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This Old House

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By YVETTE C. HAMMETT

The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 9, 2008

BRANDON - BRANDON - The old, square two-story white clapboard house tucked in an oak hammock off Bell Shoals Road leans slightly to one side.

The worn heart pine flooring Robert Knowles crafted by hand occasionally creaks when Barbara Gaylor walks across the dining room then up the steep stairwell her grandfather built.

Downstairs, the former pantry now serves as her clothes closet. The smokehouse used long ago for curing meat has been converted to a bathroom.

And the sleeping porch, once used as a respite from the Florida heat, serves as a makeshift chamber for family heirlooms - antique chests, an old iron bed and other pieces passed from one generation of the Knowles family to the next.

Gaylor and her sisters, Susan Davis Jones and Pat Davis, grew up in the house Robert Knowles built for his bride, Marjorie, in 1915. The dwelling was passed down to their mother and father, Audrey and Roscoe Davis.

A few other relatives called the house home in the years that followed, but later it sat vacant for years. Worried it would face the same fate as other homes in the area that deteriorated beyond habitation or were torn down, Gaylor returned two years ago, eager to protect it from the elements and to preserve her rich family history.

"All those other houses are gone now," Gaylor said. "Bryan's Dairy is gone. Great Uncle Tom's Knowles house was torn down last year. I don't want anything to happen to this house."

She applied to the Hillsborough County Historic Resources Review Board to designate the home a historic landmark. The board unanimously approved the request, and the county commission will consider it July 22.

Just to get the house considered for landmark designation, Gaylor and her sisters pored through reams of family documents.

"There was a trash bag full of papers that came from our mother," Pat Davis said. She sorted the paperwork by date, filling loose-leaf binders with love letters her grandparents wrote each other and pre-construction drawings showing how they wanted the house to look.

"I got home from work every night and picked up a pile of them," Davis said. She sifted through official documents, maps from the Civil War era and photos of the house and the generations who lived in it.

The sisters remember many of the stories passed down by their ancestors from those early days, when the family ate what they could shoot or grow and planted bromeliads whose offspring still live in the garden. They plucked oysters from the mouth of the Alafia River and farmed and ranched the land in the days when oxen still pulled wagons.

Today, their home is the last historical house standing on Knowles Road, off Bell Shoals, a once-rural lane that now cuts through bustling suburbia.

Robert Knowles, the area's second postmaster, named Bell Shoals for the sound of the water rushing over the shoals in the Alafia River.

Even before the house was constructed, the Knowles family was making its mark in the Brandon area.

Brothers Henry Marion Knowles and Robert Calvin Knowles arrived by wagon train in 1872 with the Hendrix family, who took in the boys after their parents died. The wagons traveled 12 to 20 miles a day from Alabama, with one young man, Israel Garner, keeping a diary of the trip.

Henry Knowles eventually purchased 80 acres and in 1902 was appointed the first postmaster for Oaklawn in the County of Hillsboro, according to family history. The county name later became Hillsborough.

In 1908, the name of the post office was changed to Knowles, a burg that appears below the Bloomingdale area on a 1917 map from Mawson's Geographic Manual and New Atlas, which is among the paperwork Gaylor submitted to the county.

When Henry Knowles died, Robert Knowles, one of his eight children, became the area's second postmaster. Gaylor and her sisters have the post office documents presented to their grandfather and great grandfather, along with dozens of photos of the family during marriages, holidays and gatherings at the house.

The women are almost giddy when they talk about all they've learned of their family's history. Among their favorite stories is one about Robert Knowles borrowing money from Brandon founder John Brandon to travel to Minneapolis to fetch his bride.

By accident, they came across some family gravestones at a small cemetery on Bloomingdale Avenue called the Bloomingdale Community Cemetery. Among those buried there is Israel Garner, who wrote journal entries about the 1872 wagon train journey.

The stories the women tell are seemingly endless.

"Our grandfather was a postmaster, a road builder, a farmer, a cattle rancher, a house builder and a hunter," Jones said.

He is a part of history the women are proud of, and one they say they'd love to see preserved along with the old house.

Reporter Yvette C. Hammett can be reached at (813) 657-4532 or yhammett@tampatrib.com.

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