by Dorothy Kulisek
In 1902, Lucinda Powell, a Seminole Indian from the Florida Everglades, sent her 12 year old daughter Lavania to Anglesea in North Wildwood to live with Captain Sam & Nora Buck. Right here is where Lavania’s amazing story began. To keep from being a slave in Florida, Lavania became a servant girl to the kind-hearted, seafaring family. In 1906, she eloped with Richard Moultrie, who she met at the Cosmopolitan Church (known today as AME Church or Asbury African Methodist Episcopal Church), on Youngs & New Jersey Aves.
Richard lived on the south end of the island and would walk the beach up to the north end to see Lavania. They moved to Philadelphia and were married, but city life did not suit the new bride. It wasn’t long before they returned home to Wildwood. Richard became a licensed minister while Lavania worked in local hotels, eventually getting contracts for bigger cleaning jobs with the hotels. This ultimately led her to open her own business, a rarity for women in those days, especially black women. Needless to say, Lavania Moultrie was one inspirational force of nature!
In 1910, Lavania Moultrie remarkably opened up the very first unemployment agency in the state of New Jersey; setting up her office next door to her home on the 100 west block of Garfield Ave. in a two-story building her husband built called the Geneva, which also served as a rooming house.
Her company was known as the Seashore Employment Agency. She matched people with employers and owners of local hotels, boarding houses and other businesses. Lavania brought people from many different states to work in Wildwood.
She took pride in knowing that Johnny Ford, one of her students who worked to save college tuition as a dishwasher at the Hotel Dorsey 1962, later became the first African American mayor in Tuskegee, Alabama.
While business prospered, the Moultrie family grew with the birth of Lavania’s four children (although she raised five). Breda was the oldest who was raised, not birthed by Lavania, along with her children Geneva (Smith), Richard (Dick), Mildred (“Honey” who married Valdemar Pitts) and Myrtle (who married Earle Hunt).
While Lavania helped thousands find summer employment, with her own children, education seemed to be the Moultrie family business. Geneva & Myrtle attended college for their teaching degrees and Dick became principal of Wildwood Elementary School. Honey, however, attended cosmetology school and opened her own beauty salon up the block from her family home. In an article written by Barbara St. Clair, found in the Wildwood Historic Museum, Honey talked about her shop, recalling that Thursday was the day most black women had off and they would come from all over the county to get their hair done. There was a real comradery of friendship that gathered in that little shop.
On a breezy winter day in January, Lavania and Richard’s grandson, Earle Randolph Moultrie Hunt met with Sun editor Dorothy Kulisek, bringing with him an almost sacred memoir filled with a 100 years worth of family photographs and news clippings. His own son, Erick, Earle says, has the closest resemblance to his Uncle Dick, a handsome, dignified-looking man who is remembered not just for being principal of Wildwood Elementary, but for the outstanding track record at Wildwood High that led him to qualify for the Olympics. Unfortunately, segregation issues at the time kept him from achieving that dream.
In his early years, Earle, or Randy as he is better known, was cared for by his Aunt Breda and Uncle Earl Saddler in Sharon Hill, PA while his parents, Earle Sr. and Myrtle, were busy working in Newark, NJ. As families often do, they helped one another do what they had to do to survive. When he reached school age, Randy went to live with his parents through grammar school years before moving to Wildwood to live with his grandmother Lavania and attend Wildwood High School, graduating in 1967. In the early 70s, he served as a summer police office on the Wildwood Police Department and fondly remembers wearing badge #28. After the death of his father, his mother eventually retired and returned home to Wildwood.
It is important to Randy that not only his son know the incredibly rich Moultrie family story, but that their history is written and lives on in Wildwood’s archives. Earle-Randy is the only member of the family left in the Wildwoods, happily residing at the Moultrie homestead at West Garfield Avenue, where a young girl who came to the island as a servant, rose up, leaving a big footprint in the sands of Wildwood by-the-Sea, NJ.
