Citrus Park Colored School

Tucked away just off Gunn Highway in northwest Hillsborough County, an area now more known for estate homes, is an old, one-room school house. The Citrus Park Colored School was built in the 1920s by and for the African-American community in the Keystone-Odessa-Citrus Park area on land donated by Mrs. Barbara Allen. Rev. Charlie Walker spent many hours at the county school board's offices urging them to open this school, until they agreed to supply the materials. The families served by the school provided the labor and construction know-how to actually build the school. Citrus Park Colored School served up to thirty students at a time until it closed in 1948. Since then, the old school building has been used by the Mount Pleasant AME Church. The Citrus Park Colored School is a designated Hillsborough County Historic Landmark.

"A Shared and Pleasant History" from the Tampa Tribune

Map showing locations of Hillsborough County Landmarks (pdf)

For further reading:

"'The Most Well Utilized Building...in the United States:' Citrus Park Colored School," by Geoffrey Mohlman. Sunland Tribune (1999) Volume 25, Number 1, pages 77 - 96.

Movie Night

The Tarpon Springs Area Historical Society will be showing the movie Beneath the 12-Mile Reef Thursday, September 25 at the Depot Museum. The film starts rolling at 7 pm.

Beneath the 12-Mile Reef was filmed on location in Tarpon Strings in 1953, and starred a young Robert Wagner. The story is a tale of young lovers from rival sponge fishing families, a Florida Romeo and Juliet.

International Coastal Cleanup

Saturday was the 2008 International Coastal Cleanup Day, organized by the Ocean Conservancy. Several local cleanups were coordinated by Keep Hillsborough County Beautiful, including one along Courtney Campbell Causeway in Tampa Bay.
















It was a beautiful morning to be picking up trash. My team found plenty of bottles, cigarette butts, and a dreidel, which got a mention in the local paper!
















Things we found that belonged there included a wasp nest and several horseshoe crab shells.

Ode to Odet and Those Who Came Before

In my mind it was a quiet day. Boys were throwing sticks, dogs were licking baby faces, parents were napping or cleaning up after lunch. An ordinary day.

Then the Spanish came.















Do you see them? Is that Panfilo de Narvaez, the man standing on the deck, eyes straining toward shore? If it is, you had better run and hide.

Now Philippe Park, then the Native American village of Tocobaga, this site on the shore of Safety Harbor was a sort of ground zero for the radical cultural and social changes that came along with Spanish exploration of La Florida in the 16th century. Each time I visit here, I look across the harbor toward Old Tampa Bay and wonder what it's like to have your way of life end.

Yet for all that, Philippe Park is a very pleasant place. It's big; there's room for everyone, with picnic shelters, a boat ramp, and great playgrounds for little and not-so-little kids. The oaks provide shade for you and shelter for frisky squirrels who have their beady eyes on your KFC. After dinner, the kids run up and down the old Indian mound. Where else in coastal Florida do they see a hill such as this? I suspect any child who tried this 500 years ago got a good clout on the ear.







































The park has a quirky history as well as a prehistory. In the 1840s, when settlement was just starting around here, a man named Odet Philippe picked this spot to be his homestead. Or Count Odet Philippe, or Dr. Odet Philippe -- he was a colorful man with a past, who claimed to be French royalty and a friend of Napoleon Bonaparte. If all the stories were true, he was over 100 years old when he died here. But no matter -- he was a true Floridian, who started a new life, reinvented himself, and stuck it out in the end. He certainly had his share of adventures here -- an exerpt from an interpretive sign at the park:















"Originally, this mound was rectangular in shape, but a tremendous hurricane in 1848 washed away approximately 1/3 of the mound. At that time, Odet Philippe used the mound to save his family from the tidal surge."


Just another typical day at the park.

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For more information or directions and events, visit Pinellas County's website for Philippe Park.

Primrose Willow

This primrose willow is doing just what it should, growing in a wet area of central Florida, and blooming in the fall. There's not much to say about it, other than it looks nice.

War Beans

The Castor Bean plant grows quickly and easily in Florida, has been grown commercially here in the past, and is used in Brazil to make biodiesel fuel. Sounds great, sign us all up, the answer for what to do with all that land cleared due to citrus canker -- well, maybe not. The plant is invasive and poisonous, one of its products being ricin. Nonetheless, 90 years ago castor cultivation in Florida was a matter of national concern.

The time was 1917, and the United States had joined World War One. One of the inovations of the Great War was the use of airplanes for military purposes, and castor oil was valued as an aircraft lubricant. Soon the plant was under cultivation in Florida, the southwestern states, and California, with growers guaranteed a price of $3 a bushel. Problems with labor, pests, and transportation lowered yields and raised prices demanded by growers. Production was far below government estimates, and the War Department turned to foreign sources of the oil. American petroleum companies promoted mineral and other oils for use in aircraft.

Soon after fields of castor were planted in Florida, armyworms began marching and munching their way through the foliage. State plant inspectors waged battle armed with dust sprayers full of powdered arsenate of lead, quickly saving that year's crop. The State Plant Board reported:

"In dealing with the emergency created by this outbreak of the army worm the Plant Board was called upon to make rather heavy expenditures. A total of $1,946.85 was expended by the Board, covering traveling expenses of inspectors, telegrams, emergency circulars, dusting machines, poison, etc. The large quantity of castor beans saved from destruction, and therefore made available for the use of the Government, more than justified the expenditure."

The war ended before all problems with massive domestic production of castor oil were resolved. Peacetime demand for the oil much less, and farmers turned to other crops. Castor bean plants are still found along roadside ditches and fields throughout south Florida, where they are considered weeds.

Photograph on page 304 of the 1918 edition of The Overland Monthly: "Human and Physical Elements in a Picturesque and Successful Castor Bean Campaign in Florida. --Herman B. Walker of Miami, and the illuminated Ford in Which He Several times Traversed the East Coast, Calling upon the Farmers to Plant War Beans."
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Sources:

"Castor Beans Grown in Titusville Supplied Oil for World War I Planes." Indian River Journal Volume VI, Number 1 (Spring/Summer 2007), pp. 2-3.

The Quarterly Bulletin of the State Plant Board of Florida, Volume I, 1916-1917. Gainesville: State Plant Board of Florida.

1918 Year Book of the Oil, Paint and Drug Reporter. New York: Oil, Paint and Drug Reporter, 1919.

Go figure... Go Rays!

Friday night was a special night for the Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays. Their win over the Baltimore Orioles guaranteed the Rays a winning season, the first in the franchise's history.
















The Rays play at Tropicana Field, an air-conditioned indoor stadium. Not particularly romantic or glamorous, but immensely practical for Florida summers.

Tampa Bay Automobile Museum

Tucked away in Pinellas Park is the Tampa Bay Automobile Museum with 30+ collectible cars, many of which I had never heard of before. Such as:

The 1962 Tiburon Roadster, designed by Henry Covington in St. Petersburg, Florida. According to the exhibit sign, this roadster (and its convertible version) are the only cars designed, built, marketed, and sold in the Tampa / St. Petersburg area.

And then there's the Hanomag Kommisbrot -- perhaps ancestral to the SmartCar? The Kommisbrot was built in Germany in the 1920s and got 60 miles to the gallon -- with a top speed of 35 miles per hour. Given the looks of this car, that must have been terrifyingly fast.

For more information about the Tampa Bay Automobile Museum, visit their website, http://tbauto.org/.

For more about the Tiburon roadster, here's a link to a 2006 article in the St. Petersburg Times: "At last, 'The Shark' finds its way back to the Bay"

Stuff for a Rainy Day

While waiting for Tropical Storm Fay to pass on by...

"Hemingway Knocked Wallace Stevens into a Puddle and Bragged About It" from Littoral

"Hialeah Park and Joseph Widener, 1932" from Colin's Ghost

"Winters in Fort Myers weren't always a wonderland for Edison" from News-Press.com, August 17, 2008

"The Master of Coconut Grove" from Modernism magazine

"Painter in a Savage Land: The Strange Saga of the First European Artist in North America" a book excerpt from the Wall Street Journal, July17, 2008

Now, That's a ...

A clue -- these usually aren't painted lavender.

It's the shovel bucket from a dragline, used in Florida to mine phosphate. It's hard to tell from this picture, but this shovel is really big. You could walk around in there. Draglines and shovels like this were a tremendous step forward in efficiency compared to the handheld shovels and wheelbarrows used when phosphate rock was discovered in Florida in the 1880s. At first, miners dug for river-pebble phosphate, but draglines let them pull off the oveburden and get to buried phosphate rock deposits more easily.

Florida phosphate is a major source of fertilizer for the nation and the world, and has been economically important to the state for over 100 years. Downsides to mining are primarily environmental, from the actual soil removal to energy and water use, to the slightly radioactive by-products stored in mountainous gypsum stacks. Most of Florida's phosphate comes from the Central Florida Phosphate District or Bone Valley, where the corners of Hillsborough, Polk, Manatee, and Hardee counties meet.

This particular shovel can be found to the side of MOSI in Tampa. Yes, that's a red dinosaur in the background.

More Reading about Phosphate in Florida:

Phosphate Primer

Phosphate at the Crossroads

Mulberry Phosphate Museum

One Last Big Push for Phosphate Mining

Florida Mine Map (pdf)