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Homes

Front Porch: Inn takes guests on timeless escapade

By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published September 16, 2005

Walking into Larry and Carolyn Yoss' country inn on the outskirts of Brandon means giving up any sense of time.

Pine floors, pre-Civil war furniture, primitive artwork, pie safes and early 19th century American antiques feel decidedly northern, Yankee-simple, and very restful, especially on a blazing Florida summer day.

"Our guests tell us it's peaceful, relaxed, like another world," Carolyn says. "Before they come, I tell them it's not Florida tropical. You won't find bamboo furniture, yellow shag carpet or glass-top tables. This is a New England farmhouse."

The faithfully re-created replica of an early 1800s salt box cottage sits at the end of a quiet suburban street off Bloomingdale Road not far from Riverview. A salt box is a slang term for the square wooden containers once used for shipping salt from England to America, explains Larry, a registered nurse who works at South Bay Hospital in Sun City Center.

Salt box roofs were built to slant in such a way that cold north winds whipped up and over the house, keeping the family warm inside.

The couple, who give frequent tours to schoolchildren and community groups, took pains not to decorate, but to authentically convey the lifestyle that went along with such a home.

"We tried to re-create a middle class to lower income farmhouse in a country setting," Carolyn says of the house they built 30 years ago.

Pie safes, jelly and pewter cupboards - though beautiful - were constructed as utilitarian objects, typically by the farmer who cut the lumber himself and built whatever the family needed. Windows were small because glass was costly and hard to obtain.

Every object had a purpose and a place, and building materials were often what could be had inexpensively, something the Yosses know a lot about. Though a carpenter erected the home's exterior framing, the couple built much of the inside of their 1,800-square-foot salt box themselves. They used antique windows, doors, molding and shutters salvaged by hand from old dairy farm tenant houses being demolished in the Brandon area. The lovingly worn pine plank floors were lumber seconds. Even an old staircase - which they believe was once used by slaves in a Plant City farmhouse - found its way into the kitchen.

They filled the rooms with antiques, handsome old rugs, photographs and books from the six-generation Michigan family farmhouse where Carolyn grew up. Children's rockers and hand-woven baskets hang from the ceilings, along with Larry's handmade taper candles and dried peppermint plants used to make tea when they're relaxing after a house full of guests.

Their home has doubled as a bed-and-breakfast since 1989, attracting travelers from all over the world as well as locals who just want to get away and lounge beneath the oak trees by the slate-edged pool. (The names of the couple's children and grandchildren have been scrawled sweetly into the concrete grout.)

The cedar shingle inn backs up to a lushly wooded Hillsborough County park and features a matching duplex guest cottage with Amish quilts, a pencil post bed, claw-foot tub, and a shaker linen rack holding the antique coverlets displayed throughout the house.

In the winter months, the inn, known as the Behind the Fence Bed and Breakfast, is booked solid for months. No doubt guests are stunned by the decorating and faithfully re-created historic decor. In the mornings, guests are treated to an extended continental breakfast that includes authentic Amish pastries baked by the couple's daughter and son-in-law who own Miller's Dutch Kitchen, a popular Amish restaurant in Bradenton.

"We really are one of Florida's best-kept secrets - a lot of locals don't know about us," Carolyn explains. "That's partly because we don't have a computer and we're really secluded from the outside world. We want it to be another world. We have a Web site, but never look at it. I didn't even get a cell phone until a year ago."

Over the years, the house has earned a spread in Country Living magazine and has been featured in Country Home and Southern Living.

The couple, both in their early 60s with six children and 20 grandchildren between them, dreamed of preserving the rural way of life they had known as children. Larry, who grew up Brethren, a religion closely related to the Amish faith, was raised on a farm in Ohio.

They continue to live in their classic salt box cottage alongside their guests, peacefully, in a retreat they made to feel much like life did in the 1800s.

No computer.

They don't even take credits cards.

Cash and checks only.

Yes, there's television, concealed in one room by a late 1700s Zoar cupboard, but a lot of guests end up playing checkers or listening to the wind in the trees by candlelight.

Says Carolyn: "Most people get here and they just want to sit outside and hide from the world."

- For more information about the inn, call (813) 685-8201.

[Last modified September 15, 2005, 11:02:11]