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Buying a house in North Pinellas? Interest rates are DOWN again

This week the magic number is 4.78, the lowest in history. Last week it was 4.85, and THAT was the lowest in history, too.
What is it? Why, the interest rate on 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, of course.
Average rates on a 15-year, fixed-rate mortgage dropped to 4.52 percent; rates on five-year, adjustable-rate loans fell to 4.92 percent from 4.96 percent.
The Federal Reserve has been trying to do what it can to make homes more affordable. Its efforts have driven mortgage interest rates to their lowest point in the history of Freddie Mac, which dates back to 1971. The rates are a full percentage point lower than they were just one year ago.
The low rates mean that more homeowners are refinancing their home mortgages. The Mortgage Bankers Association keeps an index of mortgage applications, and that index showed a three percent increase in applications for the week ended March 27. The week before was even more dramatic – 30 percent. The Mortgage Bankers Association says that fully 80 percent of all those applications were for refinances.
Last month, the Federal Reserve announced it planned to buy $1.2 trillion in mortgage-backed securities as well as $300 billion in long-term government debt. All of that has forced interest rates lower.
I’m not sure I would call this a “down side,” but the other side of the coin is that lenders are tightening up their lending standards. So while rates are going lower, they are increasingly only available to people with spotless credit.

Tags: federal reserve, interest rates, north pinellas

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

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

Palm Harbor Fire Rescue

Because Palm Harbor Fire Rescue was celebrating its 50th anniversary at the same time as the Taste of Palm Harbor festivities, there were plenty of old fire trucks in attendance. This was one of them.

Tags: north pinellas, Palm Harbor