To the Generation Who Open and Possess These Relics

On May 12, 1887, on a lot at the southeast corner of Stanford Street and Wilson Avenue in Bartow, a young man named Lacy Boyd finished a speech with four lines of verse. The Polk County Historical Quarterly's account of the ceremony records how he closed:

And now, kind friends, let us say, That each succeeding 12th of May, Shall be a Children's Gala Day, And we will call it Summerlin Day.

The occasion was the laying of the cornerstone of a brick school named for Jacob Summerlin, who had given the land. The Orlando Cornet Band played while a reception committee welcomed approximately 300 visitors who arrived by train at the South Florida Depot. Trains brought people from as far away as Orlando and Charlotte Harbor. A procession formed at the depot and marched to the barbecue grounds, where venison, veal, pork and kid constituted the meats served, along with breads, cakes, custards, pies, puddings, slaws and relishes. About 2,500 people were fed. After the meal the procession moved down Main Street to Florida Avenue and on to the Institute grounds.

Then they filled the stone.

Into it went a brief history of Bartow, a brief history of Summerlin Institute, and a brief history of Tuscan Lodge No. 6, F. & A. M. A biographical sketch of Jacob Summerlin. Sketches of two of the Institute's trustees, Capt. David Hughes and G. A. Hanson, and a sketch of Joseph Thompson, the architect. Lists of the churches of Bartow with their ministers and Sabbath school superintendents, a list of county officers, lists of the officers of the Bartow Board of Trade, of the Y. M. C. A., and of the Fire Company. A likeness of Summerlin. A photograph view of the courthouse and a photograph view of Main Street looking east. Specimens of United States postage from one cent up to one dollar, with stamped envelopes, postal cards and wrappers. One copy of the Polk Informant and one copy of the Advance Courier. The program of the celebration, the invitation cards, and the Grand Lodge's announcement of it.

And one item that was not a record of anything. The Quarterly's inventory lists it as greetings of Tuscan Lodge and the people present to the generation who open and possess these relics.

In 1885 the trustees of the Summerlin lands had begun selling some of the forty acres dedicated to education to raise the money. The sale brought $8,401, and the people of Bartow contributed another $5,000. By 1886 enough had accumulated that a $24,000 building was approved: two stories, central halls on both floors, eleven classrooms, and a bell tower over the front, or Stanford Street, entrance. The trustees decided not to let a contract for the whole job but to parcel it out so far as possible to local people and supervise the construction themselves. The brick came from the Bartow Brick Company, owned by E. C. Stuart, and was laid by the stonemason John Bishop, who built most of the older brick buildings in downtown Bartow. The figures in the record do not agree — the Quarterly reports the $24,000 approval, while S. L. Frisbie IV, in a talk given at the school's centennial on May 18, 1987, said the contract was let to Joseph Thompson for $17,000. Summerlin Institute began operation in 1889 with grades one through eleven, and a twelfth was added in the 1890s. Dr. W. F. Yocum was its first principal, with a faculty of four.

Mary Huffaker Blankner, who started in the original building, left a description of it in the Quarterly. The bell in the tower rang for the various incomings and outgoings. There were three bells in the morning, at eight, eight fifteen and eight thirty, and at the last one pupils lined up by classes and marched to their rooms at drum beat; the drum was a snare, and the second grade teacher, Miss Tommie Lee Wilson, stood at the front beating time. Rooms were heated in cold weather by small metal wood-burning stoves. Behind the boys' outbuilding grew an oak thicket, and teachers sent boys into it to cut switches.

Construction on a new Summerlin Institute began in 1928, at a cost of $190,000 for a building with 23 classrooms, an auditorium, and a cafeteria.

A newspaper article published in the Polk Record on August 13, 1930 stated that the Summerlin School built in 1887 was being demolished by the Alvin I Albinson Co. During that demolition, the Quarterly records, the original cornerstone was vandalized and the artifacts removed from inside it.

The stone itself was not carted off. It was left standing to be a monument to the school, and built up with brick taken out of the institute. The Bartow Historical Trail's account of the site differs from the Quarterly on when the stone was opened: it puts the theft on the night before the monument was to be completed, and says the articles taken had been placed in the stone in 1888. The ceremony and the deposit both belong to May 12, 1887. The two accounts agree on the rest. Everything sealed inside was taken, and no source names anyone who took it.

The original school bell and the cornerstone are mounted in a monument at what is now the northwest corner of the Bartow Elementary School playground. The school's own history says the bell is atop the monument with some of the early school records sealed inside it.

The rest of the building left the county. G. A. DeVane, the historian, recorded in his papers that the brick and timber were hauled to Lake Placid and built into a packing house; the contractor chosen for that job was from Bartow.