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Florida - Tampa And Its Neighbors

( Originally Published Mid 1930's )

Tampa, third city of Florida in population but second only to Jacksonville in commercial and industrial importance, presents many varied and colorful aspects to the visitor. It is at once a seaport of real importance, its water-borne commerce rivalling in volume and occasionally exceeding that of Jacksonville; a tourist and winter residential resort with attractions all its own; a growing manufacturing center; an important railroad center; the chief commercial distributing center for a trade area embracing most of the Gulf Coast of the Florida peninsula and a large part of the inland country of the rich citrus belt; and the city with the largest proportion of foreignborn inhabitants of any Florida community.

Entering Tampa from the East one motors through a section in which, it seems, half of the signs over the shops of the busy business street are in Spanish, half of the voices one hears are speaking Spanish. This is Ybor City, the Spanish quarter of Tampa, in which are located the great cigar factories which constitute Tampa's most widely-known industry and its largest. Tampa is the chief center in the United States, if not in the world, for the manufacture of fine hand-made cigars from Cuban-grown tobacco. Tampa cigars are sold and smoked all over the world.

When the Cuban cigar manufacturers moved many of their factories to Key West to escape the burden of the United States import duties, they brought their Cuban and Spanish workmen with them. Various factors combined to remove the cigar industry from Key West to Tampa, beginning in the 1890's, until now it is entirely centered in Tampa and the fabrication of cigars continues to be done by Spanish and Cuban workers. They have a community life all their own, with a population of approximately 20,000, a third of whom are natives of either Spain or Cuba, who have brought up their children born in Tampa to speak and read the Spanish language as fluently as they do English. The output of "Clear Havana" cigars from Tampa's factories is far greater than that of Havana itself. The annual production exceeds 350,000,000 cigars, bringing in a revenue of more than $25,000,000 to the 156 factories, which, in number of factories and employees, capital invested, value of product and of the allied industry of cigar box manufacture, from cedar logs imported from Cuba and Mexico, makes this in every respect Tampa's leading industry.

The presence of such a large and distinctively foreign colony envelops all Tampa in an exotic aura, so that the old Spanish tradition of Florida is kept alive here as nowhere else in the state. The most popular eating places in Tampa are the restaurants in the Spanish Quarter of Ybor City, where the food and service are in the Cuban or Spanish style. The social centers of the Spanish quarter are the half dozen clubs or "eentros," many of whose parties and balls are open to the public. There is also a sufficiently large Italian population in Ybor City to maintain an Italian club of similar type.

Tampa's history may fairly be said to have begun in 1885 when the late Henry B. Plant, seeking a terminal on the Gulf of Mexico for his South Florida Railroad, now part of the At lantic Coast Line, selected the fine natural harbor of Tampa Bay as the likeliest port for development. Henry M. Flagler was pushing his Florida East Coast Railroad southward, had established its headquarters at St. Augustine and was beginning the development of that city as a winter resort by the construction of the magnificent Ponce de Leon Hotel. Plant had the vision of rivalling Flagler's enterprise on the West Coast. A classic anecdote is that of the telegrams exchanged between Plant and Flagler when the rails of the new line reached tide-water.

"My railroad has reached Tampa," wired Plant. "Where is Tampa?" was Flagler's laconic reply. "Just follow the crowds," retorted Plant.

He might well ask the question; for Tampa, until the rails reached it, was an obscure fishing village of 700 inhabitants. The United States census of 1880 was able to count only 720 people living in the city which now has well over 100,000. Counting the inhabitants of the close-in territory adjacent to but not included in the city limits, Tampa's population is locally estimated at above 130,000.

Tampa did not exist, so far as census records show, before 1870, when its population was recorded as 796 as against Jacksonville's 6,912 and Pensacola's 3,347. Those three were the only communities in all Florida, less than 70 years ago, having established identities to warrant their populations being separately recorded in the census records. Ten years later, in 1880, when the cigar industry had made Key West the largest city in Florida, with almost 10,000 inhabitants, Tampa's count had fallen off to 720. But by 1890, after the railroad came, it had grown to 5,500, and before the war with Spain, in 1898, Tampa had more than 15,000 population. The selection of Tampa Bay as the rendezvous of the American fleet and the point of embarkation for American troops en route to Cuba in 1898 first impressed the name of Tampa upon the American public. The name of Tampa was the date-line of the dispatches of hundreds of newspaper correspondents throughout that short-lived war in Cuba. Thereafter no American could echo Henry M. Flagler's classic query. Everybody has known where Tampa is since 1898.

Perhaps spurred by Flagler's jibe, Henry Plant decided to build a hotel in his newly-discovered Tampa which would rival Flagler's St. Augustine caravansery in size and magnifi cence. The outstanding landmark of Tampa today is Mr. Plant's monument, the enormous structure topped by an amazing array of Moorish turrets, which stands in the center of the municipal park and now houses Tampa's municipal University. Rival Flagler's Ponce de Leon in St. Augustine its builder certainly did, in cost and expansiveness and without too much sacrifice of architectural purity and good taste. Some critics hold that it is a truer approach to the Moorish style of old Spain than anything else ever built in America. Nothing more spacious in the way of a hotel probably has ever been built anywhere in the world at any time. Its hundreds of enormous rooms, approached through literally miles of broad corridors, were furnished in the most sumptuous fashion of the 1880's. The public rooms, lobbies, parlors, lounges and dining rooms were furnished and decorated with the same disregard of expense. The woodwork of its massive doors, panelled walls and carved cornices, was of the finest material and workmanship and of the most massive construction. The furniture, bric-a-brac and works of art with which Mr. Plant embellished his hotel are almost museum pieces today; indeed, much of the contents of the building form the nucleus of the city art museum, still housed in a wing of the thousand-foot structure which, with its contents and grounds, became the property of the city of Tampa on Mr. Plant's death.

After futile attempts to operate it as a hotel without loss, the city maintained it for several years as a municipal park and show place. More than once the perennial problem of what to do with the white elephant that had been wished on them started the city fathers to consider seriously tearing the structure down. The solution finally arrived at was to turn the old Tampa Bay Hotel over, in 1933, to the newly-organized University of Tampa. The University pays no rent under its ten-year lease, but relieves the city of the cost of maintaining the building and grounds. From the point of view of educators, the University is fortunate in being able to surround its students with such a beautiful and impressive environment as the ivy-covered old hotel provides. Under the presidency of Dr. John H. Sherman, the University of Tampa has a faculty of 38 and a student enrollment of more than 700. It offers courses leading to baccalaureate degrees in Science, Arts, Education and Business Administration, besides a two-year normal course for teachers.

The sea-borne traffic in and out of Tampa harbor comprises the largest tonnage of water-borne cargoes of any Florida port, though second in point of value. Tampa's foreign trade has some curious and interesting features. Since 1930 a considerable trade has been developed between Tampa and the smaller ports of the Caribbean and of South America whose harbors are too shallow for large steamers. The "banana fleet," in which this type of commerce is conducted, consists of small vessels, frequently fishing schooners which have been dismasted and repowered with Diesel motors. These little craft, few of them more than 100 feet long, scurry between Tampa and outof-the way ports from Yucatan to the Panama Canal, and eastward as far as the Antilles. One vessel of this banana fleet as a former United States Navy destroyer, whose bulky steamboilers and engines have been ripped out and replaced by compact Diesel motors, to provide cargo room.

Most of these little craft are independently owned, frequently the owner being his own master. They began bringing bananas and other fruit shipped by independent planters to be sold to independent buyers in Tampa. Much of this trade formerly went to New Orleans, but when a market for the cargoes began to develop in Tampa practically all the shipments of this nature began to come in to this port. Being a day nearer than New Orleans, and the little craft having no refrigeration equipment, they are able to deliver banana cargoes at Tampa with less risk of spoiling than if they took them farther north. Quite naturally a business in return cargoes out of Tampa has developed, so that, from a source previously overlooked, Tampa merchants are now receiving income from sales which run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. Most of these little vessels of the banana fleet carry passengers, from one or two to a dozen, and with rather cramped accommodations, between Tampa and many little out-of-the-way spots in Latin America.

This mosquito fleet, however, although accounting for an eighth of Tampa's foreign imports, is a somewhat picturesque minor item in the sea-going traffic in and out of Tampa Harbor, which includes Port Tampa, a separate municipality with highly developed dock and railway terminal facilities, and manufacturing industries. The nearly 3,000 craft a year which enter Tampa Harbor include more than a thousand deep-water ships, three or four hundred of them freighters and passenger craft of 10,000 tons or more. Tampa's largest single item of foreign import is fertilizer ingredients, with Chile nitrates and German potash predominating, while the largest single item of export is phosphates from the nearby Polk County mines, which account for about four-fifths of Tampa's outgoing foreign commerce. One of the largest fertilizer factories in America is at Tampa, where the Florida phosphate is combined with German potash and Chile nitrate in varying combinations of these three essential elements of plant food.

Seventeen steamship lines operating freighters to every part of the world make regular scheduled voyages to Tampa with and for cargo. These include the Hamburg-American and other North European lines, several freight lines to African, Mediterranean and Oriental ports as well as lines running to South and Central America and the Islands of the Caribbean; while six different lines of freight ships and the tankers of ten of the large oil companies run in regular service between Tampa and ports of the Gulf and the Atlantic coast. Tampa has six passenger steamship lines giving regular service to New Orleans, Philadelphia, Havana, Honduras, Puerto Rico and the Windward Islands, and occasional trans-Atlantic passenger service to British, German and Netherlands ports.

The main ship channel into Tampa Harbor runs alongside of one of the most remarkable of Florida's boom-time real estate developments, Davis Islands. Born in the imagination of D. P. Davis, a native Tampan who began life as a newsboy and accumulated a small fortune in real estate operations in Miami at the beginning of the boom, the Davis Islands development was perhaps the most audacious, as it was one of the most successful of all the audacious ventures of that era of wild speculation in Florida land. It was successful because its psychological timing was precisely right.

The Florida boom was at fever peak when D. P. Davis, with a record of successful development behind him, announced to the public that he intended to dredge enough sand from the bottom of Tampa Bay to create an island covering several thousand acres, and that he was prepared to sell lots on this future island, which still existed only on blue-prints, showing boulevards, parks and numbered building lots, which he displayed in the windows of the big store which he had taken over for operating headquarters in downtown Tampa. The audacity of the project caught the fancy of the speculation-mad public, Floridians and visitors alike, when he made his first offering in November, 1924. Dredges were already at work in the Bay; anyone could look out and see them. Thousands looked, and believed D. P. Davis's dream. Hundreds stood in line overnight waiting until the opening hour set for the sale of lots on the non-existent islands. Before all the land had risen above the water every lot had been sold, most of them resold and resold again with a profit on every resale. Davis, the daring dreamer, reaped a harvest of millions in less than two years, before the real estate boom collapsed. But he was not content with that achievement, gigantic and spectacular as it was. He sunk his profits and became hopelessly involved in debt in the effort to repeat his success at Anastasia Island, in front of St. Augustine. Like many others who could not read the signs of the times, Davis did not realize that the speculative fever had run its course and the patient was cured even before he had begun his operations on the East Coast. Unable to stand up against adversity, D. P. Davis sailed for Europe with such small amounts of cash as he had been able to salvage from the wreckage of his fortune, and in midocean, giving way to his depression, he leaped overboard. His estate was hopelessly bankrupt, but the development which he had brought to practical completion in Tampa Bay was taken over by strong, well-financed and competent interests and is now the beauty spot of Tampa's front yard.

Beautiful wide boulevards lead from the city to Davis Islands over a handsome, broad concrete causeway, through a section which is occupied by Tampa's new municipal hospital and public recreation grounds. Curving tree-lined drives lead past beautiful modern homes, each in its own garden of greenery. Here on the island is the municipal auditorium; here is a country club complete with 18-hole golf course; here is a yacht harbor and here is Tampa's latest object of municipal pride, the Peter O. Knight seaplane base, named for Tampa's most outstanding citizen.

It is Tampa's dream, if not to rival Miami as an international port of entry and departure for ships of the air, at least to develop from this new port an air commerce which will cover the Gulf with a network of flying routes, from Pensacola all the way around to Yucatan, and to build up a prosperous air traffic in passengers, mail and express service with all of Mexico and Central America., down to the Canal Zone and perhaps beyond. Tampa believes firmly in the strategic value of its location as the logical center to which all the commerce of the states and nations of the Gulf and the Caribbean must eventually converge. And Tampa is looking ahead, preparing itself against the day when everyone else will recognize its commanding position.

As a railroad center Tampa is second in Florida only to Jacksonville. The main lines of the Atlantic Coast Line and the Seaboard Air Line converge here, and each sends off branches from Tampa radiating in several directions, tapping the east and west coasts of the lower peninsula, running northward to connect with the main east-and-west trunk lines of the South. As was said of ancient Rome, "All Roads Lead to Tampa." A new direct highway between Tampa and Jacksonville cuts the motoring distance between these two metropolitan centers of Florida down to only a little more than 200 miles. Besides the rails and the motor highways, Tampa is served by the busses of the Tamiami Trail route and of the Florida Motor Lines, whose service covers all Florida like a network, with modern, commodious highspeed motor-coaches. Tampa's municipal airport is the western terminal of the Eastern Airlines, operating a regular mail and passenger service.

Industrially, Tampa's activities are wide and varied. The state's largest cement manufacturing plant is located here. At Port Tampa are the repair shops of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad. An important new industry arising from the development of citrus canning is the manufacture of tin cans for the fruit and vegetable canneries of Florida. The two largest manufacturers of these containers, the American Can Company and the Continental Can Company, have established factories in Tampa, one of them adjacent to the largest cannery in the state, which is thus enabled to receive delivery of the containers for its output by gravity; the cans roll down an inclined plane from the factory into the canning works. In this cannery, besides Florida citrus products, several kinds of Florida vegetables are canned under contract for concerns in the North and West. Floridians smile when they see carloads of Tampapacked canned goods going out to market in receptacles bearing the nationally advertised brand of California's largest producer.

Under a provision of the Florida constitution exempting from taxation until 1949 industrial plants established subsequent to 1929, engaged primarily in the manufacture of steel vessels, automobile tires, fabrics and textiles, wood pulp, paper, paper bags, fiber board, automobiles, automobile parts, aircraft, aircraft parts, glass and crockery manufacture and the refining of oils and sugar, these tin can manufacturers have obtained tax exemption on the ground that their product is, technically, steel vessels. They are vessels by the dictionary definition meaning containers of liquids, and they are made of rolled steel sheets coated with tin. Curiously enough, however, the Florida courts, while admitting that exemption, have refused to exempt the Tampa Dry-dock Company, which is actually engaged in the construction and repair of steel seagoing ships! This is one of the new industries in which Tampa takes pardonable pride. It gives to the port better dry-dock facilities, with a capacity for larger vessels, than any other port of Florida has.

The early history of Tampa is largely shrouded in the mists of tradition, with very little documentary evidence, if any, to back up the assertion that the "DeSoto Oak," a stately tree standing in Plant Park, is the identical oak tree under which Hernando DeSoto met in council with the lawmakers of the Indians before he started on his ill-fated trek to the Mississippi. There is more sound historical basis for the tradition that Pamfilo de Narvaez, lieutenant and successor of Cortez, the conqueror of Mexico, sailed into Tampa Bay in April, 1528, the first European to land upon the Gulf shores of Florida. There is doubtless foundation for the tradition that for the next three centuries Tampa was a rendezvous for pirates, though the glamorous myths surrounding the figure of Jose Gasparilla and the brilliant semi-regal court which this pirate king maintained at Tampa, may be put in the believe-it-or-not class. At any rate, they furnish the excuse and the background for Tampa's great mid-winter festival, the Gasparilla Carnival, organized and conducted by the young men of Tampa and which for gayety and social brilliance rivals the Mardi Gras revels of New Orleans.

The first recorded settlement of Tampa was in 1823, when the United States troops sailed into Tampa Bay from Pensacola and built a log fort as a headquarters in the current war with the Seminoles. The spot where they landed is still called Gadsden Point, from Captain James Gadsden, later famous as Minister to Mexico, who commanded the military expedition, and the section of Tampa where the fort stood is known locally as "The Garrison." It is now a valuable manufacturing and waterfront property. The little settlement that grew up in those early days of the 19th century was known as Fort Brooke, the Indian name of Tampa being adopted later, long after the soldiers had departed and left the place to the fisherfolk and, perhaps, to 19th century pirates.

Until the opening of the six-mile Gandy Bridge across Old Tampa Bay in 1924 travelers to St. Petersburg from Tampa had to make a forty-mile circuit to get from the main land to the peninsula of Pinellas County, at the southerly end of which this greatest and most famous tourist resort of Florida's West Coast is located. Railroad travelers still have to enter St. Petersburg from the North, but sixty-seven percent of the 63,000 winter visitors who registered with the St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce in the season of 193637 arrived by motor, practically all of them over the Gandy Bridge.

The Florida traveler who has followed the trail which we have pursued on paper thus far will have been unobservant indeed if he has not, by this time, made the acquaintance of the bird which, to newcomers to Florida, most sharply reminds them that they are in a new land amid unfamiliar surroundings. Nothing like the pelican, the top-heavy, fish-catching bird of the Florida coasts, with its storage pouch for fish hung from its beak, flies over the regions from which St. Petersburg's visitors come. In the air the pelican makes a rather graceful picture. Flying frequently in flocks in Vshaped formation like geese, or in evenly-spaced single file, with their long bills and huge heads stretched out before them, they make a pleasing silhouette against the brilliant sunset sky. But ashore or perched on a pile above the water they seem like grotesque caricatures rather than actual forms of animal life. Crossing the Gandy Bridge the tourist is likely to get his first close-up view of pelicans. They are, indeed, one of the real attractions of St. Petersburg. Sitting in the sunshine and watching pelicans dive for fish and cormorants trying to take the fish away from the pelicans, may be classed as one of St. Petersburg's major winter amusements.

On that key, at least, is pitched the tone of St. Petersburg as a winter resort. Its popularity derives from its restfulness. For those whose ideas of recreation call for physical activity and outdoor sports St. Petersburg provides facilities as good and as varied as does any other Florida community; but it was here in St. Petersburg that the old-fashioned American sport of horse-shoe pitching was revived and made popular in the 1920's, here that croquet, in its stream-lined version called "roque" was revivified, here that shuffle-board was brought ashore and converted from a sea-going pastime into an outdoor sport for landlubbers. Most of the people who go to St. Petersburg go there because they want to rest.

The whole city's 40,000 population is geared to that keynote, restfulness. St. Petersburg has a smaller proportion of Negro inhabitants than most other Florida communities have and more than two-thirds of its 32,000 resident white folks are natives of the northern and western states, more than half of these from New York and New England. They have made their homes in St. Petersburg because of the restfulness of its winter warmth and quiet atmosphere. They stay in St. Petersburg the year around because, situated as it is between Bay and Gulf, there is never a day, and seldom an hour in any day, when it is not swept by breezes which temper the heat and dispel the humidity.

In an occasional outburst of local pride, St. Petersburg citizens sometimes resent the city's jocular appellation, "The City of the Unburied Dead." But it is true that St. Petersburg has peculiar attractions for the elderly. The average age of its inhabitants, permanent and transient, is probably higher than in any other community in the world. It is the only city in the world in which the curbstones at street corners are notched to form ramps for the accommodation of wheel chairs. Men and women of advancing years flock to St. Petersburg to lengthen their lives and because here they can find, as nowhere else, the society of people of their own age and kind, seeking like themselves peaceful relaxation and mild recreation.

St. Petersburg is famous the world over for its green benches, thousands of benches in the city parks and lining the broad sidewalks of the city's main thoroughfare, Central Avenue. Literally tens of thousands of winter visitors spend practically all of their waking hours on the green benches, getting most of their exercise by occasionally moving from a sunny spot to a shady one. There are more checker players than golfers, more ladies whose chief outdoor sport is knitting than there are tennis players.

Yet for the younger and the more active of the middle-aged there are, within the city limits of St. Petersburg, several golf courses as fine as any in Florida, great batteries of tennis courts pretty constantly in use, hand-ball courts, skeet-shooting parks, facilities for every sport. St. Petersburg is not precisely a lonesome place for youth, in spite of the predominance of elderly people. In recent years the proportion of the younger element in the annual influx of tourists is noticeably increasing, largely through the efforts of the Junior Chamber of Commerce, which charges itself with responsibility for the entertainment of visitors between the ages of 18 and 35. Both the community as such and the numerous splendid tourist hotels pride themselves upon the quality of their dance music and the smoothness of the floors of their ballrooms.

St. Petersburg's new municipal pier, extending half a mile into Old Tampa Bay is, for those who do not prefer sitting on the green benches in the Green Park to any other form of amusement, the resort's most popular social center. Fishing from the municipal pier is the mildest and least strenuous form of this popular sport. There is no better fishing anywhere than in the waters of the Gulf and Bay off St. Petersburg. And, of course, St. Petersburg has its bathing beaches. These are on the long keys which lie between the peninsula and the Gulf. The southerly key is connected with the city by a modern concrete causeway and is the site of several attractive residential developments, one of which, Pass-a-Grille, has become an important center of social life.

St. Petersburg proudly calls itself "The Sunshine City," and justifiably so. For years the St. Petersburg Independent, its enterprising evening newspaper, has dramatized the city's climate by announcing that the paper will be given away free every day on which the sun does not shine. Not more than five times a year has it been called upon to make good on this pledge. The healthfulness of the climate of the Pinellas peninsula induced the United States Veterans Bureau to build here, just north of the city, the largest hospital for veterans of America's wars anywhere in the South. The group of beautiful buildings standing in their extensive and beautifully landscaped park is one of the show places of St. Petersburg.

One of the most ambitious and beautiful of all of the boom-time real estate developments centered around the Hotel Rolyat, a few miles north of the center of St. Petersburg on the shore of the sound between the mainland and the keys. Both architecturally and in its furnishings and decorations the Rolyat rivalled the most attractive and luxurious resort hotels of America. But the property met the fate which befell many other pretentious developments and finally the city took title to it for unpaid taxes. It solved the problem of what to do with it by turning it over to the Florida Military Academy, a highlyregarded preparatory school for boys which had outgrown its quarters in Jacksonville. Over a week-end the entire personnel and equipment of the Academy was moved from Jacksonville to St. Petersburg and housed in the almost palatial quarters of the Rolyat. Its student enrollment from all parts of the United States has been materially increased since its removal.

St. Petersburg was the first of Florida's tourist resorts to establish and popularize the system of tourist registration at Chamber of Commerce headquarters. Every Florida city today maintains a tourist bureau of information and registration, frequently in connection with a community center or auditorium, often with reading rooms and facilities for social gatherings. This system not only enables the community to maintain a record of its winter visitors and their back home addresses for promotional follow-up purposes, but in St. Petersburg it has been developed into a system whereby visitors are enabled to make contacts with other tourists from their home states or towns or those who are or have been engaged in similar lines of activity. Thus in St. Petersburg there have been formed a large number of societies and associations of people having a mutual interest and background. State Societies, such as The Indiana Society, The New England Association, etc., hold meetings, conventions and reunions which are among the most interesting features of winter life. If the visitor to St. Petersburg has been a fireman, a minister, a schoolteacher or engaged in any other occupation back home, he or she is pretty sure to be waited upon by a representative of the St. Petersburg society of that organization and invited to drop in at their meetings for a social afternoon or evening. Typical of these social units is the association of retired police officers, headed by a former Inspector of the New York Police Department, who prevents time from hanging heavy on his hands by active service with the Chamber of Commerce in the promotion of social contacts.

Whenever a community on either of the Florida coasts feels the need of more shore frontage it proceeds to create more land by dredging sand up from the bottom of Ocean or Gulf. A peculiar virtue of Florida sand is that when so pumped up and restrained from side-slipping by a sea-wall it packs up tightly, into such a substantial piece of terra firma, that tall buildings clan be built upon it with little or no other underpinning. Thus, in 1925, St. Petersburg's largest and most elaborate hotel, the Vinoy, was built upon land which was entirely under water when the hotel was projected.

The highway northward along the Pinellas peninsula from St. Petersburg runs through wide areas of citrus groves. Pinellas County has long been one of the highly productive orange and grapefruit sections of the state. The county seat, Clearwater, is the home of numbers of Northern families who have retired from active business to live calmly and peacefully on the income from their citrus groves and other agricultural sources of wealth.

Near Clearwater is one of Florida's unique institutions, developed, as so many things in Florida have been developed, out of the hobby of a retired business man who wanted some thing to occupy his time. In this case the hobby was peacocks. It has developed into a peacock farm in which every known variety of these gorgeous birds is bred, and a nation-wide business has been built up in supplying peacocks for ornamental purposes to country estates, public gardens and parks, and in the sale of the semi-annual crop of peacock tail feathers, which the birds shed twice a year, to interior decorators.

Another show place of Clearwater, a real beauty spot, was founded by a retired business man who had been impressed with the beautiful landscape effects he had seen in the gardens of Japan. Out of his hobby grew the Japanese Garden in which the buildings, planting and landscaping so faithfully follow the Japanese form and manner that it seems like a spot transplanted bodily from old Nippon. In a real Japanese tea house real Japanese girls serve real Japanese tea. There are few more charming spots in which to spend a restful Winter afternoon. Close by Clearwater is the Ulmerton Hog Ranch, of 385 acres, established in 1924, which has become the largest producing unit in the Southeast of prize porkers.

Clearwater is the trading center of a wide area, and a tourist resort which offers so many natural attractions that its winter population nearly doubles its normal 10,000 year-'round residents. With seventeen hotels and more than 1,000 cottages and apartments available for seasonal rentals, Clearwater attracts especially visitors who enjoy water sports. Clearwater Beach, the outlying key connected with the city by the Memorial Causeway, is increasingly popular as a summer resort as well as with winter tourists, and is built up with many homes and beach cottages. It has also two large yacht clubs. Within the widespreading, tree-planted area of the city itself are beautiful estates occupied by wealthy families who selected Clearwater for their Florida homes because of the unusual combination of natural elements which it offers.

Although situated directly on the coast and between two bodies of water, Old Tampa Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, Clearwater is built on high ground, averaging 100 feet or more above sea-level. A committee of the American Medical Association is on record as having declared that Clearwater is the healthiest spot in the whole United States. It is a friendly community, which does not hesitate to extol its own merits as "The Springtime City Where it's Springtime All the Time," over its high-power radio station WFLA.

Clearwater's industrial life centers around the citrus industry, for which it is an important shipping point. There are eleven citrus packing houses for the fresh fruit and two canneries of citrus products. Clearwater has a direct highway connection with Tampa by way of the Davis Causeway, a nineand-one-half mile privately capitalized toll-bridge across Old Tampa Bay, which shortens the distance between the two cities to a fraction more than twenty miles.

A dozen miles north of Clearwater is one of the most picturesque of all Florida communities, Tarpon Springs. What makes Tarpon Springs unique is the fact that it is the head quarters of the Gulf sponge fisheries, and the world's largest sponge market. More than a quarter of the little city's 4,000 inhabitants are the Greek sponge fishermen and their families, the majority of the adults being natives of Greece, brought up in the sponge fisheries of the Aegean Sea.

The first commercialization of the Gulf of Mexico's sponges began at Key West, where it had developed into a flourishing industry by the middle of the 1890's. In 1898, when the United States was at war with Spain, the Key West sponge fishermen brought their boats into the harbor of Tarpon Springs because they were afraid of Spanish war-ships. The headquarters of the industry were removed to this spot by John K. Cheyney, who had been the first to commercialize the Gulf sponges. Here was established the Tarpon Springs Sponge Exchange, to which buyers come from all the world to bid at the sponge auctions.

Until 1905 sponge fishing in the Gulf was confined to the shallow waters near shore, the sponges being lifted from the rocks to which they are attached by means of hooks. In 1905, Mr. Cheyney and his associates brought over from Greece and the islands of the Aegean the first sponge divers, at the instance of John Cocoris, a Greek sponge expert employed in the Cheyney warehouse. These divers brought with them their own equipment, their diving suits, and plans of the type of sponge boats used in the Mediterranean. From then on the Tarpon Springs sponge fishery began to grow into the million-dollar annual industry which it has now become. Many of the sponges are still taken by hookers, but these can work only in depths under thirty feet, while the sponge beds of Florida reach a depth of 130 feet in some parts of the 9,300 square miles of sponge-bearing area lying between Key West and St. Marks light, near Apalachicola.

Sponge hookers work from small boats which are towed out to the sponge beds by a "mother" ship. The hooker, in calm weather, is able to see the sponges on the bottom; if the surface is ruffled by wind he uses a water-glass, a glass-bottomed bucket through which he can see the bottom. His hook is a sharp-pronged, three-toothed rake on the end of a long, light pole, with which he wrenches the jelly-like sponge from its rocky adhesion.

Diving for sponges in the Gulf Fisheries is done entirely in diving suits; "skin" or naked diving, with its hazard of sharks, is still practised only in the Mediterranean. The only hazard is sponge diving as conducted off Tarpon Springs is the risk of a mechanical failure of the air-pump on the deck of the boat, or a kink in the hose through which air is pumped into the brass helmet, screwed fast to the thick rubber suit with its lead-soled feet in which the diver is encased, a hundred or more feet below the surface of the water.

The sponge-diving boat is a completely-equipped small cruiser, provisioned for a voyage from a few weeks to several months at sea; for the sponge fishers do not return to port until they have got a full cargo. The divers go down with rope bags slung from their shoulders which they fill with sponges before they signal, by a pull on the lifeline, to be hauled up. In the shallower waters a diver stays down without exhaustion for two or three hours, in deeper water he may remain submerged for only half or three-quarters of an hour. After ten years or so of deep-water diving the sponge fishers sometimes become subject to a form of paralysis called the "bends" induced by long exposure to the high air-pressure inside the diving suit. It is the same ailment which often attacks workers under compressed air in tunnel and caisson construction.

The sponge, when taken from the water, is a jelly-like creature covered with a tenacious black skin, its cells filled with gelatinous gray matter which is removed by letting it decay on the deck of the sponge boat and then squeezing it out by pressure. What is left is the skeleton of this half plant, half animal.

When brought to shore, sponges are a uniform dark gray and have to be bleached for the market. The four varieties of sponges taken in the Gulf are classified by the shape, color, texture and toughness of the skeletal structure. The most valuable are the "sheep's wool" sponges, then the "yellows," third the so-called "grass sponges" and of least value the "wire" or "velvet" sponges. The size of a sponge depends upon its age, the diameter increasing about one inch a year.

The Tarpon Springs sponge fleet comprises nearly 150 boats, and about 500 sponge divers. Most of the boats are built on the Greek model, ranging from 25 to 45 feet in length. They seem to be frail craft for long voyages, but they frequently remain out in the Gulf, fifty to eighty miles from land, for weeks at a time before they complete the cargo. The deeper the waters and the farther from land the sponges are taken, the more valuable they are.

Everything about the sponge fisheries is on a cooperative basis. The divers and crews of the sponge boats share with their owners and officers in the proceeds of each voyage. When the sponge market is high and brisk, rival boat owners bid against each other for the services of divers known to be especially expert, frequently offering bonuses in addition to their shares. In the Spring of 1937, when the sponge market was more active than it ever had been, with auction prices at record highs, bonuses to individual divers of as high as $500 for a single voyage were reported.

All sponges, on being brought ashore, are sorted for quality and size, threaded on strong cords 58 inches long, the ends of which are tied together, making a circular wreath of sponges.

All of the catch is stored in a cooperative warehouse maintained by the fishermen, in the courtyard of which the sponge auctions are held on designated Tuesdays and Fridays. Most of the regular buyers maintain their own warehouses in Tarpon Springs where the cleaning and trimming of the sponges for the market are done. A single morning's sales at the sponge auction may total $50,000. The total annual sales run close to $1,000,000.

The presence in Tarpon Springs of this large colony of Greeks, numbering between 1,000 and 1,500 with their families, lends an exotic character to the section of the city in which they make their homes, have their church, their own shops and social centers. They are a clannish people, living very much to themselves, except as they have business relations with the English-speaking population. Being shrewd traders, like all Greeks, these Mediterranean inhabitants of Tarpon Springs have risen to the opportunity which the annual tourist influx offers them by opening up curio, souvenir and coffee shops in which a thriving trade is done, particularly in types of merchandise which reflect the Byzantine arts and crafts of the Levant. Many of the women and some of the men of the Greek quarter wear their native costumes, which adds a touch of picturesque color to the city.

In the Greek Orthodox church at Tarpon Springs, where worship is conducted by the oldest of all Christian rituals, centers the gorgeous and impressive ceremony which draws thousands of tourists every year on January 6th, the Feast of the Epiphany. This is the ceremony observed nowhere else in America but annually in the churches of Greece, commemorating the Baptism of Christ, the Descent of the Holy Spirit and the Recovery of the Cross by the Emperor Constantine, founder of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Metropolitan Archbishop for North America, accompanied by other high prelates of the church and often by numerous prominent Greek laymen, comes to Tarpon Springs to conduct the ceremonies.

Early on the morning of Epiphany worshippers congregate at the church, where masses are said until noon. Then the Archbishop, clad in the gorgeous gold-embroidered robes of his office, wearing a jewelled golden crown and bearing in his right hand a golden sceptre, heads a procession in which march the minor prelates, also in full sacerdotal regalia, who are usually joined by a delegation of priests of the Protestant Episcopal Church, likewise fully vestmented. Altar boys carrying banners and gilded insignia of the church clear the way for the procession through the streets of the town to the bayou where the final ceremony is to be held, while the Byzantine choir, chanting the ancient hymns of the Eastern Church, follow the pontifical group, with the secular visitors bringing up the rear. At the water's edge the Gospel is first read in Greek by the Archbishop, then in English by an interpreter. The reading finished, a white dove, signifying the Holy Spirit, is released, and as it flies out over the waters the Archbishop casts a golden cross into the bayou, symbolizing the Baptism of Christ. The young sponge divers, stripped for the plunge, have been assembled awaiting this moment. As the cross touches the water they plunge after it. One of them seizes it and brings it to the surface. Proudly he climbs ashore and kneels humbly to receive the Archbishop's blessing. He and his boat, the sponge fishers believe, will be especially favored until next Epiphany.

Another unique attraction of Tarpon Springs is the collection of ten religious paintings by the late George Inness, Jr., famous son of a famous artist father, which hang in the Prot estant Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd and are on exhibition daily. The elder Inness, widely acclaimed as America's greatest landscape painter of the nineteenth century, "discovered" Tarpon Springs half a century ago, and immortalized it in his famous painting, "The Home of the Heron." His son, who died in 1936, maintained his studio here until his death. Among the prized pictures in many museums and private collections are scenes in and about Tarpon Springs painted by the Innesses, father and son.

Leaving the Pinellas peninsula we follow the Gulf Coast northward through New Port Richey before we swing eastward to come into the highway leading north from Tampa to connect with the Gulf Coast Highway, the new, broad major artery which follows the curve of the Gulf to the western extremity of the state at Pensacola. In this southerly section the road does not follow the contours of the shoreline as closely as it does after it swings westward from Apalachicola. An interesting spot, reached by a detour of a couple of miles, is the "Dude Ranch" at Moon Lake. There is no good reason why the West should have a monopoly of the kind of outdoor recreation which consists in roughing it in tailor-made clothes, with most of the roughness sand-papered off by the knowledge that the guide will get you back to the ranch house and a hot supper before dark. The dude ranch, Florida style, is patterned after the up-to-date Western institutions of its kind, with subtropical embellishments and improvements. It is wild country, forest and jungle and lakes and streams, with an enormous dancing pavilion and an up-to-date orchestra in the middle of it. At Brooksville, where we turn into the main highway, is the estate of Raymond Robbins, famed among horticulturists as the experiment station where many improved agricultural and horticultural methods have been developed. The property was given to the state of Florida by Mr. Robbins and is now one of the important outposts of the State College of Agriculture's experimental staff.

At Inverness, a few miles north of Brooksville, it is worth while to make a detour over a side road toward the Gulf if only for the sake of seeing Homasassa Springs, which supplies the flow of crystal clear water of the Homasassa River, a broad nine-mile stream winding among wooded islands to the Gulf, in which fresh water fish and those native to salt water mingle, all clearly visible to the eye of the fisherman. Homasassa Springs is another spot in Florida of the many which deserve the name of "Fisherman's Paradise." One of the ambitious real estate developments which was halted by the collapse of 1926 left behind it a delightful little hotel in the woods, which now, under the ownership and management of "Dazzy" Vance, famous former pitcher of the Brooklyn Dodgers, is a sportsmen's rendezvous the year around.

Along the highways and byways in this section travelers since 1935 have seen numerous painted signs, informing them that the Federal Resettlement Administration was engaged in activities on the particular tract behind the sign. Few people in the nearby towns had even the vaguest idea of what the Resettlement Administration was doing or contemplated doing. In response to a request by the authors for information about these activities, a concise summary of the recent agricultural history of Florida was supplied by the Federal authorities. It presents a picture of conditions which affected principally the Negro farmers and the lowest class of "crackers" or "poor whites." These constitute but a small minority in the lower Florida peninsula; there are more of them in the older settled regions of North and West Florida. The rehabilitation of impoverished farmers is the sole concern of the Resettlement Administration, and the extent of impairment of Florida's agricultural developments, as set down in the official summary, is over-emphasized. So far as the general picture is concerned it is nevertheless worth quoting if only to emphasize the point which has been made earlier in these pages, that to reap the riches which Florida farming yields to its successful pursuers calls for capital resources, intelligence, adaptability and industry to a higher degree than do ordinary agricultural operations elsewhere. The hazards of the Florida agriculturist are admittedly high, but the reward for success is in proportion to the risk.

The Resettlement Administration's summary of the factors which led to the distressed condition of many Florida farmers must be read as having particular application to the unfor tunates who were lacking in one or all of those qualifications for successful farming. The summary follows:

"During the years of 1924 and 1925 Florida was experiencing one of the biggest real estate `booms' in its history. It was at this time that farm land prices rose and labor became so scarce that large numbers of farmers felt they would make more money by selling their farms for speculation and working in the small towns where labor was very scarce. This continued until the fall of 1925. The farmers lost their farm holdings and the economic balance of their farms was completely reversed.

"In the fall of 1925 the bottom fell out, or the `boom' broke, so to speak, and since work ceased within the cities the farmers were forced to return to their farms. Most of them had been subdivided by some real estate promoter or had been sold several times, thus causing the farmers considerable delay and expense in obtaining their farms again and replacing the crops and fruit trees.

"This adjustment was getting well under way by 1927, but in the fall of that year Florida received another hardship, which was the hurricane. This did the greatest damage that had ever been done within the state. Farm homes, crops, fruit trees, and other types of development were demolished, or put out of commission for several months. In the early fall of the next year the 1928 hurricane followed in the same tracks. It was not quite so strong, but enough to ruin the crops and destroy a large number of houses, barns, etc.

"This about depleted the farmers of all their operating capital, and most of them had gone in debt heavily to rebuild and repair their homes. The banks were the main source of credit for rebuilding the state agricultural disaster. Furthering their hardships was the failure of the banks. This began in 1928, and, as we all know, many were closed by the end of 1929. The banks had been the lifesavers for the agricultural crisis but now there were no hopes from them.

"The prospects for all crops were increased by the beginning of the next year, but then came the fruit fly which swept all of South Florida and parts of North Florida. In the coun ties where the fruit fly was found it was necessary that all fruit and vegetables be destroyed. This again unbalanced farm economics for that year.

"It again left many farmers depleted of cash and there were no banks or people willing to loan, or had the money to loan, to refinance these farmers.

"Conditions were again headed towards normal when Florida suffered the most severe freeze it had had since 1896. This was in the winter of 1931-32. Crops were completely killed to the lowest point of the state and for most farmers this was the last straw. Following this freeze was another, not quite so severe but enough to throw hundreds of other farmers out of business.

"The above factors, among many other general economic factors, led to Florida's lowest point in agricultural production and to thousands of farmers being left without operating credit, and, in many cases, without homes."

For the rehabilitation of the unfortunate farm families, chiefly Negroes, who were hardest hit by the factors recited, Resettlement Administration has done effective work, reaching some 7,000 beneficiaries who have been put on their financial feet by loans of Federal funds, taught improved methods of farming and of home-making, tumble-down cabins have been replaced by neat bungalows with modern conveniences and these people have got a new start on the road toward whatever independence they are able to achieve and maintain.

Before proceeding northward, we swing eastward again to Dade City, seat of Pasco County, an important cross-roads through which almost all motorists pass on the way to Tampa or St. Petersburg from Jacksonville and Northeast Florida. The town takes its name from Major Dade, U. S. A., famed in Florida annals as the victim of an Indian massacre. In the Seminole war of 1835 Major Dade and his command of 110 men were ambushed by the Indians and all but three were slaughtered, a few miles north of the little city which now bears his name.

At the scene of the Dade massacre, near Bushnell, county seat of Sumter County, is the 80-acre Dade Memorial Park, established and maintained by the state. A concrete replica of the fort of pine logs which the troops built before their last gallant stand, and a bronze statue of an American soldier of 1835 stand in a beautiful grove of moss-hung live-oaks.

The town of Bushnell, although the seat of a county in which profits of $500 to $1,000 an acre are often realized by its prosperous truck farmers, has fewer than 500 popula tion. It has, however, one unique industry, peculiarly Floridian. That is the largest factory engaged in drying and baling Spanish moss for sale to upholsterers. A hundred tons of this hairlike fiber are collected by trucks every month, from points as far as 200 miles away, and ten carloads a month are shipped to northern furniture factories.