Moving To Palm Harbor When It Wasn't Even On The Map

Little did I know the adventure and carefree days that lay ahead of me, as I looked curiously from our car window. My mother and I were traveling from Cross City, Florida to a place, not even on the map. I was counting cars that slipped by us on this lonely road to help the time pass. At that time (1945) Florida did not have the traffic that it has now, so that was a fairly easy way for me to pass the time.

My dad had been transferred from Cross City, Fl to Palm Harbor, as the depot agent for The Atlantic Coast Line.

My mother was trying to be excited and happy but even a five-year-old like me could figure out some things. I watched as feelings of loneliness and “what ifs” washed over her sweet face. She made a valiant effort in pretending to be happy and carefree.

We were leaving behind good friends. My mother had a best friend that was like a sister to her that she was now leaving behind. I looked at my mother and realized that she needed my comfort and also needed for me to keep on playing our car-counting game. After all, I would be six years old soon and would be starting school and I needed to take care of my mother,

As we arrived in this little town that was not even on the map, it was time to say goodbye to Cross City and embrace a new adventure. It was time for our family to be all-together again. (My dad had already moved there.)

I don't think I fully appreciated this wonderful Palm Harbor until I was grown. Now I look back and see that was such a special time. I want everyone to know about these experiences of friendship, hard times, and uniqueness of Palm Harbor.

I grew up in Palm Harbor, Florida. In those days, it was contained to just a few unpaved streets and everyone knew everyone. A walk to the post office (to collect mail) was a social event.

We settled into a two-bedroom bungalow, just off a dirt road. As a matter of fact, all the roads were dirt, covered with some sort of shell mixture that made a car ride easier. None of the streets had markers with street names on them. The house had a purple bougainvillea on the side, crawling up the chimney, a guava tree and several orange trees in the back yard. The garage was separate and in back of the garage was a big chinaberry tree that would come to be my climbing tree. The hardwood floors gleamed. The tiny kitchen had a linoleum floor and had one window that transformed you to the front yard where there was a fountain and small flower garden. The picture below is my former home, as it is today. The fountain is no longer there, but the owners have kept it up and even made the kitchen a little bigger! I have visited this house that I grew up in and the owners were so kind. They let me come in the house and look around. What memories! I can almost hear the voices of my mother and daddy!

One of the mysteries encountered upon moving to Palm Harbor in the forties or fifties was the dirt/shell streets with concrete curbs and sidewalks. There were even concrete curbed dividers in the middle of these streets, occasionally with palmetto palms, that had obviously been planted in these dividers long ago. These streets would extend out into orange groves as well as go by many vacant lots.

After inquiring about this phenomenon with Dewey Adair, of Adair’s Grocery, he explained that these streets, curbs, sidewalks, and dividers were the remains of what was once the town of Sutherland.

The once well-planned town of Sutherland had fell victim to the Florida land boom and crash in the twenties and then the depression in the thirties pretty well sealed its fate for any possibility of a comeback for Sutherland. Some streets had been paved with red brick where the town had begun and homes, hotels, and colleges had been built. But a majority of the streets remained for many years covered primarily with sand spurs.

The idea of the town of Sutherland had begun with developers out of Nebraska in the late nineteen hundreds. Evidence of this is the existence of Nebraska Avenue and Omaha Street. By 1900 a Sutherland railway station existed to serve passengers and freight on the Florida Orange Belt Railroad. A picture of it shows a decided Alaskan-Russian influence in its design, with a large steep pitched roof cupola over the entrance, as well as ornate scalloping on the facer boards of both the cupola and the station roof. Years later the Sutherland station and the Florida Orange Belt Railroad were eventually replaced by the Palm" Harbor Station and the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad.

This brings me back to daddy. He was now the new depot agent in Palm Harbor. Little did we know how the citrus industry was the hub of this little town and how the whole family would be extremely busy.

(Continued next time. This is an excerpt from "Palm Harbor" now on Amazon by Francine Larson and Ray Hall)