Goldsboro’s Black legacy shaped Seminole County’s history and identity

Goldsboro was not an accident of growth; it was built by Black residents who turned work in rail yards, fields, groves, ice houses and produce houses into land, voting power and a town charter. On Dec. 1, 1891, William Clark and 19 other Black registered voters incorporated Goldsboro, which the Goldsboro Museum and UCF RICHES identify as Florida’s second African-American city to be incorporated. The story still matters in west Sanford because the institutions that once anchored the community, its schools, church life, business legacy and historical record, now shape what preservation, redevelopment and investment will mean on the ground.

A town built by labor and voting power

The Freedmen’s Bureau helped establish Goldsboro during Reconstruction for African Americans who worked the region’s railroad yards and agricultural economy. That early economy tied Black residents to the daily engine of Central Florida’s growth, while also giving them the means to organize politically and establish a town of their own. When William Clark, a merchant, joined 19 Black registered voters to incorporate Goldsboro in 1891, the community was claiming more than a name. It was creating a civic structure with its own elected leadership, its own institutions and its own place in Seminole County history.

The museum’s history page names the town’s first elected officials, including Mayor Walter Williams, and traces how quickly Goldsboro developed the markers of a real municipality. A postmaster followed, then the first church, and then a school, which opened just a year later with Katie Stubbins as teacher. Those details matter because they show a community building itself from the inside out, not waiting for outside permission to define its future.

Schools carried the community forward

Education became one of Goldsboro’s most durable institutions. Goldsboro Museum’s education history says Black children in and around the community were attending church-sponsored or private schools as early as 1870, before formal public structures took hold. That record runs through Goldsboro School on Goldsboro Avenue, Goldsboro Elementary on 16th Street in 1916 and Crooms Academy on 13th Street in 1926.

Joseph Nathaniel Crooms stands at the center of that school history. Born in Orlando on June 17, 1880, Crooms studied at Florida Normal College, now Florida A&M University, and at Hampton Institute before arriving in Sanford in 1906 to lead Hopper Academy. He later helped establish Crooms Academy, which became the first African-American four-year high school in Seminole County. Seminole County Public Schools says Crooms and his wife, Wealthy Crooms, donated more than 17 acres of their own property for the school, a level of sacrifice that speaks to how Black educational advancement was financed through personal land, labor and risk.

For Seminole County, the school story is not just about a campus. It is about how Black families secured upward mobility when public systems offered little room for it. It is also about how property ownership became a tool of civic power, with land used to create institutions that outlasted the people who built them.

Charter loss did not erase the community

Goldsboro’s formal independence ended in 1911, when the Florida Legislature passed the Sanford Charter Bill and Goldsboro was folded into Sanford. Museum histories add that Sanford banker and state lawmaker Forrest Lake pushed a plan that dissolved both cities’ charters and created a new arrangement that made Goldsboro a community within Sanford. The legal boundary changed, but the neighborhood identity did not disappear.

Today, Goldsboro is part of west Sanford, and a community history source says it had more than 4,000 residents at the turn of the 21st century. That makes it a living neighborhood, not a frozen exhibit. The Goldsboro Museum and the Goldsboro West Side Community Historical Association now carry much of the work of preserving the area’s history, schools, churches and businesses, especially after a 2009 community effort led to the creation of the historical association.

Why the record matters now

Goldsboro’s history is visible in specific places and institutions that still structure how the community is understood:

• Goldsboro Avenue, where one of the early school sites stood.

• 16th Street, home to Goldsboro Elementary in 1916.

• 13th Street, where Crooms Academy opened in 1926.

• The churches, schools and business sites that anchored the original town.

Those places are more than memory markers. They are evidence of Black self-determination in Seminole County, and they are part of the case for how land should be used now. When preservation plans, redevelopment proposals or new investment come into west Sanford, they should be judged against the actual history of the neighborhood: a Black-incorporated town, built by workers and merchants, sustained by schools and churches, and held together by families who used land and education to create opportunity.

That is why Goldsboro remains one of Seminole County’s most consequential communities. Its history is not only about what was lost when the charter disappeared in 1911. It is about what still survives in the institutions, property lines and civic memory that continue to define west Sanford today.