Righting the past: Winnie Ann Hart, midwife and longtime resident of Old Warrington, dead

​​Editor’s note: This is the 17th in a series of historical obituaries written today to honor the men and women of the past who were denied the honor at the time of their death because of discrimination due to their race and/or gender.

Winnie Ann Hart, longtime resident of Old Warrington, died around 1916. The matriarch of a large family, she was a well-known midwife in Old Warrington before the eviction of the community’s residents by the federal government in the 1910s and 1920s.

Mrs. Hart was born Hosie Taylor on July 4, 1841, in “Choctaw, on the line of Alabama and Florida.” Her father, John Taylor, was a Seminole. Her mother, Lucinda Taylor, a Creek. The Taylors were prosperous, owning cattle and stock. Then, in 1854, Lucinda died in Milton, Florida. Winnie recalled, “My mother died when I was quite a child and the white people took me.” Winnie and her siblings remained together for the next seven years, but with the outbreak of the Civil War, “the white people took them [Winnie’s siblings] away.”

Righting the past: Their history wasn't just forgotten, it was buried. Today we tell their stories.

Winnie made her way to the relative safety of Warrington, where she met and married Charles Hart. Born in Covington, Alabama, around 1838, Mr. Hart had spent the Civil War working as a laborer in Warrington supporting the American war effort. According to family history, Charles and his brother Jerry had run away from the nearby Hart plantation and enlisted in the Union Army. Though Charles registered for the draft in 1864, no records of his military service have yet to surface.

After peace and emancipation came children. Louis and Clara arrived in 1866, Mary in 1867 and Thomas in 1869. Winnie would eventually give birth to 14 children. Eleven survived into adulthood.

As their family grew, Winnie and Charles became increasingly prominent in their community. Winnie supported her community as a midwife. Charles was a founding pastor of Warrington’s Smyrna Primitive Baptist Church. On August 1, 1869, he conducted his first documented marriage, one of 120 he would officiate over the next 16 years as a Baptist minister. Two weeks later, the couple purchased 66 acres from the state of Florida on Big Lagoon. Seventeen years later, they would add another 32 acres to their tract.

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Family descendants have shared that the family moved to a home a hundred yards west of the Pensacola lighthouse. This rectangular cabin, elevated on six brick piers in a small clearing, overlooked Pensacola Pass. Winnie likely tended a nearby house garden and prepared meals in the kitchen area located on the north side of the house, while her children played with their porcelain dolls and miniature tea set with the neighboring Wingate family.

The Harts thrived. Winnie gave birth to her 14th child, Phoebe, in 1887. Charles remained a prominent minister and supplemented his income as a gardener. In at least two elections in the mid-1880s, he served as an election inspector, further evidence of his stature in the community.

Winnie Hart lost her 59-year-old husband on June 14, 1896. His death warranted a short notice in Pensacola’s afternoon newspaper, The Daily News: “Charles Hart, an old colored man well known to all visitors to the lagoon on the government reservation, died yesterday.”

Winnie remained in their home with six of her children. At the dawn of the 20th century, her five sons worked in Pensacola’s booming maritime economy while Phoebe, age 13, went to school.

In March 1907, Winnie joined 116 Escambia County residents filing applications with the federal government to be officially recognized as Native Americans. After filling out the detailed application the best she could, Winnie lamented, “Not being taught to read and write, I have answered as truthfully, and as best I can. Rev. Mohawk recognized me as a Creek and Seminole.” She signed the application with an “X.” The government rejected her application.

Two years later, the federal government filed a federal court case against Winnie Hart and five other defendants to remove them from the land they had occupied for decades. Winnie Hart, the Wingates and other defendants, derisively called “squatters,” eventually lost the case a year after the first naval aviators arrived at the recently closed Navy Yard in what would become NAS Pensacola. Many other residents of the Warrington and Woolsey communities relocated to New Warrington, on the north side of Bayou Grande.

As biplanes and blimps flew overhead, Mrs. Hart packed up her home of nearly 50 years. Her community had changed. The thriving Reconstruction haven for recently emancipated African Americans working at the Navy Yard and nearby fortifications became the nation’s first training facility for naval aviators. Winnie left her waterfront home, probably moving in with one of her children to enjoy her final years with her many grandchildren. She was dead by 1916. Winnie would not live to see the U.S. Navy evict the last remnants of the multiracial Warrington community in the late 1920s.

In 2021, the Pensacola Lighthouse & Maritime Museum announced the discovery of the Hart Homestead. Ongoing archaeological surveys, historical research and oral histories are informing the museum’s development of a new permanent outdoor exhibit set to open in 2024. This exhibit will be located near the homestead site and present the history of the Hart family and the nearby multiracial communities that thrived during the Reconstruction era. With it, the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Hart and their family will be commemorated.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Winnie Ann Hart, midwife and longtime resident of Old Warrington, dead