When you think of the Kathleen area, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? We’ll admit — we didn’t know much about it.
We sat down with Lois Sherrouse-Murphy, a fifth-generation resident who has served as president of the Kathleen Area Historical Society since 2012, to discuss some of this area’s history. Consider impressing others with hyper-local history facts our new go-to party trick.
The Kathleen area is not made up of just Kathleen.
While Kathleen is the largest community that most people think of when they think of this part of the city, there are actually eight historic communities that comprise the area: Kathleen, Galloway, Gibsonia, Green Pond, Griffin, Providence, Socrum, and Winston. You’ll see nods to these communities throughout the northern parts of Lakeland, from road names to the names of schools.
Of those communities, Socrum is the oldest — it was settled in the late 1840s,
.
Kathleen was not always unincorporated.
While the Kathleen area is considered an unincorporated community of northern Lakeland today, that was not always the case. The one-square-mile town was