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Off the beaten path, 'a million-dollar view'

An old lodge with an intriguing history faces the past and future.

By ANDREW MEACHAM
Published January 26, 2007

The house lies at the end of a dirt road, surrounded by woods and a river. Tall windows and unusual carpentry set it apart, making it an architectural mongrel. Concrete blocks holding up the front porch look as if they need to be there. A shack in the yard barely stands, its bowed planks splitting and smelling of rot. "People think The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was filmed here," said Kenny Brannen, who has lived there for 30 years. The fragments of information he has collected over the years reveal some clues about the home's origins and colorful history. Other stories simply remain rooted in local lore.

Brannen, a farmer who once ran a greenhouse on this property, just north of the Manatee County line near Wimauma, can barely walk. A cane and padded boots help him move about, despite nerve damage from diabetes and heart and kidney problems.

Brannen, 59, doesn't own the 2 acres on Lightfoot Road where the house stands or the adjoining 48-acre spread fronting the Little Manatee River. Owners have allowed him to live there since 1976 as a caretaker, paying property taxes on the 2 acres and watching over the grounds.

A hidden past

An elderly postmaster in the 1970s told him that a prominent family built the home in 1875.

It was a hunting lodge, the postmaster said, where an adventuresome Teddy Roosevelt once spent the night.

The lodge and half a dozen other homes made up the village of Riverhead. A boat brought mail and supplies to a bustling post office and general store, the postmaster said.

Then everything faded, leaving a paper trail that disappears after 100 years or so like the wisps of a forgotten dream.

The postmaster died not long after relating the oral history, Brannen said. So did Brannen's wife. Even 25 years later, he won't mention her name.

"It's still too fresh," he said.

In recent years, Brannen and Diane Alvarez, a neighbor who wanted to preserve the house, have searched through available records looking for evidence of the 19th century community called Riverhead.

They found that some of what the postmaster said was true.

Shifting ownership

Records in the Atlas of Florida Groves show that a Thomas Claude Lightfoot owned 20 acres of grove land in 1897. Whether he or someone else sold 50 acres on Lightfoot Road is uncertain. But sometime after 1900, Sterling Lipscomb bought the property and devoted most of it to orange groves.

When Lipscomb died in 1965, he left the land to his daughter, Ann Weld. In the mid 1970s, Weld sold a 2-acre parcel containing the lodge to Francis Pipes, a businessman from Washington, D.C.

"He was going to retire here," said Brannen, who agreed to watch both properties for the owners in exchange for board.

In 1982, Francis Pipes boarded a jet that left Washington's National Airport and crashed into the Potomac River.

Brannen recounted that history as he drove a riding lawnmower into the woods. On one side of a dirt path, brush has long since reclaimed the groves. On the other side, the Little Manatee River bends. Cattails stand on each bank. A pit bull mix named Hootch trots alongside, preoccupied.

"I have a million-dollar view," Brannen said.

Beer cans in the bushes and tire tracks show that people also like these woods.

The view ends abruptly across a road leading to the Sundance Boat Ramp, where 262 acres of orange groves were cleared for a subdivision.

'Progress' inches in

Property owner Allison Repetto plans to build 224 houses just a stone's throw from Brannen's homestead.

Farther west, on both sides of Interstate 75 at Valroy Road, another 182 houses are coming.

The expansion of development into rural areas disturbs Diane Alvarez, an adjunct English professor at the University of South Florida and resident of the tiny community called Sundance.

In 2005, Alvarez wrote to Lana Pipes, Francis' widow, asking her to get her house listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Pipes, 64, wrote back, saying that she didn't intend to sell the property.

Alvarez worries that someone else eventually will.

"It's one thing to read about Riverhead village," Alvarez said. "It's another thing to go and see that rough, solid house that stood for these hundred and some years."

Neither Pipes nor Weld would comment on their properties.

But Weld's daughter, Diane Ashley, said that Weld, 82, has no immediate plans to sell her 48 acres.

"But what will happen in the future, we don't know," Ashley said.

The mail depot

Alvarez led a group of neighbors from the Sundance Homeowners Association who wanted to learn more about the mysterious lodge's origins.

From area libraries, Alvarez found turn-of-the-century maps listing Riverhead at the location of Pipes' home, near other towns with names like Floridelphia, Gulf City and Oysterville.

A legend of old post offices compiled by a stamp collectors society showed that the cluster of houses in Riverhead had its own post office from 1887 to 1902.

Precise records of Roosevelt's travels have been more elusive. While assembling troops for the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt stayed at the Tampa Hotel in 1898, said University of South Florida librarian Paul Camp.

"But he was only here for a couple of days," Camp said. "And he would have been fully occupied with his military duties, getting men and equipment on ships headed for Cuba."

Camp and Tampa Bay History Center curator Rodney Kaite-Powell have heard the stories that Roosevelt returned about 1907 to hunt or fish.

"It wouldn't have been surprising for him to have come here," Kaite-Powell said. "There is a myth or legend that he was impressed by what he saw here."

For now, the lodge's lone resident lives in a bubble between dread and serene bewilderment. Among the many plants, a jacaranda tree has shed thousands of purple blossoms.

"I have to pinch myself sometimes to believe that I live here," Brannen said.

Andrew Meacham can be reached at 661-2431 or ameacham@sptimes.com.

[Last modified January 25, 2007, 07:46:17]