Take time trip to early days of Rollins at cozy museum
During the Winter Park History Museum’s last exhibit, about hotels and motels past, I wondered whether docents might have to cope with a few visitors who had such a fine time that they didn’t want to leave. The lure of Langford Hotel memories can be pretty strong for some of us.
The folks who shape this compact museum’s exhibits have a way of making folks feel at home with history, in all its complexity. In just 900 square feet, they create a whole world through details. In their latest exhibit, those details include beautifully enhanced historic photos, the work of graphic designer Will Setzer, that accompany text by the museum’s archivist, Linda Kulmann.
All in all, the details work together to present the world of Rollins College, from its founding in 1885 to 1935 — the first 50 years of Florida’s first college.
The mother of Rollins
Accounts of Rollins’ history often begin with its inaugural president, the Rev. Edward Payson Hooker, but the exhibit starts with the “mother of Rollins,” Lucy Cross, who arrived in frontier Florida in 1880, armed with a degree from Oberlin College in Ohio and the dream of opening a school.
“Like many mothers, history tends to overlook her contribution,” an exhibit panel notes.
Like Rollins, Oberlin had been founded by the Congregational Church. Revolutionary for its time, it was the nation’s first coeducational college and offered Cross a model for a liberal arts college in Florida, which didn’t present fertile ground.
In 1884, all of Florida could claim only eight county high schools. “Elementary and high schools operated from two to five months a year with wholly inadequate facilities. Most of the students attending them could not read,” writes Jack Lane, professor emeritus and Rollins historian.
Such conditions didn’t deter Cross
but spurred her on. Working behind the scenes, she persisted in the advocacy among Congregationalists that ultimately made Rollins a reality in 1885. Today, her contribution is honored by the Cross Hall dormitory
on the Rollins campus.
Dorothy’s world
The exhibit tells stories from many chapters of Rollins’ first five decades, but its overall look and design reflect the 1930s, when Dorothy Shepherd Smith graduated from the college in 1933. The next year, she started work at the college’s library, beginning a career that would see the preservation of Rollins and Winter Park history become her life’s work.
Smith’s “research, compilation and publication are legendary,” an exhibit panel notes. “She assembled the prodigious Chase Scrapbooks, 1881-1906, preserving the original newspapers from the town’s founding.”
Retiring from Rollins in 1971, Smith died in 2013 at the age of 101, leaving
other historians treasures that include the black wool bathing suit she wore in her youth. It’s on display in the exhibit, looking remarkably fresh and unfaded.
The bathing suit hangs in a recreated 1930s dorm room, dedicated to Smith.
It’s OK to touch its woolly texture as you marvel at what it was like to swim in such a garment, and it’s OK to peek
into the drawers of the furniture and examine what’s inside.
The “dorm room” walls are bedecked with a period wallpaper that the museum’s executive director, Christy Grieger, helped hang. It’s that kind of museum — hands-on, for visitors, staff
and volunteers. If you plop down on the sofa in the exhibit and start paging
through the 1930s magazines, soon you may be gone into the past. It’s hard to leave.
If you go
“Rollins: Florida’s First College — The Early Years, 1885-1935,” will be on display at the Winter Park History
Museum through 2022. The museum is in the Winter Park Farmer’s Market building, 200 W. New England Ave. Hours are Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Details: call 407-6472330 or visit wphistory.org.