin himself, G. A. Hanson and David Hughes — had sold enough of the donated land to let the contract for a permanent school building in Bartow. They decided against letting one contract for the whole job. They parceled the work out, so far as possible, to local people and supervised the construction themselves. The brick came from the Bartow Brick Company, owned by E. C. Stuart. A stonemason named John Bishop laid it.

Stuart had just arrived. Edward Crosland Stuart was born in Bennettsville, South Carolina, and moved to Bartow with his wife, Laura Ellis, in 1887, the year the cornerstone was laid.

By 1886 enough money had accumulated for a $24,000 building: two stories, central halls on both floors, eleven classrooms and a bell tower over the Stanford Street entrance. The Polk County Historical Quarterly gives that figure. The Bartow Historical Trail's account of the same building says it was erected in 1887-88 for $20,000. The two do not agree.

The cornerstone went down on May 12, 1887, in Masonic ceremonies at the southeast corner of Stanford Street and Wilson Avenue. Thousands were invited. Among the papers sealed inside was a sketch of Joseph Thompson, the architect of the Institute.

Stairs to the second floor climbed inside the bell tower. An iron fire escape came down from the upper floor at the rear. The building went up before Bartow had a municipal water works, and it had no enclosed sanitary facilities: the girls' privy was a 20 by 30 foot brick building at the southeast corner of the campus, the boys' at the southwest. Rooms were heated by small metal wood-burning stoves.

The school opened on January 2, 1889, with Dr. W. F. Yocum as principal and four assistants, and three more assistants were added within a few weeks. The first session closed on June 5 with a total enrollment of 305 and an average attendance of 250. The Florida Department of State records that the Summerlin Institute, built in 1887, served as the first brick schoolhouse in Florida south of Jacksonville. In 1894 the city of Bartow purchased the building and all the unsold property of the Institute and assumed its outstanding obligations.

About the man who laid the brick, the record is one sentence long. The Quarterly says John Bishop built most of the older brick buildings in downtown Bartow. It does not say where he came from, what he was paid, or where he went afterward. The National Register nomination for the Bartow Downtown Commercial District notes that no buildings survive from the 1890s in the commercial district.

In 1906 Stuart financed a brick block at 260-270 East Main Street, on the northeast corner of Central Avenue and Main. The Bartow Historical Trail records that it was built of bricks made in Stuart's own brick plant. Dr. J. A. Garrard, an early tenant, kept his medical office upstairs. That nomination, dated March 29, 1993, lists it among the district's twenty-seven buildings as Masonry Vernacular, 1906 — the Stuart Block.

A new Summerlin Institute building was erected on Tharp Street in 1928-29. On August 13, 1930, the Polk Record reported that the Summerlin School built in 1887 was being demolished by the Alvin I Albinson Co. During the demolition the original cornerstone was vandalized and the artifacts were removed from the time capsule sealed inside it in 1887.

The cornerstone stayed in Bartow. It was left standing as a monument to the school and built up with brick taken out of the Institute. The Trail and the Quarterly disagree about when the time capsule was emptied; the Trail puts the theft on the night before the monument was to be completed.

G. A. DeVane, the county historian, stated in his documents that the brick and timber from the school were transported to Lake Placid to build a packing house. The closing of the Bartow school coincided with a move by local growers to build a packing house at Lake Placid, and the contractor selected for that project was from Bartow. The Quarterly does not name him, and it does not name the packing house.