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Holding onto old Florida
By BILL COATS, Times Staff Writer
LAKE MAGDALENE -- Alex and Beatrice Shaw, newlyweds in the 1930s, didn't just move to their new property on Lake Byrd. They embraced it. They raised oranges, lemons, limes and strawberries. Chickens and turkeys. Roses, azaleas, gardenias, canna lilies and palms. Three daughters were born, and Alex celebrated each birth by planting a magnolia tree. But nothing conveyed their attachment to the land more than their house. On Alex Shaw's instructions, a carpenter felled cypress trees and saddle-notched them like Lincoln Logs. He brought limestone from the Hillsborough River for a chimney. Finally, he added a tin roof. "My parents bragged that the logs came from the property," said Ellen Glen Shaw Lloyd, 66, of Tallahassee, for whom the first magnolia was planted. "I think it fit the land it was on and the lake atmosphere," said Mabel Shaw, 62, also of Tallahassee, the middle daughter. Thanks to the dense foliage, the distinctive cross-shaped house has remained essentially hidden off Indian Mound Road for 67 years. Now that's going to change. Two weeks ago, the Hillsborough County Commission approved a developer's request to rezone the cabin and its 10 remaining acres for a dozen Mediterranean-style villas averaging more than $500,000 apiece. In the process, county planners required that the log house be moved and preserved. The planning documents refer to it as a log "cabin." "I don't think my parents thought of it as a cabin," Mabel Shaw said. "They viewed it as a house." Log cabins or houses are rare in Hillsborough, said Parviz Moosavi, the county's historical preservation planner. A historical surveyor visited the Shaw house five years ago and found it in good condition, eligible to be named a Hillsborough County Historic Landmark. There are 18 such landmarks in unincorporated Hillsborough, with another 280 structures considered eligible, Moosavi said. Current landmarks north of Tampa include historic schoolhouses in Lutz and Citrus Park and a 66-year-old fire tower in Carrollwood. The significance of the Shaw house has been a financial headache for developer Vin Hoover, who must move the building. Hoover estimated last week that the move would cost him $45,000, although more expenses remained to be figured. "It's an unfair burden," he complained. Hoover said he was considering several sites where property owners had agreed to accept the home. The closest would be immediately across Indian Mound Road, in an orange grove owned by Earl Stover, 72, of Carrollwood. "I told him that I'd love to have it," said Stover, who grew up in the neighborhood in the 1930s and '40s. Stover said he would locate the house where his grandfather's house once stood, behind four cabbage palms. Vivid Memories The Shaws arrived in the neighborhood around 1935. Alex Shaw, a former football fullback for the University of Florida Gators, was the state's dairy inspector for the west coast, according to Mabel Shaw. The house on the lake was a child's paradise, recalled Miss Shaw, who lived there until she was 6. "Mother would let us run out and pick a strawberry, and she would dip it in sugar for us," she said. "We had to go get the eggs. Knocking a chicken off a nest is one thing when you're tall enough to look down at the chicken. But when you're 2 feet high and you're looking the chicken in the eye, it's quite another thing. My favorite chickens are dead." In 1947, Alex Shaw was transferred to Tallahassee, where he eventually became director of the dairy division of the Florida Department of Agriculture. The family returned to their two-bedroom log house during summers, but mostly left it vacant. In 1971, worried about vandalism, Shaw sold it to a neighbor, home builder Russell Crumpton. Four years later, Crumpton deeded it to his son, Danny, and Danny's bride, Joni. Their first child, Jason, was born in the house 23 years ago, attended by a midwife. The Crumptons still live nearby. Like the Shaw daughters, Joni Crumpton is nostalgic about the house. She remembers Alex Shaw's huge azalea bushes and the noisy tin roof. "When it would rain, you could not hear a conversation." In 1985, the Crumptons sold the property to a trust, and a caretaker has lived there since. Hoover said he will build one of the villas for himself, nearest the site of the log house. He plans to preserve the three magnolias. The Shaw sisters had heard nothing about the log house for years. Their mother had died in 1968, their father in 1987. "We're amazed that it's still standing and somebody's living there," Mabel Shaw said. "We're delighted. "My parents would just be so excited about this, they wouldn't know what to do. They wouldn't believe they had a historic house." -- Bill Coats can be reached at (813) 269-5309 or coats@sptimes.com
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