Schools / Education
Joseph Nathaniel Crooms (b. June 17, 1880) was passionate about education.
In 1906, with the help of the community, Joseph built a two-story wooden building during his first year as principal of Hopper Academy. Before Hopper Academy was built and renamed, the school was known as “Colored School No. 11.”
Joseph was the principal of Hopper Academy from 1906 to 1926. The building still sits where Joseph built it today!
He also built and was the principal of Crooms Academy.
Hopper Academy was a school for Black children in Georgetown and Sanford during segregation. It was one of the only schools for Black children in Florida.
From 1926 to 1961, the school taught grades 1 through 6. Before Crooms Academy was built for high school students in 1926, Hopper went up to grade 10.
Now, it is part of the Florida Black History Heritage Trail and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2015.
Neighborhood Midwife
Marie Jones Francis, the “midwife of Sanford,” left behind a successful hotel and restaurant she owned in Sarasota in 1942 to return to Sanford and become a midwife. World War II caused a shortage in doctors and nurses, so Florida’s Children’s Bureau sent Francis to Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University to acquire her practical nursing license in 1945. She specialized in premature babies and returned to Sanford to aid her mother, Carrie Jones, at the Fernald-Laughton Memorial Hospital before they opened the ward in their home. “When her health started failing,” she recollects in a newspaper article, “I took over.” Francis converted her house at 621 East Sixth Street to also serve as a maternity ward, where she delivered over 40,000 babies over her 32 year career. She became a midwife in the same vein as her mother and together they ran the Jones-Francis Maternity Hall in Georgetown.
Francis served her community in several ways. She delivered babies for both white and black families from Seminole County, primarily patrons who either preferred natural births or could not afford deliveries at a hospital. In the 1950s, it cost $70 to stay nine days where soon-to-be mothers were taken care of. Francis was assisted by her sister, Annie Walker, who did the cooking. The house and ward also served as a school, where Marie Francis taught nurses the art of midwifery. Nurses would come from across the state to learn how to delivery infants naturally. A heavy burden on a single working mother, Marie Francis had three daughters, Cassandra Clayton, Daphne Humphrey, and Barbara Torre. Clayton and Humphrey became school teachers and Torre became a purchaser at Seminole Memorial Hospital.
Neighborhood Churches
Historic Saint James AME Church
Historic Saint James AME Church is older than the City of Sanford itself, as its founding dates back 10 years before the city was incorporated in 1877. The historic church building — completed in 1913 by Black architect Prince William Spears — is getting a new roof as a part of the first major restoration project for the church.
Georgetown Steering Team 