White Oak A.M.E. Zion Church

http://www.deadbluesguys.com/  Go check them out so I don't feel so bad about stealing their pictures.

With the help of Susan Patterson, the City Attourney for Sanford, I found Reverend Laura Brown.  Laura Brown is the current pastor for the White Oak congregation.  Since they don't have their own church, they're sharing with two other A.M.E. churches in Sanford until they can get the resources together to re-open the White Oak church.

Laura Brown is one of the nicest ladies you'll ever meet and I hope she accomplishes everything she sets her heart to in life.  She was, however, full of disappointing news.

For a start, it turns out that the church was basically abandoned.  They locked the doors and went home.  No one took any of the paper work home with them, furniture was not stored, hymnals were not shelved - whomever was the last one out the door simply turned out the lights, turned the key in the lock, turned on his heel and went home.  Over the years, vandals destroyed or scattered all of the records, the furniture, the bibles...they smashed the windows and punched holes in the floor.  Rev. Brown told me that if the roof hadn't leaked, they probably would have stolen that too...

So, I had been thinking that maybe Floyd was a member of an A.M.E. congregation and wrote letters as if that were possible.  I wrote letters to the pastors of Fair Promise, Love Grove, New Hope, Poplar Springs and St. James A.M.E. churches.  I am no longer surprised that I haven't heard back from any of them.  I'd hoped that someone there might have remembered Floyd or that the church might have inherited the records from White Oak, but the records were never removed from White Oak until vandals scattered them so they couldn't have had any knowledge about those records.

This was my best hope for finding a legend to the cemetery.  Rev. Brown is also trying to put together a legend for the cemetery from people's memories - mostly to accomodate the members of her congregation who have purchased plots there but now don't know where those plots are...

If you happen to know anything about this cemetery, e-mail me and I'll put you in touch with her.