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Old photos at heart of drive for museum

Elizabeth MacManus will show part of her collection and take orders for framed copies Saturday to fund a museum.

By BILL COATS
Published October 30, 2005

If you go

The "Lutz History Picture Show" will be held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday at the Lutz Community Center in Bullard Park, off U.S. 41 and Lutz-Lake Fern Road. Admission is $5 for adults and $1 for children 12 and younger.

LUTZ - The faces, thousands of them, have stared at Elizabeth MacManus from the past. Farmers among their crops. Athletes in uniform. Schoolchildren in rows. Frozen on film as they squinted in the Florida sun 50 to 95 years ago.

It all started in the 1970s, when MacManus agreed to compile a history book that her church, the oldest in Lutz, published to celebrate America's bicentennial.

"I asked some of the pioneers if I could copy some of their old pictures," she said.

MacManus has been asking ever since. She has collected more than 1,000 photographs from the pioneer days of Lutz and Land O'Lakes. In 1998, MacManus and her daughter Susan published the 544-page local history, Citrus, Sawmills, Critters & Crackers.

On Saturday, some 200 of MacManus' favorite photos from Lutz will be on display at the Lutz Community Center. She'll take orders for framed copies of the photos for $25. That and admission will go toward her drive for a history museum.

MacManus, 82, has her personal favorites.

There's the completion of Lutz's first post office, barely half the size of a Hummer, photographed on Jan. 21, 1913. Ten men stand proudly outside the tiny building, along with a small boy on a sawhorse and a dog gazing straight at the camera.

"That was the first day that they opened this post office and the first day that Lutz had its name and all those old pioneers were in it," she said.

Until then, Lutz was called North Tampa. But federal postal officials refused to approve a post office with that name, fearing confusion with Tampa. So they suggested Lutz, because the community's train depot was called Lutz Junction, after two brothers who helped create the junction.

Another favorite: A shot from about 1912 of the train depot, as a smoke-billowing locomotive approaches from Tampa. That photo became the model for a depot replica that the Lutz Civic Association built in Bullard Park in 2000.

One of the most striking photos shows a picnic, on May 11, 1912, of the local Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association. Nearly 40 men, women and children are interrupting their feast to stare solemnly at the camera.

Many of the photos show MacManus' father, Mike Riegler, a German who became the first land buyer after Chicago's North Tampa Land Co. created the new community in 1910. But to MacManus' chagrin, her dad passed down hardly any photos.

"You would have thought being the first permanent settler, he would have lots of pictures," she said. "But he didn't."

-- Bill Coats can be reached at 813 269-5309 or coats@sptimes.com

[Last modified October 29, 2005, 09:48:04]