With the often mentioned road construction that continues, and will continue for the next year or so, I thought it appropriate to do a re-run of a post from 2007.
— September brings the “beginning of the end” of the hot summer season, but the early beginning of the influx of our “seasonal” visitors. That means an increase in traffic and travel (how could it get any worse?). For the Koreshans who lived in a different time, travel on roads and bridges was a different kind of adventure.
In the “Community Current Events” column from September 1927, 75 years ago this month, Dennis Richards wrote:
Florida is building highways so rapidly it is always impossible to say from day to day what the mileage of hard-surfaced roads is. …Florida now has approximately 9,500 miles of highway over which automobiles may be driven at high speed.”
Of course, we now have about 122,000 miles of highway in Florida and “high speed in 1927 meant going about 95 mph at the Indianapolis Speedway. Of course they do that on I-75.
Richards talked about crossing the Gandy Bridge, connecting Tampa and St. Petersburg. It was built in 1924 and shortened the distance between the two cities from 42 to 19 miles.
Closer to home, Richards also talks about traveling over to Pine Island with Allen Andrews, Laurie Bubbett and Harry Manley. They were enjoying the ride over the new road which had been recently opened to the public. He commented that the citrus groves on Pine Island were nearly immune from frost and that they required no spraying for scale and other pests because of the action of the salt air.
We hope to be doing another update to the online archives very soon. We’ll be adding more images of many of the documents and also full text of another year or so of the “Community Current Events” column which began appearing in the Flaming Sword in 1916 and continued until the end of the publication in 1949. The CCE column gives us valuable insight in to the daily lives of Koreshans.