Everybody in this county drives McMullen-Booth Road. Almost nobody knows it started as two men cutting a path through scrub between their cabins.
James Parramore McMullen and Richard Booth cleared it so they could reach each other. It later became the first road in Pinellas built to surveyors’ specifications, and it now carries several lanes of traffic past shopping centres named after nothing in particular.
McMullen’s cabin is still standing. It was moved to a field in Largo and you can walk into it on a Wednesday afternoon for nothing.
What Heritage Village is
Pinellas County’s living history museum, at 11909 125th Street North in Largo, inside the 182-acre Pinewood Cultural Park complex. The phone is 727-582-2123 and the site is heritagevillagefl.org.
Twenty-one acres of county-owned pine and palmetto scrub holding more than twenty-eight historic structures, connected by brick paths with good signage. Most were relocated from elsewhere in the county. A few, including the Harris School and the Williams Park Bandstand, are reproductions of buildings that stood in St. Petersburg. Only one came from outside Pinellas, and that is the railroad depot.
The county started the project in 1976, when the Junior League of Clearwater partnered with county government to fund moving the first building onto land the county had held for decades without a plan for it. It opened to the public in 1977 and has grown since.
Admission is free. That is worth stating plainly because people assume otherwise and stay away.
The McMullen-Coachman log cabin
Built around 1852 near Alligator Creek in what is now Clearwater, a one-and-a-half storey Florida Cracker log home, and the oldest existing structure in Pinellas County.
James and Elizabeth McMullen raised livestock and farmed it, growing cotton among other crops. Their cattle ended up on dinner plates across the South and in Cuba. After the Civil War, with the American economy in pieces, they sold cattle to Cuba because the Cuban economy was stable. By 1869 the family was manufacturing syrup barrels and holding sugar cane grinding parties. Later they turned the cotton fields into citrus groves.
Elizabeth Campbell McMullen, a Hernando County native, was probably the first midwife in the area. By 1900 nearly sixty children had been born in that cabin, many of them extended McMullen family.
Read that paragraph again as a writer. Cotton to cattle to Cuba to syrup barrels to citrus, inside one family, inside fifty years, in one building you can stand in. That is an entire economic history of the peninsula and it fits in a room.
The cabin is furnished as it would have been, with cooking utensils by the hearth and quilts on rope beds.
The other buildings, and what each one is for
The homes were chosen to show different economic positions instead of being uniformly impressive, which is the decision that makes the place useful.
The Boyer honeymoon cottage is fourteen feet by fourteen feet, one room, built in 1878 by a Tarpon Springs fisherman named Joshua Boyer for his bride Mary Ormond. Stand in it and the economics of a young fishing family in 1878 stop being abstract.
The House of Seven Gables is the other end. Built in 1907, Queen Anne, barged down from Clearwater and moved onto the site in 1977. It is what elegance looked like here at that moment.
Between them sit the Moore House, a working farmhouse, and the Lowe House from the early 1900s, where separate bedrooms and decorative moldings mark a family arriving in the middle class.
Then the public buildings. A one-room school. The H.C. Smith general store. The Safety Harbor Church, a plain wood frame building whose tongue-and-groove planking came from E. H. Coachman’s sawmill, and which was served by circuit-riding Methodist pastors who also covered Anona, Bayview, Curlew, Largo, Ozona and Sutherland, the last of which is now Palm Harbor. The congregation outgrew it and opened a new sanctuary in 1960.
A 1930s sponge warehouse from Tarpon Springs, which connects directly to the trade that built that town.
The Sulphur Springs Depot, built 1924, the one building brought from Hillsborough. It operates as a depot and mercantile where you can buy a cold drink, which makes it the practical mid-visit stop.
And the Gandy Tower, also 1924, which marked the entrance to the Gandy Bridge, the first bridge across the bay connecting St. Petersburg and Tampa. Before it, getting from Tampa to upper Pinellas meant a steamship.
The boat shop
The McKay Creek Boat Shop is a reproduction of Clark Mills’s boat shop in Dunedin, and it carries a story most people here have never heard.
Mills designed the Optimist Pram, a small, simple, cheap sailing dinghy for children. It became one of the most widely produced sailing designs in the world, and a very large share of competitive sailors alive today learned in one.
That came out of this county, from a local builder, and the exhibit covers his life alongside the design and sailing’s place in Pinellas.
It is the clearest single example of what the village is for. A thing you have seen a thousand times without knowing where it came from turns out to have come from a shop a few miles up the road.
The archive
This is the part writers should care about most and it is easy to walk past on the way to the log cabin.
The Archives and Library was established in 1961 as part of the Pinellas County Historical Museum, which makes it older than the village built around it. It is the primary resource centre in this county for collecting, preserving and studying the region’s history.
More than 3,500 volumes covering Pinellas and Florida history, genealogy, historic conservation and preservation. More than 8,500 photographs of the county. A permanent collection of over 20,000 artifacts, meaning furniture, personal belongings, communication devices, recreational objects and decorative pieces.
Three and a half thousand volumes of local history and genealogy is a collection you cannot assemble privately at any price, because most of it was never reprinted and much of it was never commercially published at all.
The museum’s stated mission includes facilitating research, which is an invitation. Contact the curator of collections before visiting, because an archive of this kind is not a walk-in browse and the material is stored instead of shelved.
I have written about the wider museum and archive picture across both counties, and about the family history side separately.
The galleries
The Visitor Center holds two gallery spaces and they rotate.
Pinellas Passport, subtitled Your Ticket through Time, runs through the growth of the county with displays covering agriculture, coastal living, community life and tourism. That is the orientation exhibit and it is the right first stop if the county’s chronology is not already in your head.
Quick and Easy: Gadgets for the Home covers the labour-saving devices sold to households across the last century, which is a better social history than it sounds, because what a family was persuaded to buy tells you what they were expected to do all day.
There is also a collection of Christopher Still prints, reproductions of murals he was commissioned to paint for the Florida House of Representatives. They are dense with historical detail, much of which corresponds to things standing elsewhere in the village.
Hours, access and the practical details
Wednesday through Saturday from ten in the morning until four in the afternoon. Sunday from one until four. Closed on all county holidays. Admission free.
Note that it is shut Monday and Tuesday, which catches people who assume a county park keeps county park hours.
The site is mostly self-guided and you can walk into most buildings at your own pace. Some houses run docent-led tours, and the demonstrations happen at points through the year: a smokehouse, a sugar cane mill and boiling shed, blacksmithing and woodworking.
Eight sites are ADA accessible: the Circle of the Senses, the Harris School, the H.C. Smith Store, the House of Seven Gables, the McKay Creek Boat Shop, the Safety Harbor Church, the Safford Pavilion and the Sponge Warehouse. The paths are brick and well signed.
Dogs are welcome outdoors on a leash provided you clean up. Only service dogs are permitted inside the structures and the museum. The whole site is non-smoking.
Some buildings close periodically for repair, which is what happens when a county maintains twenty-eight historic structures on a public budget.
What to do on a first visit
Start in the Visitor Center, because Pinellas Passport gives you the county’s chronology in twenty minutes and everything outside makes more sense afterwards.
Then walk the homes in rough order of wealth instead of geographically. The Boyer cottage first, then the Moore farmhouse, then the Lowe House, then the House of Seven Gables. Doing it that way turns a collection of buildings into an argument about class, and the argument is the useful part.
Go into the log cabin last. By then you have seen what the county became, and the 1852 room reads completely differently.
Take notes on the things nobody interprets. Door widths. How high the ceilings are relative to your own head. Where a window sits relative to a work surface. Whether a room has one door or two. Those details are what you will need later and no placard mentions them.
And photograph interiors if permitted, but write the sensory notes by hand the same day. Photographs record what a room looked like and not what standing in it was like, which is the thing you came for.
Making a day of it
It sits a few minutes from Largo Public Library, which has two floors, a cafe, bookable group rooms and a quiet garden, and which opens until eight on Monday through Wednesday.
That combination is unusually good. Archive or village in the morning, somewhere proper to write up in the afternoon, coffee without moving the car far. I have laid out the wider Largo options in where to write in Largo.
For used books in the same trip, The Book Rescuers on Ulmerton Road is three miles of shelving at two dollars a paperback.
And the Pinellas County Historical Society, a separate nonprofit, raises funds for programming and exhibits at the village. Membership is the simplest way to support it if the place turns out to be useful to you.
What twenty-eight moved buildings give you
A reconstruction gives you an idea of a building. A moved building gives you the building.
Ceiling heights, window placement, door widths, the depth of a porch, how sound carries between rooms, where the light falls at three in the afternoon. None of that is recoverable from a photograph. All of it is settled before anybody writes a word about how a room felt.
For anybody writing about this state in the nineteenth or early twentieth century, one afternoon covers a pioneer cabin, a fisherman’s one-room cottage, a farmhouse, a 1907 Queen Anne and a country church. That is the fastest available education in how people here really lived, sorted by what they could afford.
It costs nothing, it is open five days a week, and on most weekday afternoons there is almost nobody else there.
The society behind it
The Pinellas County Historical Society is a separate nonprofit that raises funds to support programmes at Heritage Village and pay for buildings, displays, artifacts and equipment.
That division matters if you are trying to get something done there. The county funds operations through the Board of County Commissioners. The society funds the things a county budget struggles to justify, which is most of what makes a museum interesting.
For a writer the practical point is that a volunteer-supported museum is far more approachable than its size suggests. People who give their Saturdays to a historic building generally want somebody to care about it, and a specific question about a specific structure lands better than a general enquiry.
Membership is inexpensive and it is the simplest way to stay in touch with what the collection is doing, which matters because exhibits rotate and material moves in and out of storage.
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