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The first Thanksgiving: A FLORIDA event?

I’m from New England, a place rich in history and tradition.  The Mayflower, Plymouth Rock, Thanksgiving – all early American historical icons that New Englanders takes great pride in.

Now, however, I live in Pinellas County, Florida, a place rich in sunshine but a little light in the history department. Florida is a great place to live, but it simply doesn’t offer the rich past of the Northeast.

Heck, the state wasn’t even sold by the Spanish to the U.S. until 1819; Florida didn’t become a state until 1849. Many of the people considered to be the pioneers of Pinellas County didn’t live in these parts until the early part of the 20th Century.

So imagine my shock when I learned that the first Thanksgiving wasn’t the one held in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620, but was an altogether different celebration held in St. Augustine, Fla. about 55 years earlier.

The first Thanksgiving a Florida event? Who would have ever dreamed?

Nonetheless, that’s what Michael Gannon and several other Florida historians claim.

According to those accounts, a Spanish explorer, Pedro Menendez de Aviles, landed in what was to become St. Augustine on Sept. 8, 1565, and immediately decided to put together a Mass of Thanksgiving. He even decided to invite some of the local Timucua Indians, much as the Pilgrims allegedly did 56 years later.

There’s no record of what everyone had to eat on that day in St. Augustine, but one good bet is Cocido, a Spanish stew of beans, chicken and cabbage which is popular to this day.

Also, there’s a bit of controversy as to whether this Mass actually qualifies as a Thanksgiving event.

That’s okay – I’m told the people who run the Plimoth Plantation, the historic facility in Plymouth that commemorates the Pilgrims’ home, are going a little light on the “first-thanksgiving-in-the-new-world” claim these days, giving that honor up to the Indian tribes who populated the area long before the Pilgrims ever arrived.

Nonetheless, I like the idea that Florida has a claim to the first Thanksgiving. I’ll be sharing this story with the friends and relatives who join us for dinner on Thanksgiving Day. And I may even try my hand at Cocido if I can find a good recipe.

Tags: history, holidays, pinellas county, Thanksgiving

Al Boyd’s boot

It wasn’t so long ago that North Pinellas County was little more than orange groves and open land. Because of that, the area isn’t exactly chock full of old stories and legends. But there is a pretty good story involving Boot Ranch. Boot Ranch is now a shopping center, but it used to be a good-sized ranch that was owned by one Al Boyd.

Al Boyd's boot

Since Al called his spread Boot Ranch, he built a great big boot to mark the entrance of his driveway — a 17-foot bit of concrete footwear that bore the image of a Brahmin bull. At the time, the boot stood at what is now the intersection of Tampa Road and McMullen Booth.

The Boyd ranch was a large spread that covered a significant bit of acreage in North Pinellas County. But, like all the other large tracts in the area, it was eventually sold to make way for housing developments, apartments and a big shopping center, appropriately named the Shoppes at Boot Ranch. When the shopping center was built, the big boot was painted white, pink and light green (not exactly cowboy colors) and was moved to a place of honor in the shopping center parking lot. That is where it still stands today.

Here’s the interesting part:

If you look closely at the base near the boot’s toe, you can see the faint outline of a small window. And if you walk around to the back, you can see the faint outline of a painted-over door.
Legend has it that Al Boyd had a small room built into the boot.

According to legend, Al was unhappy that some locals used to drive by and take pot shots at the boot. He asked the sheriff about what he could do to retaliate, and the law officer said he could return the fire if he were in or near the boot — that returning fire would be tantamount to self-defense.

So, Al reportedly would hang out in his little room in the boot and wait for gun-toting ne’er-do-wells to drive by. If they opened fire on his boot, Al supposedly would stick his rifle through the window of the boot and return fire. One night he supposedly peppered the door of a passing pickup truck when the occupants took a few shots at the boot.

The boot had a colorful past, just like Al Boyd. It seems kind of sad that it is living out its final days in a shopping center parking lot.

Tags: history, North Pinellas County, real estate

One of the oldest cemeteries in Pinellas County

Kids can be pretty hard to figure.

Take my granddaughter, Caitlyn.  She is eight years old and in the second grade. Now, you’d think a young girl like that would have plenty of fears — the dark, or things that go bump in the night.

Caitlyn reads the inscription on a gravestone

So where do you think she’s been pestering us to take her?  To a cemetery.

We haven’t really been able to figure out where this cemetery thing came from, but she’s really fascinated. So this past weekend her grandfather decided to take her on a field trip.

Since I had written recently about Curlew Methodist Church, that’s where they went — Curlew Methodist has one of the oldest graveyards around here, and there are quite a few gravestones that date back to the 1880s.

Caitlyn loved it.  She enjoyed reading all the inscriptions, and she liked learning about the people who were buried there.  She decided that the Jones family must have been pretty big around here, because so many of them had headstones in the cemetery. And she liked reciting some of the short poems she found on some of the stones.

She wasn’t scared at all.

“The ghosts are only around at night, anyway,” she said.

Caitlyn said she was going to tell all about her cemetery adventure at the next Show and Tell at her school.

Tags: Add new tag, cemeteries, churches, history, north pinellas, Palm Harbor

Curlew church is one of Pinellas County’s oldest

Curlew Methodist Church in Palm Harbor

I’m from New England, a place where communities often stretch back several hundred years. It’s not like that here in North Pinellas County.

The area where I live, made up of Palm Harbor, Dunedin, Tarpon Springs and even much of Clearwater, was little more than orange groves just 20 or 30 years ago. There are many wonderful assets in this region, but the local history is a bit thin.

But that’s not true of everything. A case in point is Curlew United Methodist Church, located in a little corner of Palm Harbor just north of Curlew Road.

Most churches in this area are not very old, but Curlew United Methodist Church was founded 140 years ago, in 1869. John Sutton, a local resident, decided that this part of North Pinellas County, a near-frontier area back then, needed a place of worship. He called together 22 of his friends and neighbors, and he then provided six acres of land for the church and an adjoining cemetery.

Sutton wasn’t done at that point; he also provided logs from the property, which were rafted down to a saw mill in Clearwater, cut into boards, and then rafted back up the coast.

The church members agreed to help build the church, which Sutton named Curlew after the pink birds that flocked nearby. Actually, Sutton thought the birds were curlew birds, but he was incorrect; they actually were pink spoonbills. No matter; the name “Curlew” stuck, and that’s the name of the church today.

About 12 years later, the church was destroyed by fire. The members held their services under a big oak tree on the property for a couple of years, then built a new building. However, that building wasn’t very well put together, and members tore it down in 1902 and built a new one.

That building was remodeled in 1942, and it still stands on the site and serves the members of the congregation, but not as the main church building; that structure was erected in 1969.

The cemetary that Sutton founded surrounds the church on two sides, and its gravestones provide a fascinating record of life and death in North Pinellas County from the late 1800s until the present day.

Today, the Curlew United Methodist Church still counts descendants of John Sutton among its worshippers. It is the oldest church in Pinellas County to still occupy its original site.

Tags: church, Curlew, history, north pinellas, Palm Harbpr