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The other Spring Hill was a black community

By SHARON TUBBS
Published April 6, 2007

So I'm driving to Spring Hill from downtown Tampa the other day. Takes me 10 minutes.

Not the Spring Hill in Hernando County - that's an hour away. This is Spring Hill the neighborhood, right here in Tampa.

You won't find it on current maps. A liaison at the city's Neighborhood & Community Relations department had never heard of it.

Neither had I.

But as I journey north on Nebraska Avenue and turn right onto Yukon Street, I realize I've been in these parts plenty of times.

Earl Glymph opens the door to his neat yellow home with brick accents and the proverbial white picket fence. He asks if I had any trouble finding it. I hadn't.

"Praise God," he says, taking his time across the cream tiles in his living room.

He ushers me to the dining table, and for the next two hours he grants my request: He tells me his story.

In many ways, his is also the story of a little-known Tampa neighborhood called Spring Hill, a place with memories that some hope will be preserved in a museum one day soon.

He was born here 74 years ago, the sixth of eight children, raised in a house his family still owns about a mile away on Skagway Avenue.

I try to pin him down at this point, posing the obvious question. Technically, aren't we in Sulphur Springs?

He smiles, but is adamant. No, this is Spring Hill. The boundaries are roughly Central Avenue east to 12th Street, and Yukon north to Skagway.

People try to mingle the areas together these days, but in his eyes, they're separate just like they were when he was a child.

Spring Hill was where the black people lived. It's where the black-owned grocery stores, laundries, hardware shops, restaurants and fruit stands were.

It's where an old-school preacher held a revival and promised that Jesus would be with him always. Where he went to grade school with teachers who acted like second mothers and fathers, and any adult could set a child straight with his parents' thanks.

Sulphur Springs?

That's where the streetcar stopped a few blocks south.

It was the place he had to walk from to get home, where the white kids called him names and he and his friends sometimes fought with them. "It depended on how many of us it was, how many of them it was."

Back then, Sulphur Springs was a resort area for white people. It had a recreation center, a swimming pool, a skating rink. It had the 10-cent store and a place to buy ice cream. Seating was whites-only, so servers would hand him a cone through the window.

His father, a hardworking construction laborer, didn't like that. "If a man doesn't want your business," he'd tell him, "don't spend your money there."

He remembers all that, yet he raises thick eyebrows, puts on a broad smile, lets out a chuckle and says, "I've had a tremendously wonderful life."

He and his siblings had fun. They played baseball and loved school. He graduated from Middleton High in 1951, then from Florida A&M University. A stint in the Army during the Korean War was his first brush with integration. "We were drafted in the Army. It wasn't a black Army or a white Army. It was just the Army."

He met a nice girl named Pauline whose family lived in Spring Hill, too. They got married and had two daughters.

He taught agriculture for Hillsborough schools nearly 30 years before retiring in 1990. He worked alongside white teachers and taught white students. He made a lot of friends of various races.

With integration, opportunities for African-Americans expanded. The buddies he grew up with left Spring Hill for other aspiring Tampa neighborhoods, like Carver City and Jackson Heights.

He didn't; he wouldn't. "If everybody got educated and left home, what would home be?"

This isn't the same place he grew up in, though. He can't think of a black-owned restaurant or grocery store here now. No place he can buy a nice suit.

Even the church he joined in the early 1950s, Spring Hill Missionary Baptist, moved to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard outside the neighborhood.

And Sulphur Springs isn't a segregated resort anymore.

About 60 percent of people here are minorities, says community leader Norma Robinson later. She, her husband, Joe, and others like Mr. Glymph are gathering records and oral histories and looking for a home for what they call the Sulphur Springs Museum and Heritage Center.

There, they hope the story of African-Americans in the area, including Spring Hill, will be told.

In the meantime, Mr. Glymph is telling me about the time a couple of years ago when community leaders were scheduled to meet at the Harbor Club, an old building on Grant Avenue, barely two minutes from his house.

He'd heard about a movie theater and a club near there decades ago, but he never saw fit to go. That, he said, was the "Sulphur Springs side."

[Last modified April 5, 2007, 08:13:38]