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Archive for October 3rd, 2009

Canada’s Campobello Island — a long trek from North Pinellas County

The view we saw every morning at Lupine Lodge on Campobello Island, New Brunswick, Canada. That bit of blue water you see is a bit of the Atlantic that separates Campobello from Eastport, Maine.

     I know, this doesn’t have much to do with real estate in Pinellas County, but it was a beautiful view that greeted us every morning on Campobello Island.
     Campobello is part of New Brunswick and is just off the coast of northern coastal Maine. It is best known as the summer residence of Franklin Roosevelt.
     We stayed there because we wanted the grandkids to get a little history lesson, but we also chose Campobello because we wanted to go to the annual Maine Blueberry Festival, which is in Machias, Maine in an area that offers very little in the way of hotel rooms.  We thought staying in Campobello would be a good and fun alternative, and it was.

One of the two guest buildings at Lupine Lodge

     We stayed in a place called the Lupine Lodge, which was very nice but a little on the primitive side. No air conditioning, no television, no phones in the rooms. The place was clean but I don’t think it had been updated since the pre-1920s, when the place was built.
     There was a restaurant on site that was pretty good, but we decided to venture off and see what other food opportunities existed on the island. Not a great decision, as it turned out, because there was only one other restaurant on Campobello. We had some breakfast there, though, and we returned the next night for dinner and had some very good losbter stew and scallops. Emily had a good-looking lobster roll.
     We spent part of an afternoon at Roosevelt’s summer “cottage” — I’ll do a separate post on that.
     All in all it was a great visit. I lived the first 40 years of my life in Maine and never visited Campobello. The trip up there gave me a chance to go back to Jonesport, the coastal fishing and lobstering village where I spent summers as a kid.
     The worst part of the Campobello visit may have been the border crossings — we had to go back and forth every day for three days, and crossing the U.S. – Canada border isn’t the simple picnic it used to be. The Border Patrol people are courteous but very businesslike, and passports are now a necessity.
     I’ll do separate posts on our whale-watching trip and on the blueberry pie-eating contest back in Machias at the Blueberry Festival.    

Tags: Campobello, Maine Blueberry Festival, vacation

North Pinellas Historical Museum displays Palm Harbor’s past

Hartley home, which houses the North Pinellas Historical Museum

Alright, I know what you’re thinking: “Where the heck have you been?”

It’s a fair question. First, we took a vacation and took the grandchildren up to Campbello Island in New Brunswick, Canada (more on this later). Then we came back to a bunch of moving chores and other demands that couldn’t be put off.  So here we are.

So, without further excuses, here’s a quick report on what we did today — a visit to the North Pinellas Historical Museum in Palm Harbor.

The museum is one of those places you can’t miss, being on the busy corner of Belcher and Curlew roads. But I’ve driven past it a million times and never stopped in before.  Today I resolved to do something different.

Cracker house behind the North Pinellas Historical Museum

The excuse was a yard sale on the grounds of the museum. There were a number of displays of all kinds of used stuff and we did a tour of the grounds before we went inside.  There were scores of people outside, either selling or buying stuff, but surprisingly there was no one inside the museum building excpet a couple of staffers. So we took our time moseying around inside.

The house itself was originally owned and built by the Hartley family, one of the early pioneer families of North Pinellas County.  A very nice museum volunteer told us how the house sat on the dirt road that was the main thoroughfare between Tampa and the Gulf many years ago, and she explained how people traveling over to the coast from Tampa would stop, water their horses, and perhaps use the Hartley’s outhouse.

The house ’s exterior is made up of concrete blocks which had been cast on the site.  The original block casts, she said, had been purchased from Sears & Roebuck. The house was built between 1915 and 1919.

The museum's parlor

Out back is a classic small Florida Cracker house, a simple living structure that was popular a hundred years ago.  Our guide explained to us how the cracker housercame to be in the back yard: A few years ago, the house had to be moved from its original North Pinellas location.  It was decided to move the house south to Largo, where the Pinellas County Heritage Village is located.

Once on the road, however, word came that the 21-acre Heritage Village facility had no room for the cracker house.  So… hurried negotiations resulted in the house being diverted to the North Pinellas Historical Museum site.

There are many things to see at the museum and lots to learn about Palm Harbor’s early days. Drop by sometime — admission is free, although they won’t turn down a voluntary donation.