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New Pinellas County park is on the way

Who would have ever thought that you would have to actually travel to a park to see an orange grove in Pinellas County?

It wasn’t too many years ago that North Pinellas County was almost one big orange grove. As recently as the 1980s, orange groves still dotted the area. The subdivision where I live was an orange grove until it was subdivided in the mid-1980s. We still have a couple of orange trees in the backyard that are left over from those days.

Now, Pinellas County is about to open a new county park in Largo that will be devoted in part to preserving a bit of  Pinellas County’s orange-growing history.

The county bought 157 acres in Largo (at Belleair and Keene roads) from the Taylor family back in 1998 (for $13 million), and later they bought a few additional acres. This coming December, the county hopes to open the land as Eagle Lake Park. Some of the Taylor family’s orange groves will be preserved so people can see what orange grove farming was like in Pinellas County.

Pinellas County has some great parks, and Eagle Lake Park will just be the newest one. You can learn more at www.pinellascounty.org/park/

Tags: north pinellas, orange grove, parks

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 28th, 2009 at 4:07 am and is filed under Florida, history. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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