Event connects residents to the past.
The East Hillsborough Historical Society held its 48th Annual Plant City Pioneer Day on Saturday at the 1914 High School building in Plant City. “I love history,” resident James Brown said. “Plant City has always reminded me of the history of my home town in Illinois…This is very nice. I know that we can’t get into the building very often, but it is nice that they opened it up.”
The 1914 Building was indeed opened for the celebration. Inside, visitors had chances to see antiques like paintings, banners, clothing, memorabilia, an antique automobile, and permanent model train displays. “This HO-scale layout has been here for over 30 years,” Dave Kirk said. “It is fairly static now because it is about as complete as it can be. So, we are in a maintenance mode after a lot of years of building. A number of our buildings were scratch-built, others were what they call kit bashed, where they take a kit and they modify it.” One of the model layouts is a reproduction of Plant City, circa 1910.
Mike Norton from the Educational Theater Program of the H.B. Plant Museum came for the day, wearing period attire, to serve as “Henry Bradley Plant, the man who brought the railroad to this part of the world,” he said. “It would have reached Plant City in about December of 1883. Of course, at that time, Plant City was known as Cork. They didn’t name it after Henry Bradley Plant until many years after.” Norton played his role on stage twice during the day. An actress also played a maid from Plant’s large hotel that is the centerpiece of the University of Tampa campus.
In addition to food for the historical soul, vendors served hot dogs, potato chips, boiled peanuts, and dirty soda. “This is our first dirty soda, and he is loving it,” Lauren Herold said about her son. His concoction was Mountain Dew and apple-toasted marshmallow. “We came to see my niece and sister-in-law dance. It was really great to be able to see a lot of history for Plant City. My four-year-old, Brax, got to pet the animals and feed them, and he had so much fun seeing the train area. I thought it was wonderful. I think it’s fantastic. It’s really nice to be able to get people out here to see Plant City’s history.”…