Norma Goolsby Frazier still lives on the land her grandfather settled a century ago in Peru. (For those of you with the wrong-headed Yankee tendency to pronounce like the country, it's actually Pee-rue.)
This scrappy, eyeblink of a town was eclipsed in the middle 20th century by what is now Riverview. But Frazier believes it to be the oldest settlement in Hillsborough County outside of Fort Brooke, from which Tampa grew.
Frazier, a local historian and author of the new book The Flaming Red Hill (Vantage Press, February 2004) was born at home, in a log cabin on the property that sprawls off McMullen Road not far from Boyette Road. The cabin is long gone. Three years ago, Frazier now 68, built a tidy new brick house with a view of cattle pasture, pine trees and dense stands of oaks.
"It's like I don't know anything else but this land," she says. "I always loved my home and felt blessed to be here."
As a child, she used to row the boat for her father when he fished in the nearby Alafia River.
"Dad would catch a fish and mom would get a fire going on the riverbank and we would have a picnic right there," she recalls. "I guess those were the things farm families did in those days."
Before development marched in and began to tame the wild landscape, Frazier remembers seeing wildcats and panthers, little red foxes and bald eagles.
Her family settled in central Florida in the 1840s, and migrated to the Peru area around the turn of the last century. They joined the First Baptist Church of Riverview 100 years ago, a place that Frazier has written about in her book A Light in the Wilderness and where she still worships.
"I believe the river has always been the attraction to this area," she says. "It not only provided food, but the land was fertile and they could plant crops. It was also very beautiful here."
Frazier has six grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren, with whom she takes great pleasure in spending time. Her little house brims with baskets of picture books and dolls in frilly dresses. When she was a little girl she used to pick wildflowers with her grandmother, something she remembers like it was yesterday.
"From where I was standing, the pine trees looked like they were soaring toward the sky, and my grandmother turned to me and said, "Seventy-five years ago there were Indians here.' "
Her new book, which is set in 1842 at the conclusion of the second Seminole War, is a fictional work that Frazier says she believes to be "historically correct." It sells for $13.95 and can be ordered online or from local booksellers.
God inspired her to write a book about a family migrating to a settlement on the banks of the Alafia River by wagon train, she says.
There's a thread of mystery to the plot, a hint of spirituality, some thrilling nights of campfires stoked until dawn to keep panthers away, as well as a real message about the meaning of home.
And, says Frazier, "it's a book full of Florida history, that a variety of readers will be interested in."
