Okeechobee schoolhouse a cherished structure

Our July 23 column give a brief history of Okeechobee County, a sparsely populated but historically important part of our region.

Perhaps its most cherished structure is the one-story white-frame, one-room schoolhouse at Southwest Fifth Street and South Parrott Avenue.

It now houses the Okeechobee County Historical Society’s administrative offices and its collection of historical materials.

On Dec. 3, it held a 100th birthday party for the school.

The settlement originally was called the Bend, because it is on a peninsula at the confluence of the Kissimmee River, Taylor Creek and Lake Okeechobee.

Students originally met in a thatched-roof shack.

The schoolhouse was built in 1909, eight years before the county was formed from parts of Palm Beach, St. Lucie and Osceola counties.

The St. Lucie County school system designated it School 14.

By then, the settlement had been renamed “Tantie,” and the name stuck to the school as well.

Teacher Tantie Huckaby of South Carolina had given her name to the post office in 1902.

The town became Okeechobee in 1911. By the fall of 1915, the school had become so crowded a tent was set up for the overflow.

Construction began March 18, 1916, on a new two-story brick building. The Okeechobee Public School opened later that year.

The former schoolhouse eventually became a private home.

It stayed that way until the mid-1970s, when W.R. “Ronnie” Watts, who had been a toddler when his parents moved in to the building around 1922, agreed to sell it to the historical society.

The home needed a lot of restoration and other work, including repositioning it on its block foundation; the 1928 hurricane had knocked it askew.

Okeechobee Historical Society Museum & Schoolhouse: 1850 Highway 98 N., Okeechobee. (863)763-4344. Guided tours by appointment.

Read more: History of Okeechobee County, by Kyle Van Landingham and Alma Hetherington.

The 1909 Okeechobee schoolhouse, originally designated School 14, was the first to be built in Okeechobee County. After a new school was built in 1916, it became a private home, and it stayed that until the mid 1970s. This picture was taken Sept. 20, 1976, as the schoolhouse was being moved to a new site. It now houses the Okeechobee County Historical Society’s administrative offices and its collection of historical materials. (Palm Beach Post file photo)

Tags: buildings, Okeechobee County, schools

Homegrown football heroes

It’s hard to escape football fever in south Florida — what with the Pro Bowl and the Super Bowl at Sun Life Stadium — so let’s take a look at some local football players who have made history.

Indianapolis Colt receiver Pierre Garcon, a 2004 John I. Leonard graduate, and New Orleans Saints fullback Heath Evans, a King’s Academy grad, will be at the Super Bowl on Feb. 7 (Evans won’t be playing though; he’s out with an injury), but they’re not the only local boys to make it big.

Pittsburgh Steeler wide receiver Santonio Holmes of Glades Central was last year’s Super Bowl MVP, after he made an amazing tip-toe catch in the end zone for the winning touchdown.

And 15 area players made the Florida High School Athletic Association’s list of the 100 greatest football players in Florida history, including past stars — Carver’s Barry Hill, Kennedy’s Lemar Parrish and Atlantic’s Bobby Butler — and present ones — Pahokee’s Anquan Boldin, Suncoast’s Devin Hester and Santaluces’ Vince Wilfork.

Other area high school football players who made the list:

Ottis Anderson (Forest Hill, pictured at right with St. Louis Cardinals owner William V. Bidwell as he holds up the jersey that he would wear for the 1979 season)
John Carney (Cardinal Newman)
Anthony Carter (Suncoast)
Eddie Edwards (Fort Pierce Central)
Jessie Hester (Glades Central)
Rickey Jackson (Pahokee)
Don Latimer (Fort Pierce Central)
Fred Taylor (Glades Central)

We know there are a lot more local football players who have made the big time, and we’d like your help in compiling a list of them. You can see the list we have so far here.

Tags: football, schools, sports

Palm Beach County area football players who made it to the NFL

This list is a work in progress, and we welcome your input in expanding the list. Please use the form or comments below to let us know about other local football players who have made the big time.

The list is sorted by school, then by player’s last name.

Sources: Palm Beach Post archives, Pro-Football-Reference.com. Last updated February 18, 2010.

Tags: football, schools, sports

The butcher’s son became UF president

Our Oct. 15 column on the former Southboro post office prompted a note from Oliver Earle Young Jr., now 82.

He notes that the butcher shop across from that post office was owned by a man named Criser.

The butcher’s son: Marshall Criser, who went on to become president of the University of Florida.

Except, Criser said recently from his retirement home in Gainesville, the shop wasn’t across from the post office.

It was at the corner of Lakeview Avenue and Dixie Highway in downtown West Palm Beach, he said.

Criser’s father had sold his butcher shop on the New Jersey shore and piled his wife and 13-year-old son into their car for a new life in Florida.

The trip took two days. They were in southern Georgia when they heard a news bulletin on their car radio. It was Dec. 7, 1941: Pearl Harbor.

Criser’s father left him and his mother in Port Salerno with his grandfather, a commercial fisherman, and headed to West Palm Beach.

He cut meat for a market for about four years, then got his own shop.

Marshall worked weekends and in the summer.

“Butter was rationed,” he said. “My father would always try to set aside butter for his customers. Every day we were in the shop, a stream of cars would come by. They just would open the window and say, ‘Any butter today?’ We’d shake our heads ‘no’ and they’d go on.”

Because of its location, 80 percent of the shop’s customers were Palm Beach mansions, so business was great in the winter, slow in the summer.

Cooks would call in orders for pickup or the senior Criser would drive over the bridge in his delivery wagon, his son said.

Business lagged and Criser closed the shop and worked a few years as a paper salesman. Born in 1900, he died in 1962.

By then his son had graduated Palm Beach High and the University of Florida and was at a Palm Beach law firm where he’d work for three decades, before taking the reins at his alma mater from 1984 to 1989.

Post file photo
Marshall Criser and wife Paula at his swearing in as new University of Florida president in 1985.

Tags: schools

Elbridge Gale and his daughter Hattie: Mangos and the Little Red Schoolhouse

We know this year marks the centennial of Palm Beach County. But the region’s modern history goes back further.

It’s been 125 years since the Rev. Elbridge Gale, a minister, educator and professor of horticulture retired to the area from Kansas in November 1884.

He became one of the first to build a cabin on the west side of Lake Worth, then the name for the Intracoastal Waterway.

The Gale house, at 401 29th St. in Northwood, is the site of the nation’s first fruit-bearing, grafted West Indian mango tree.

It’s believed the existing structure wraps around some or all of the original cabin.

Gale called his home Mangonia because of his success in raising imported mangos. By 1894, a small community, also known as Mangonia, had sprouted north and east of his property and eventually became part of the city.

Gale died in 1907.

Perhaps more famous, albeit for a brief stay, is Gale’s daughter Hattie.

She was all of 16, younger than some of her charges, when the school we now refer to as the Little Red Schoolhouse opened in March 1886.

Hattie, who arrived in 1885, taught for only three months before the area hired a teacher for $100. She returned to Kansas State, where she finished her education.

She also met Kansas State faculty member William Henry Sanders at a Manhattan, Kan., train station in 1887. They moved that year to Lake Worth and married Aug. 24, 1890. She was 20.

Hattie taught in the Mangonia neighborhood. Her husband worked as an engineer on a tug helping build the Overseas Railroad. A 1906 storm drove it out to sea and sank it; several men drowned, but Sanders survived.

The couple eventually retired to Central Florida, and Hattie died in Inverness, north of Tampa, on Aug. 1, 1955.

The couple had several children, but only one was still living when Sanders died Sept. 18, 1967, in St. Joseph, Mo.

Sanders’ sister, Susan, married Harry DuBois. Their 1898 home, believed to be the second-oldest in the county, is now the DuBois Pioneer Home Museum. She died in 1977 at 101. Her son, John R., married Jupiter pioneer and historian Bessie DuBois. That makes Bessie, Hattie’s niece by marriage.

Photo courtesy of the Historical Society of Palm Beach County
The Little Red Schoolhouse, the first schoolhouse in Palm Beach County, opened in 1886. The first teacher was 16-year-old Hattie Gale (in doorway).

For more information: Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach: (561) 832-0731. On the Web: www.palmbeachpreservation.org

Tags: place names, schools