The Cane the Children Gave Him

He bought Bartow with a deed dated June 25, 1862: the Riley Blount homestead at Fort Blount, $3,000 in Confederate money, about $19 an acre, a price considered high at the time. The 160 acres are the present center of the city. When the war ended, the settlement held around 150 people, and Summerlin gave away 150 cows branded W and O, for widows and orphans.

The biennial report of Florida's Superintendent of Public Instruction for the two years ending June 30, 1896, records that in 1866 Summerlin set aside forty acres inside what are now Bartow's city limits, the proceeds of the sale to be applied to erecting and equipping a school building. Summerlin, G. A. Hanson and David Hughes were constituted trustees of the fund. The Bartow account of his life dates the gifts a year later, to 1867, and adds forty acres for the county seat and land for the Baptist and Methodist congregations. Accounts differ on the year.

Schools in Polk County at that time, including the log Blount School, were run on a fee system, and families who could not pay did not send children. The historian Canter Brown Jr. put it plainly in his history of the county: the principal taxpayers were mostly cattlemen with little desire to spend their money on schooling poor children, black or white, and the county contained no public schools until 1868, when the Summerlin Institute was built. Summerlin himself had only a very rudimentary education.

The first building went up in 1867, 25 by 40 feet, frame, two stories. The school was on the first floor and the Masonic hall on the second. A $300 grant from the Peabody Fund kept it going. Along with the usual subjects it taught surveying and astronomy.

By 1887 the trustees had sold enough of the forty acres to let the contract for a permanent building. It was erected over 1887 and 1888 at a cost of $20,000, and it was the first brick schoolhouse south of Jacksonville. Sealed into the cornerstone were coins, postage stamps, newspapers of the day, and a photograph of Jacob Summerlin.

The school opened formally on January 2, 1889, under Dr. W. F. Yocum, with four assistant teachers and three more added within weeks. The register for that first session showed 305 pupils enrolled and an average attendance of 250. The session closed June 5. In 1894 the city of Bartow bought the building and the unsold Institute property and assumed the outstanding debts.

It was a school for white children. Black families in Bartow had been educating their own since before there was a public system, in Providence Baptist Church in the section of town white residents called the quarters and Black residents called Over the Branch. No record shows that school receiving any government money. The 1880 Polk County census listed five Black children as attending school: Elizabeth Moore and her sisters California, Sarah and Frances, daughters of Andy Moore, a farmer who had been enslaved in Bartow; and Emma, daughter of Prince Johnson, who had also gone from slavery to owning his own land.

Summerlin died on November 4, 1893. He had spent the closing days of his life in Orlando, and was buried in Bartow. The stone carries the Masonic compass and square and four words: Founder of Summerlin Institute.

The brick building came down in 1929, replaced by the school now called Bartow Academy. The 1887 cornerstone was left standing as a monument, built up around with the institute's own bricks. On the night before that monument was to be finished, vandals emptied it of everything that had been sealed inside in 1888.

The cane was gone by then, and nobody knew where. When the Bartow historian Lloyd Harris asked Summerlin's descendants about it around 1980, they told him they assumed he had been buried with it. In 2014 a Lake Wales antiques collector named Tim Violette bought a local couple's estate, found the cane in it, and telephoned Myrtice Young, the county's historic preservation manager, to ask whether she knew of any Summerlin descendants. The Polk County Historical Association voted to pay Violette $3,300 for it, the value of the gold in the cap.