New Port Richey, Florida, like many cities between Jacksonville and Tampa, can thank Henry Plant's 1885 railroad for its phenomenal growth. Thirty-five miles northwest of Tampa, in West Pasco County, New Port Richey eventually hosted its own railway connection right through downtown. City planners constructed the community in a grid, naming north-south streets after Presidents and east-west streets after states. The arrival of the U.S. Post Office...

Winner of the 2014 National Outdoor Book Awards for History/Biography
Emma Gatewood told her family she was going on a walk and left her small Ohio hometown with a change of clothes and less than two hundred dollars. The next anybody heard from her, this genteel, farm-reared, 67-year-old great-grandmother had walked 800 miles along the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. And in September 1955, having survived a rattlesnake strike, two hurricanes,

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The pace of redevelopment has accelerated in recent years along Tampa Bay's gulf beaches, leaving tourists and residents alike in awe. This volume provides a glimpse at the beaches as they were and as they are today, and opens a whole new window to view the development that both enhances and threatens the barrier islands. Author R. Wayne Ayers and photographer Nancy Ayers, residents of Belleair Beach, are actively involved in chronicling and preserving...

African Americans have risen from the slave plantations of nineteenth-century Florida to become the heads of corporations and members of congress in the twenty-first century. THey have played an important role in making Florida the successful state it is today. This book takes you on a tour through the 67 counties, of the sites that commemorate the role of African Americans in Florida's history.

This narrative is about a fairly unknown segment of past, rural Florida life, the moonshine whiskey trade. The story also has romance, family struggles and personality conflicts. It focuses on two main "Crakers": Clarence Lane and Lonnie Tucker.

"There's a dark cloud over Sunny Jim's Safety First Parasailing and Stand-Up Paddleboarding business on Florida's Riggs Beach--especially after one of his clients is killed in a tragic paddleboarding mishap. Sunny Jim is sure it was no accident, and he hires Helen and Phil to find the murderer. Between cutthroat competitors poaching his territory, the city threatening to revoke his license, a restaurant owner wanting his beach spot for a parking lot,...

A narrative of prose and pictures of ranchers in Central Florida, particularly the Sand Hills region, documenting their lives: the hardships, happiness, joys and sorrows.

"This new edition of Bruce Hunt's popular guide reveals the real, old-time Florida still to be found on the back roads of the Sunshine state in little towns that lure you in with their quaintness and keep you there for a spell with their friendly occupants. The towns featured all have a population of less than 10,000. There is an introduction with each town's history. Included are museums, galleries, antiques shops, local eateries, local fishing holes,...

A classic historical western of the eighteenth-century American frontier by the celebrated author of Riders of the Purple Sage. First published in 1906, The Spirit of the Border is a vivid and brutal tale based on true events as chronicled in the journals of Zane Grey's ancestor Col. Ebenezer Zane. It tells the story of Moravian Church missionaries and their efforts to bring peace to the Ohio Valley-efforts that met a tragic end in the destruction...