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Historic icon needs some helping hands

The Palm Harbor Historical Museum needs an assistant director, along with docents and volunteers.

PALM HARBOR - The telephone answering machine says, "It's a great day at the Palm Harbor Historical Museum." But not if the director has had a bad fall, injured her leg and can't open the museum for visitors.

Winona Jones has been a fixture at the Palm Harbor Historical Society's museum at Curlew and Belcher roads for years, devoting her time and talent to everything from dusting to drumming up support.

But Jones, 76, recently injured her left leg in a fall at home. During the same time, her husband Charlie underwent surgery for an aortic aneurysm. Without Jones, the museum is temporarily closed through early October, according to Kitty Mozina, vice president of the Palm Harbor Historical Society.

With Jones temporarily unable to run the museum, the society is looking for an assistant director to help fill her place. The unpaid position requires some degree of organizing, cataloging and paperwork. Experience at writing grants and working with historical materials also would be helpful.

The museum is housed in a gray two-story house that once belonged to Judge Thomas William Hartley, a justice of the peace and a citrus grove owner. The 3,200-square-foot museum tells the story of Palm Harbor, Ozona, Dunedin, Crystal Beach and other places where the first settlers came in 1850s, paving the way for citrus, cattle and, eventually, suburbia. An old well on the premises hails from an era without running water, electricity, indoor plumbing, screens or air-conditioning.

About 10 docents usually give tours of the 1915 house on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, but more are needed, Jones said. They are also looking for adults or teenagers to donate community hours to catalog artifacts and photographs.

"We need more help, more help, more help," said Mozina, or "Miss Kitty," as she is known at the museum. "Inside the house we follow the tradition of the time. We try to be very authentic."

Over the years the historical society has gathered a collection of artifacts that includes photographs, journals, deeds, milk bottles from the Johnson dairy, spoons and hubcaps and items from the Faith Mission orphanage in Crystal Beach.

When the historical society started, it was mostly for North Pinellas residents who had grown up together. Their goals were to audiotape stories, gather photos and do surveys of the cemeteries.

But they've done more than that. One of the society's first accomplishments was to establish the Palm Harbor Historic District in 1994. The society's home went from location to location until the county offered the old Hartley property at Belcher and Curlew; it opened in 1998.

Soon there will be an addition to the history of Palm Harbor. Jones is working on a book called Around Palm Harbor, a history of unincorporated North Pinellas which will include information about churches, schools, cattle and citrus businesses, and recreation and social activities of the past.

As a fourth-generation Pinellas resident, Jones worked 28 years as a library media specialist for Pinellas County schools, retiring as director of media services at East Lake High School.

She remembers springs when the scent of citrus blossoms permeated everywhere in North Pinellas and a time when she and her mother took washtubs to the Gulf of Mexico to pick scallops for dinner.

"We want to preserve and protect the history, the written and physical artifacts, and promote education of people to the history of the area," she said.

For information about the unpaid assistant director's position at the North Pinellas Historical Museum, call Winona Jones at (727) 785-1652 or write to the museum at 1043 Curlew Road, Palm Harbor, FL 34683.