Joshua Wilks
Published: August 23 2004
For more than 35 years, Professor Randall Broxton has been doing what he believes he was meant to do, teaching history. For Broxton, a history teacher on the Pensacola campus, history is not only a profession, it’s an obsession.
It is this obsession that led him to pursue a career in history, as well as spending countless hours collecting stories and researching different topics of Pensacola history.
And he would have no other way. Three Saturdays a semester, Broxton, the advisor of the Jared Sparks Historical Society, laces up his walking shoes and leads dozens of people on tours down the streets of historic Pensacola to share stories he has spent a lifetime gathering.
The tour provides guests an opportunity to observe the various architectural differences of the Spanish, British, and French culture that have had an impact on the city. It also provides a native’s story-telling technique.
For instance, Broxton’s first tour this year of old Seville Square may include a tale of Clara Barkley-Dorr, the widow of a lumber tycoon, who built a two-story Greek Revival house across from the square in the 1871. It has been rumored for more than a century that she was known for being overly concerned for her children’s safety in the “wilderness” of Seville Square. The Dorr house, now owned by the University of West Florida is still there, preserved to historical accuracy.
Broxton may also recount the reports of the botanist William Bartram, who explored and documented the Pensacola area in the mid-1700s, landing by ship south of Seville Square. In journals, Bartram mentioned the ancient oaks, with draping moss and the sugar-white sand that garnished this very place Broxton leads his tour -scenery that can still be witnessed today.
“It makes it more relevant to understand what people lived like in that point in time,” Broxton, a Pensacola native, said. “We’re expanding preservation.”
In one of his tours of St. Michael’s Cemetery, formally surveyed by the Spanish in 1807, Broxton points to graves of veterans that have served during the American Revolution, even though Pensacola was not part of the British empire at that point in time, the War of 1812, the Civil War, World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam. He may point out how war has affected Pensacola residents since the beginning, just as it does today.
It is through these lessons he teaches either in a classroom or on a sidewalk that his students go on to become preservationists in one form or another.
“(PJC) Students participate in community service, as well,” Broxton said.
Many of his students volunteer at historical societies and museums, and many eventually pursue history as a career.
For Jesse Glasshoff, 26, a philosophy major at PJC, these tours are more than a history lesson; they are a cultural experience and evidence that the past once existed. As president of the Jared Sparks Historical Society, Glasshoff enjoys tagging along because, he said, it’s more of a hands-on experience, where you can visually see the past in front of you.
The tours are absolutely free of charge.
“The only thing they have to do is come, look, enjoy, participate,” Broxton said.
His only recommendation is a comfortable pair of walking shoes.
The next tour will be Saturday, Sept. 11 at Seville Square in downtown Pensacola.
For more information on PJC’s Jared Sparks Historical Society, visit The Corsair Web site’s Community Calendar page at www.eCorsair.com for details and tour schedules.