Good Day to all! The Charlotte County Historical Society’s annual Florida Frontier Days Festival is coming up next Friday and Saturday, February 27 and 28, 9:30 till 2 each day at a new location. We will be at South County Regional Park. Use the Carmalita Street entrance next to the county’s school bus yard. Free games and “hands-on” activities. …
Good Day to all! Here is the second “Bridges” column. Did you know the first bridge connecting Charlotte Harbor and Punta Gorda was obsolete by the time it was completed in 1921? You do if you read my first “Bridges” column. Henry Ford’s success replacing the horse and buggy as the principal mode of travel and completion of…
Good Day to all and HAPPY NEW YEAR! Did you know this column, which I am privileged to write for the Charlotte County Historical Society, has appeared in this newspaper, typically every other Wednesday, for over fifteen years? Consequently, I thought it appropriate to revisit the Society’s and now defunct, Historical Center’s evolution. What became The Charlotte County…
Good Day to all, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and Happy Holidays! Check out Punta Gorda Kiwanis’ Christmas Card Lane at Gilchrist Park through January2. Did you know the first record of Christmas celebrated locally can be found in Jarvis Howard’s journal? Howard arrived from New York with his wife Brenda and their three children in January 1874,…
Good Day to all and Happy Holidays! Hope you enjoy the first of my annual Christmas columns. Did you know, although a huge celebration today, the proclaimed date of Jesus’ birth has not always been so, and that the first record of Christmas in today’s Charlotte County dates from 1876? Early Christianity’s focus was on Easter, liturgically the time…
Good Day to all! Here is my annual Halloween column. Hope to see everyone on West Marian Avenue Sunday evening at its corner with McGregor Street. The Punta Gorda Kiwanis Club will be handing out glow ropes while they last. Bring your “trick or treaters” by to get one. Did you know a local Halloween tradition began over…
Good Day to all and Happy Thanksgiving! Here is my annual “local Thanksgiving” column. Did you know a turkey, although common if you could get one, was not necessarily the centerpiece of early Thanksgiving celebrations in the area? Prayers of thanks and other ceremonies have been around for ages, but Thanksgiving as we know it, likely had its…
Good Day to all! Thank you everyone who helped make the Society’s first Low Country Boil a success! Did you know Charlotte County’s major thoroughfare running from north of I-75’s Exit 170 to the harbor was once a cattle trail? More evident when I was a youngster, as it was not the relatively straight thoroughfare it is today. …
Day to all! Did you know the First National Bank of Punta Gorda established by Edwin W. Smith was just the first “First”? Perry McAdow’s Punta Gorda Bank had gotten competition in 1912 when Smith’s Merchants Bank began operations. Its name was changed to First National Bank of Punta Gorda in 1919. A few years after Smith opened his…
Good Day to all! Did you know financial services offered by Bank of America, until Hurricane Ian, at its East Olympia Avenue and Nesbit Street location had their beginnings with Punta Gorda’s first locally owned bank? In late 1889, the city’s first “official” bank opened, operating from an office in West Marion Avenue’s “100 block” from the back…
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