As soon as destined for obscurity, tiny Oneida Bungalow Courtroom has many tales to share now and into the longer term
by Tim Gilmore
If she closes her eyes, Minnie Gaffney McDaniel, 88 years outdated, can see each inch of her childhood dwelling. She will see the again porch her daddy enclosed and the shelf he’d constructed for the youngsters’ toys and books. She proudly stored her report playing cards there. It broke her coronary heart when the hearth destroyed them that late summer time day of 1951.
Solely McDaniel’s grandmother was in the home. Each her dad and mom labored and her maternal grandmother came visiting throughout the day and cooked for the entire household. It was Friday and McDaniel was downtown shopping for two pairs of footwear for Monday, her first day at Outdated Stanton Excessive College. She purchased a pair of penny loafers and a pair of black-and-white Oxfords.
Coming dwelling, the bus driver stopped at Forest Road. “He mentioned he couldn’t go any additional,” McDaniel remembers. “There’d been an enormous hearth and the hearth hoses had been all around the street. My pastor was additionally on the bus, so we began strolling collectively. After I bought to the place the West Lewisville College was, two academics had the home windows up, and one in every of them mentioned, ‘Gaffney, Gaffney, your own home is on hearth!’”
Seven a long time later, Spencer Fletcher, a younger medically retired Navy pilot, walks between rows of hundred year-old homes. All of them face inward, equivalent wood framework, eaves to eaves, some with authentic metallic roofs, all with entrance porches. Fletcher purchased Oneida Bungalow Courtroom two years in the past. He’s restoring it one home at a time and the tenants nonetheless dwelling right here stay.
Oneida Bungalow Courtroom marks nearly the very heart of West Lewisville, an historic Black neighborhood later swallowed by the initially white neighborhood of Mixon City. Initially it held 29 homes, a service station, a rentable billboard and, whereas the grime street between homes was initially pedestrian, a car parking zone at what’s now Edison Road.
“We took pleasure in our properties there on Wade Drive,” says McDaniel, who lived at 463 Wade Drive from 1936 to that apocalyptic Friday in 1951 when her home burnt down. Happily, nobody died or was damage and firefighters stored the entire group from going up in flames.
She nonetheless has an image of herself standing on that childhood porch, 1945, a photograph of her
paternal grandmother, Abbie Gaffney, seated on that very same porch, only a yr or two earlier than she died in the home in 1933, and a clipping of the obituary of Aunt Mamie, Annie Mae Bartley Sumpter, of no. 451, who lived right here from the Nineteen Thirties till her demise in 1997.
In 1968, the Florida Appraisal Firm reported 27 homes nonetheless extant, every slightly below 800 sq. ft, every renting for $25. With the outdated filling station bringing in $140 a month, the annual gross rental worth got here nearly to $10,000. Charles Coley says the lease rose to $50 per home when he took the job reworking them in 1970, “and the value stayed that for a very good lengthy whereas.” Coley was the upkeep man right here for greater than half a century, from the time he was 18 till he broke his wrist in 2023. He’s 72 years outdated.
No one known as it a “bungalow court docket” again then. “We known as it the rock street,” as a result of Wade Drive, via the center of the court docket, was by no means paved and “had them railroad rocks.” Coley remembers the deal with of every home prefer it’s a buddy’s title. The janitor for West Lewisville Grammar College lived in 467. Miss Netti—“She at all times took that snuff!”—who babysat for everyone—“Her complete home was full’a infants!”–stayed in 475. From 2005 to 2015, Coley himself lived at 472.
He remembers the Gaffney boys, together with Reggie, future Metropolis Council member, and Don, who’d quickly turn out to be the primary Black quarterback for the College of Florida. Charles Coley says “the rock street” was “full of kids again within the day,” that rising up right here “had been fairly cool. You stayed collectively, you performed collectively, you went to church collectively, you bought in bother collectively.”
The group appeared so vigorous. “Crab boils and fish fries now? That went on on daily basis!” He laughs occupied with it. The little concrete block constructing on the nook of Goodwin and Lewis, he says, “was a juke joint, White’s Confectionery, owned by Ulysses White.” At this time, light letters throughout the highest say “Goodell’s Nook Retailer” and newer letters on a entrance door say, “Love Tha’ Neighbor Social Membership.”
Spencer Fletcher purchased Oneida from Chuck Rogers a yr and a half in the past. He was the one potential purchaser who didn’t plan to demolish the entire place. Rogers died this previous summer time, 77 years outdated. You would possibly name Rogers a slumlord, however that will obscure numerous kindnesses. “He came visiting right here on daily basis,” Fletcher says. He drove tenants, most of whom didn’t have a automobile, to the grocery retailer or to Greenback Normal. He gave them cash after they wanted it. “He was very caring,” Spencer says, “and the tenants cherished him.”
When Rogers informed him he wouldn’t be round for much longer, Spencer thought he simply meant he was ageing, not dying. Rogers had recognized Oneida all his life. Greater than half a century earlier, his grandfather paid him to color the homes and to stroll door to door to gather the lease.
The outdated filling station is now the workplace for Oasis Paint Firm. Spencer Fletcher began Oasis, portray and restoring woodwork in outdated buildings, simply earlier than he retired from the Navy. He plans to put in central warmth and air in Oneida and he’s changing pressboard siding added in 1970 with thinner lap siding to match the unique aesthetics.
He continues to satisfy former residents and to gather outdated pictures and oral histories. He
sees the court docket as a dwelling, open-air museum. He nonetheless encounters individuals who assume the court docket needs to be bulldozed, however says, “To think about how a lot life occurred right here, births and deaths, individuals’s struggles, their worst moments and their greatest! There’s so little left of the neighborhood round it and these homes maintain an enormity of cultural and historic worth.”
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