A Look at the Uses of Oral History by Jeff Blakley In this post, I am continuing to explore the lives of ordinary working stiffs in early Homestead. The subject of this post is Willie Alonzo King. Susan Dryer, the owner of Ages Ago Antiques in Homestead, donated a booklet to the Town Hall Museum…
By Jeff Blakley I was recently sent a series of photographs taken in Detroit in 1911. I’ve managed to identify some of the people in the photographs. One of them, I think, is that of Alice M. Graves, wife of Thomas L. Graves, who came to Detroit in 1911 from Pontiac, Illinois, where he was…
by Jeff Blakley If you grew up in Goulds or Princeton, you know where Baile’s Road is. For those who never ventured far from Homestead as a child, Baile’s Road joins U.S. 1 at about S.W. 224th St., where the NAPA store is located. For years, I drove by the intersection and occasionally turned on…
I’m pleased to publish this piece about growing up in Homestead in the 1950s. The author, Paul McHugh, is the son of George and Delphine McHugh and he grew up in an oak hammock not far from South Dade High School. His father, George, was a general contractor, a member of the Homestead Power Squadron…
By Jeff Blakley Writing the post entitled The Beginnings of Goulds led me to want to find out more about Lyman B. Gould, for whom the community is named. I searched through issues of the Miami Metropolis from the era, conducted census research on Ancestry and searched records on the Internet and FindAGrave for this…
by Jeff Blakley Jean Taylor, in her book Villages of South Dade, gives only the sketchiest of information about the founding of Goulds, writing only that it was named for a “Mr. Gould,” who was from Indiana and was the foreman of a tie-cutting crew for the Florida East Coast Railway. I’m posting this essay…
A Postcard Tells Its Story by Jeff Blakley Piecing together the small number of remaining fragments of early Homestead history is quite a challenge. I’m writing this post to show how, sometimes, we historians are fortunate to be able to build on the knowledge contributed by others and are thus able to advance our knowledge…
Last December, Mike Emery, who is writing a book on the Coca-Cola Bottling Company in Florida, contacted the Town Hall Museum, asking what information we had about the Coca-Cola bottling plant here in Homestead. We have almost nothing – only the location of the plant, but Mike’s query led me to keep his request in…
A Miamian Visits Homestead in 1923 Article transcribed by Jeff Blakley This article came from the July 31, 1923 issue of the Miami Herald and I thought it was a delightful piece that captured a sense of what Homestead was like in that era. The Seminole Cafe, adjacent to the Homestead hotel, was owned by…
by Jeff Blakley The building which once stood on the southeast corner of Krome and N.W. 1st Street was built in 1921 by J. W. Conner for Archie J. Campbell, one of Thomas Alexander Campbell’s sons, for whom Campbell Drive is named. It is pictured in the photograph at the top of this page, next…
