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A rural community of family-owned groves and citrus packing houses was uprooted as housing developers moved in. Some of those families' descendants helped found Seminole in response to the encroachment of other cities.
By ROBIN MITCHELL
© St. Petersburg Times, published July 4, 2001
SEMINOLE -- Long before there was a Seminole Mall, before the aroma of citrus blossom blanketed a rise between Bay Pines and Largo and long before the railroad came on its way to St. Petersburg, other people passed through Seminole.
None, no doubt, were Seminoles.
The first Seminole known to have visited Seminole did so in 1968 when Joe Dan Osceola, then president of the Seminole nation, paid a visit to the chamber of commerce awards banquet. He returned the next year as parade marshal for the third annual Seminole Pow Wow parade and barbecue.
But other native people had called these parts home, or crossed over these parts, for millenniums.
The evidence of their being here was everywhere, until their religious and living mounds fell to flat shopping centers. Their midden mounds, or waste dumps -- generations of shells piled high -- were turned into road base.
Little survives. But one, close to home, does.
Remnants of a domiciliary, or dwelling, mound are behind the VA Medical Center at Bay Pines. That is all that is left of a people -- that we today call Tocobagas -- who lived there sometime between 500 and 1000 A.D. Shell tools, pottery, arrowheads and tooth wear suggest they came for the abundance of hunting and fishing.
They were, by the day's standards, a large people -- skeletal remains hint that they were muscular and the men about 5-feet-6, the women about 5-feet. They favored tattoos and adornment, and shellfish.
Archaeological studies at other points along the Pinellas County coast suggest that centuries earlier, other people roamed in search of the gulf's bounty, or prehistoric horse, bison and, perhaps mammoth. Low-lying and plentiful coontie added starch to the diet, as berries and figs did for sweetness.
But these people had long since disappeared by 1528, the year the Spaniards came, and it would be many a year before people returned to live on the crest that today is Seminole.
They would come with the lure of nourishing rain, good soil, mild winters and a taste for citrus fruit.
From the late 1800s until the 1950s, when houses began to dot the land like spit orange pips, the community of Seminole, and points north and east, was based on agriculture.
"You may wonder why they picked this place in the raw pine woods to build their homes and community," wrote F. Leon Campbell many years after his 1879 arrival.
"There were several good reasons. The area was surrounded on three sides by salt water which meant good drainage, also an abundance of fish and other sea foods. They could see that the land was fertile and would be just fine for growing oranges and that was what they expected to do as soon as they could get their land ready."
The early settlers, many Southern veterans of the Civil War, according to Campbell, relied on raising cattle and hunting "wild game plentiful, such as deer, turkey and quail, and some wild things that they did not need such as bear, panther and alligators . . . while they waited for their orange groves to come into bearing."
According to Campbell, whose recollections are part of Heritage Village archives, much of the early Seminole community was centered on what is now 54th Avenue at Seminole Boulevard.
Marvin Chapel, so named by first pastor E.H. Giles for his son, a Methodist bishop, was northwest of the intersection. Now, 110 years later, it has almost 900 members and is the Seminole United Methodist Church. (Though at the heart of the original Seminole community, the church wasn't annexed into the city until April 2000.) To the south, just across 54th Avenue, was a one-room schoolhouse that sat on an acre of land given by the Michel Thevenet family, on a corner of their 100-acre orange grove and vineyard.
On the southeast corner was the Felthouse Grove, owned by Oliver and Sally Archer. Their neighbors to the east were family, more Archers, who developed the Satorious Grove.
Farther east on 54th Avenue, near what was then the Depot Road because of the railroad (now the Pinellas Trail), lived A.P. and Inez (Archer) Hoffman, who had a grove.
To the north of the Archers and Hoffmans, across 54th Avenue in what is known as Blossom Lake Village, lived the Langleys, who lost their extensive and the area's first commercial lemon groves in the 1895 freeze. Campbell tells of the Langleys grafting grapefruit to the re-budding lemon roots to start the first paying grapefruit grove.
While waiting for the grapefruit to bear, Campbell says, the Langleys started the first commercial poultry ranch with 1,000 leghorns, making weekly trips to St. Petersburg by wagon.
People living there today recall the area's citrus roots in its street names: Orange, Lime, Calencia, Temple, Satsuma and the like.
At what is now the Bay Pines triangle, more Archers (Capt. Gus and Caroline) ran a general store, maintained a grove and served as the Seminole Post Office. Across the way from them was John White's Landing, a fish camp and picnic grounds that served as a gathering place.
On the grounds of today's Bay Pines VA Medical Center were the home and orange grove of Capt. George Arthur and, at the southern tip of the VA property, Hartman's Point, which had a freight dock, sawmill and a turtle kraal, or pen.
To the north of 54th Avenue, along Duhme and Ridge roads, was the Dale Murry grove and the Charlie Snow grove. Just to the east of Ridge Road, off Old Oakhurst Road, lived Albert and Dell Meares, who ran what was called the John's Pass Post Office, which got mail via horse cart from Clearwater and Largo.
Scattered to the north along Ridge Road and what is now Seminole Boulevard were the groves and homes of Ben and Maggie Campbell (keep them in mind), Martin and Mary O'Quinn, Will and Pink Cobb, and Clayton and Anna Whittle.
By the 1940s, seven citrus packing houses made a home on what is now Seminole Boulevard between 50th and 78th avenues. Only the Orange Blossom packing house remains.
In April 1904, at what is now the Largo Fairgrounds, the Johnson family welcomed son Jesse Wilder into the world. In August 1905, at the Campbell homestead at the corner of what is now Seminole and Johnson boulevards just east of Seminole Mall, John A. and Clara Meares Campbell welcomed baby girl Sarah Marjorie.
Twenty years later, Jesse Johnson, on his way to a horticulture degree at the University of Florida, and Marjorie Campbell, fresh from two years at Florida State College for Women, were married.
From them sprang the modern city of Seminole.
Johnson was a fifth-generation descendent of a Florida pioneer family with extensive holdings in Seminole, Clearwater and Largo. After graduating from UF in 1929, Johnson returned to the area to open Seminole Nurseries -- at the homestead where Marjorie Johnson was born.
Johnson's background may have been in the land, but his influence extended far beyond.
He would go on to found the Bank of Seminole (now First Union); he donated land for the first Seminole Public Library and money for the Seminole Fire Rescue Department; and he was instrumental in getting a post office. He also established the A&P grocery store (again, on the Campbell homestead property) on Seminole Boulevard and Seminole Mall, which opened in February 1970.
In the late 1940s, they set their eyes on turning the saltwater bayou of Lake Seminole into a freshwater lake. Later, they would help found Sylvan Abbey Memorial Park in Clearwater.
Evolving into the community's unofficial mayor, Johnson saw that the area in which he had grown and prospered was under the envious eye of neighboring cities keen on expansion. Madeira Beach crossed to the mainland to take advantage of the cigarette tax revenues coming from the new Publix shopping center and Largo, where the big citrus packing houses had been, was looking south.
If Seminole was to keep its distinct flavor, Johnson and others figured, it would have to become its own city.
"Several attempts to become a city were made . . . and it failed," said former Mayor Holland Mangum. "We were beginning to get pressure. The mayor of Largo announced they'd move south, (St. Petersburg Mayor Herman) Goldner talked about moving northwest into Seminole, Pinellas Park talked about going west and Madeira Beach was coming from the south.
"We wanted our own destiny."
The community growing up among the citrus groves got a boost in the late 1950s with a parade of homes tour. The agriculture spine along west Pinellas was becoming home to people who weren't growing grapefruit and oranges.
"Most of groves were being sold out to development," recalls Mangum.
You could see it coming, he said. "I remember when the owner of a grove, who went to Seminole Methodist Church, said he was going to sell. He said "When I can get $3,000 an acre, that's more than I can make growing citrus on it.' "
At the time, you could buy most any 90-foot by 120-foot lot for $1,000.
The savings and loan folk saw potential as homes started to come in.
Russell Stewart, now 90 and then a director at Home Federal (Savings and Loan) in St. Petersburg, was sent to Seminole to open Home Federal's first branch office.
That he did, converting an old motel on the corner of Seminole and Park boulevards.
"It was just a little country community at the time," he recalls from his daughter's home in Jacksonville. "There wasn't even a stoplight there.
"Park Boulevard was the stop street, but you didn't need to stop because nobody was coming."
"As the years went by and Seminole prospered, (Home Federal) prospered as well and we built the first two-story building on Seminole Boulevard," he recalls. That building remains. It's the Huntington Bank now.
Seminole Mall, which by now was sporting its own Colony Shop and Gordon's Jewelers, was serving its growing community, so one didn't have to drive as far for the essentials,
But it was the grocery store at the mall -- a Publix -- that held promise of a new city: a gold mine called cigarette taxes.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, municipalities -- towns and cities -- could share a portion of the cigarette taxes collected by the state. For smaller incorporated areas, it was a relatively painless way to keep a lid on property taxes.
On April 16, 1970 -- out of the watchful eye of all but a chosen few -- fewer than two dozen community leaders were called to a meeting to discuss, in secrecy, a plan of attack. "We didn't have to be open," Mangum said. "The Sunshine Law didn't apply to non-governmental bodies."
Mangum walked in the door and was asked whether he would be the chairman, as he had been president of the volunteer fire department. "I said I would, on one condition," he said. "That every club and association be invited in."
That gathering was the forerunner of the driving force behind the city of Seminole: the Christmas Tree Committee.
"The Kiwanis Club had done real well selling Christmas trees, so when the Chamber of Commerce said they wanted to start looking into creating a city," said Mangum, "we thought that by calling it the Christmas Tree Committee it would be secret. Even members of the chamber thought it was a committee to sell Christmas trees."
It wasn't until July, when the committee knew the direction it was going to take, that news got out.
The plan was to take advantage of never-used state law that allowed the creation of a city if you could muster 1,000 registered freeholders to petition to create a city, then have two-thirds of them show up for a vote and vote for cityhood. Then they had to stick around to elect a mayor and council.
The foot soldiers of the Christmas Tree Committee, later the Seminole Improvement Committee, volunteer firefighters and members of the Pinellas Seminole Woman's Club, had gone door-to-door in a core area around Seminole Mall, and the cigarette taxes at the Publix.
"Eighty-three percent of the area surveyed said they wanted to form a city, but we couldn't form a city that big -- yet," said Mangum.
The canvassers had gotten a pretty good idea who wanted a new city and who didn't, Mangum said, "so we drew a line around all the "yes' votes" and submitted that as the proposed city boundary.
The timetable created a problem, too. It's one thing to get 1,000 people, especially when you want most of them on your side, in one place; it's another thing to do it at dinner time on a Sunday afternoon during football season.
"People complained about it being on a Sunday, but we told them to look into history and see that many meetings were on Sundays and in church.
"And this was before the Bucs," said Mangum. "If it had been when the Bucs were here, we'd have to hold it a day the Bucs were out of town.
As it was, the hopeful city founders were up against the New York Jets and the Los Angeles Rams on NBC.
The vote was scheduled for 5 p.m., Nov. 16, 1970, in the confines of a meeting room at Seminole Mall.
"If you have to handle a thousand people at supper time and during football season, you had to do things quickly. We identified each person that they were a resident of the area around the mall about a mile in each direction, and when we knew we had the votes, we closed the door," Stewart said.
Of the potential would-be city's 1,219 freeholders, 895 came to the meeting. At least 818 "yes" votes were needed.
The vote, 823 to 72.
"All the sudden we were a city of Seminole," said Stewart.
Pinellas County's 24th and last city, was born. Within minutes, Stewart was elected its first mayor and a nine-member council was chosen, which then appointed Johnson honorary mayor.
The Jets beat the Ram 31-20 before a crowd of 76,378 at the same hour.
First thing Monday morning, papers confirming the vote were sent to Tallahassee, and that afternoon, Gov. Claude Kirk phoned Stewart offering congratulations. "Wow! First time a governor called me."
The first two months as a city were hectic, not to mention poor. A survey had to formalize the boundaries and, as it took 60 days for the cigarette tax to filter home, even postage stamps needed for city business had to be borrowed.
Within a couple of years, the law that allowed the creation of a city, as Seminole had done, was repealed.
The plan early on was to create a core city, and rapidly grow by annexation into the third-largest city in Pinellas.
The 1,000-plus population of 1970 has grown to about 16,000 residents today, and the city has annexed itself many fold over, the biggest of which nearly doubled the city's size to 4 square miles last year, but the wild-eyed early growth dreams have become more modest.
That first year's budget, all of $45,000, has burgeoned to more than $11-million today. (The cigarette tax, by the way, was replaced with revenue sharing in the mid 1970s.) A city manager form of government replaced the strong mayor in 1995.
A city library and huge post office sit across 113th Street from a renovated recreation center. St. Petersburg College, formerly the junior college, is building a $6.8-million joint-use library not far up the road.
"We've come from a community of orange groves to a community with big city problems," said current Mayor Dottie Reeder. "We have the problems even big cities have with traffic."
She looks on the city of her early teenage years with nostalgia -- "the one bank, one savings and loan, the A&P grocery and White House hamburger stand" on the southwest corner of Park and Seminole boulevards "known for its very good onion rings."
In the summer, teens walked to the Tides Bath Club in the Redingtons for weekly dances and movies. "There was nothing else to do," she laughed.
"Every year and every day, it becomes more complex," Reeder said. "But there is an attraction to our community that other cities would like to imitate. We're known for very good schools, the city is very efficient and we continually lower taxes."
Yet another annexation referendum is scheduled Aug. 7 for voters in Seminole Grove Estates, a subdivision of 222 homes just west of 113th Street between 86th and 102nd avenues.
"And I read where Mrs. Hutchinson is willing to sell 36 acres of green space to the city just to keep it as green space," said former Mayor Stewart. The city is trying to buy Edwina Hutchinson's 36 acres of undeveloped land that abuts Long Bayou, at 68th and 70th avenues.
Does Stewart keeps an eye on the city? "I do, because I'm on the computer. I get the news of Seminole and how badly the Devil Rays are doing."