History club secures historic status for Putnam community
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SARAH CAVACINI/Palatka Daily News –
Q.I. Roberts Junior-Senior High School students’ years of historical preservation work paid off this month after state officials deemed a piece of Putnam County historically significant.
The school’s History and Archeology Club received a sign from the Florida Department of State that officially recognizes the now-defunct Historic Banana Community in Melrose as a historical site.
Teacher Mike Weeks said the club, which he oversees, formed before the COVID-19 pandemic but members kicked back into gear and had been trying for two years to get the site designated.
“It was good for the kids because they had to go through the whole bureaucracy and all the steps and applying,” Weeks said. “We wrote the text for the marker and had to get it approved.”
According to the site marker, the community was located along Etoniah Creek, 1 mile south of Melrose. The community existed before the Civil War, with settlers moving there from South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia, according to the marker’s text.
The community had a post office and a mill, Weeks said, and people might still be able to see where some of the mill’s pilings sat. The mill operated until the 1930s, according to the marker.
Weeks and club members had help from Historic Melrose Inc. when learning about the site’s history and getting the designation, the teacher said.
“I think … in terms of the club’s goals and one of our big goals is just preservation of historic sites (and) to try to help in any way we can with that,” Weeks said.
Principal Joe Theobold said the History and Archeology Club provides Q.I. students with a unique experience like Weeks taking students to participate in fieldwork and visit archaeological sites. They’re doing the work professional historians and archaeologists have to do, he said.
“This is so valuable to our students and citizens in general. Understanding the methods used to study the past is valuable in this age of instant information at our fingertips,” Theobols said via text message. “Someone has to do the digging, the reading, to make that information available.”
Weeks said no date has officially been set to get the marker placed at the Banana Community site but he hopes it will be in the near future. When he and students first unpacked the marker this month, the excitement was palpable, he said.
“It is really just a feeling of accomplishment,” Weeks said. “We’ve been working on it for so long. … When we saw it the other day, we unpacked it. We actually got to look at it, and it was just like, ‘Wow, we actually did this.’”
