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MICHAEL CANNINGMoody Avenue: The Moodys held extensive tracts of land in Hillsborough and made their living raising cattle.
John Benjamin Moody was a town and country kind of man. That stood to reason, given that much of the country he and his family owned turned into town.
His grandson, John Moody III, laughingly recalls how his grandfather would vigorously wash the chewing tobacco from his mouth when his city friends came to visit. It's a fitting memory of a cattleman who toted a six-gun on the range and led successful businesses in town.
Moody, 85, best remembers his grandfather as a true outdoorsman who hunted and fished. He was a good humored man who loved his Winchester Model 12 shotguns and Granger Rough Cut chewing tobacco.
"He was an old Florida cracker," said Moody, a retired jet mechanic in Lake Placid. John Benjamin Moody was born in 1865 in Lithia, a part of eastern Hillsborough County that has remained mostly rural. He was the son of one of the area's earliest pioneer families.
Cattle was the Moody clan's main industry. In 1887, John Benjamin and his father, James, established Tampa's first cattle market at the present intersection of Franklin Street and Kennedy Boulevard in downtown Tampa.
The Moodys had extensive land holdings throughout eastern Hillsborough and Tampa. John Benjamin Moody spent time as a young man on a sprawling family ranch called Moody Heights. It stretched from where his namesake street in South Tampa intersects Kennedy Boulevard to the shores of Old Tampa Bay in the Beach Park/Culbreath Isles area and Rocky Point.
Around 1900, John Benjamin Moody traded his home in Lithia for a large house in the city, on Nebraska Avenue near the intersection of Michigan Avenue (today called Columbus Drive).
Moody served as vice president for the First National Bank of Tampa and bought and sold real estate. He stayed active in the cattle industry until 1925. He died in 1930 at age 65.
- Source: John Moody III, Tampa-Hillsborough Public Library.