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Guardian of history looks to house collection
By LISA BUIE, Times Staff Writer LUTZ -- Walk through Elizabeth MacManus' Land O'Lakes home and you'll feel like you're shopping in downtown Dade City. Antiques and collectibles cover everything. The walls, the tables, the mantels. "This is turn of the century," she says as she winds a dark wooden music box. The tune that spills out sounds like harp music. Mrs. MacManus also has a vase painted by her childhood music teacher. On the dining room wall hangs the glass-encased orange tea set she got when she was 4. Two china cabinets are packed with old crystal. She also collects pictures taken during the old Florida Cracker days. Don't ask her to name her favorite item. "Gosh, that's like asking you to name your favorite child," says the 79-year-old daughter of Lutz's first pioneer settler. Diabetes has left her blind, but she can describe every item and tell you its story. Another vase, one painted in an Asian motif: "I thought it was the ugliest thing my parents had," she says with a grin. For years, Mrs. MacManus has held onto things others might have cast aside. She started gathering the area's history in 1950. In 1976, she began taking her artifacts and displaying them at temporary museums. In 1996, she filled 12 rooms at First United Methodist Church with 40 wooden display boxes of materials she accumulated around her home. She has old bricks from the railroad, faded photos of people posing with such things as a dead alligator or a huge cypress they cut down, birth announcements, old arrowheads. Mrs. MacManus has dreamed for years about building a permanent museum to share her artifacts. But escalating land prices make it tough for the retired homemaker to buy a lot. A donation would be a godsend, but she knows few landowners would take a pass on developers' big money. "I've got enough stuff to fill five buildings already," she says. One way she has found to teach people about local history is through books. In 1998, she and her daughter, political scientist Susan MacManus, published the 544-page Citrus, Sawmills, Critters and Crackers: Life in Early Lutz and Central Pasco County. Mother and daughter now are at work on another book, Going, Going Gone, which is a local history of the early 20th century. "People think they live in the country, with these houses side by side," she says with a laugh. "That isn't the country." Susan credits her mother with nurturing her own love for things past. "When we were young, she would pile us in the car and she would just take us to various places in Florida -- the Ringling Museum, St. Augustine, Sanibel Island. We literally saw Florida from top to bottom," says Susan, who now is a professor at the University of South Florida. Susan sees the books as a way for her mother to claim credit for work that rightfully belonged to her. Many folks would interview her mother over the years, she said, and then fail to mention her contribution in their works. "People come and take all her stuff and write about it and never give her credit," she said. "That really irritates me." Mrs. MacManus is also a living, breathing, museum exhibit herself. Her father, Mike Riegler, was a German immigrant and Lutz's first permanent settler in 1911. He came to the area because he wanted to grow oranges. Her mother was 12 when she met Riegler, who was about 40. "He just waited for her to grow up," Mrs. MacManus said. Mrs. MacManus was born across the lake from her current home in what is now called Land O'Lakes. Mrs. MacManus got an early appreciation for collectibles at the piano of her music teacher, who loved to paint vases. "You could hardly sit down at that piano, it was so cluttered with all the stuff she painted," she said. Mrs. MacManus and her husband, Cameron, raised their three children in the concrete block home that they had built in 1950. It still sits on the property. Developers have called for years about buying the land under the homestead. Though it's still off a dirt road and boasts dense trees, the property's a mere stone's throw from State Road 54 and grocery stores, gas stations, fast food joints and banks. Mrs. MacManus says she'll sell when "something" freezes over. Still spry, she goes to garden club meetings and shopping, even bowling with a program sponsored by the Lion's Club. But her daughter watches as age takes its toll. "People need to realize if someone doesn't take an interest in this, they blink and it's all gone, and there's no recollection," she says. Nothing would make Susan happier than for a museum to become a reality during her mother's lifetime. "It's the one thing I wish I could give her." -- Lisa Buie is the editor of the central/east edition of the Pasco Times. You can reach her at (813) 909-4604 or toll-free 1-800-333-7505, ext. 4604. Her e-mail address is buie@sptimes.com.
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