The Grove

A Contemporary Artist Exploration of the Browns Grove Manuscript Collection

Something drew me into this project when I did not yet know what it was.

After my father died, I went to deposit his ashes in the St. Johns River on the banks of his property, in East Palatka, Florida.

My father grew up in Florida, as did all of his family and my mother’s family. I did not. In fact, I did not even live here then.

The place was heavily wooded with long beards of Spanish moss and overgrown in thickets of saw palmetto and cabbage palm. The sun cut through the canopy in tilted shafts lighting the soft ferns of a forgotten path to the river. The air was thick and close and still until the breeze opened onto the wide arms of the St. Johns River. It formed an elbow at this point, some two miles across.

His ashes swirled in an eddy under the exposed roots of an ancient cedar which marked the bounds of the property.

There was an old abandoned house, grand in its day. Built of cypress, with wide porches and gingerbread lintel and held together with kudzu vine. On the second floor, I found several old boxes of dusty papers, tied with string.

The papers were written in ink, in an old fashioned cursive script which is not seen much anymore in this age of post-it notes and Arial fonts. They were dry and fragile and dated from the early part of the last century. There were hundreds of them, neatly stacked and tied. Organized somewhat chronologically and by categories such as: personal letters, business letters, receipts, checks, accounting ledgers and bank statements. There were school books and notebooks filled with news clippings from the 1800’s about the “gold rush” of the orange industry in Florida.

View the entire collection on the Jacksonville Public Library website.

We enlisted the help of historians and archivists to research and catalog the collection of over 1,000 documents. The compiled data reflects the story of a successful black-owned citrus business operated by Malachi Hampton from 1890-1962. This could have been any ordinary success story, except that it seemed like an extraordinary achievement that the son of a slave did this, at this time, in this place.

There are heroic deeds written in stone, while there are a million daily acts of ordinary virtue, scattered like the ashes of yesterday’s news. These papers were not lost. They were left behind to be found.

The Grove project began as an attempt to decode, explore and re-examine cultural beliefs. The body of work in this exhibit uses historical, political, and personal characters to recount societal issues and events. This is a story, not a contribution to historical research. It is a visual narrative of that grove and of Mac Hampton’s life.

The artists involved in this project applied interdisciplinary models to explore information sourced from these documents comparatively with historical data. This is an attempt to triangulate situations and dispel assumptions.

Interdisciplinary Arts and Media Research (IAM-R) project was founded as a residency program and research platform for established artists to explore cultural themes in their own style, as visual narrative.

Project artists: David Montgomery · Michael G. O’Connell · Chas Smith · Brett Waller · Eric Wilson. Many others assisted in research and technical support, giving hundreds of hours of their time.

Generous funding was provided by a grant from The DEW Foundation. The manuscript collection is archived by The Jacksonville Public Library/Digital Special Collections, with the support of The Mellon Foundation. It is accessible to everyone.

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Distribution/film by Brett Waller and David Montgomery_The Grove 2024

The Grove - Distribution/film by Brett Waller and David Montgomery