This is a collection of photographs taken from the Florida Memory Project website where the pictures can be seen in their original larger format. I just wanted to give people an idea of what life was like in Florida in 1904 and thereabouts.
The photos cover 4 main themes: Family, Play, Work, & Community. In some shots, the lines are blurred: a mother and her three children pose picking oranges. In another, several smiling Plant City Baptist women surround a single boy; are they all related or are they just a group of friends? There are several shots of picnics, which is understandable given the nature of Florida's weather, where it is sunny & warm most of the year. The heavy, post-Victorian style of their clothing must have been stultifying in the summer humidity, but I imagine it proved effective against mosquitoes!
I gather that this was the average Florida farm family. Notice how old the parents look; they could be as young as in their 40's, if the youngest child is any indication.
This looks to be a segregated girl's school. The lesson for the day seems to be sewing. Lookit them happy faces!
50 years later, these guys' grandsons will be playing chicken with their Chevys ala "Rebel Without A Cause":
Unfortunately, this was the average Florida road in the unincorporated regions:
On the other hand, those boys might meet up with these ladies and wind up having a picnic:
Speaking of picnics, here's a family having a meal al fresco on what looks like their back porch; note the dude on the right pulling the camera string:
Of course, it couldn't have been all play in those days. Somebody had to plow the fields and plant the corn & beans.
Yes, they even had swimming pools back then, and anyone who has tried doing it themselves with chlorine tablets would be the envy of these guys:
Here is a man and his son grinding sugarcane for sirup which will then be processed into molasses and sugar grains, not to mention a little moonshine on the side, no doubt:
These guys are farming pineapple:
Interesting how fully-dressed the ladies are to pick oranges. Not sure if this was standard attire or some kind of publicity shot:
Thems be whoppers behind these two fishermen:
I didn't realize that women were working in banking positions back then:
I don't know exactly what these guys are up to in this shot. I believe they're hunting but there's something vaguely Bonnie & Clyde about that smartass in the middle. Black guy holding the shotgun is part meek, part menacing too.
Hey, baby: it's the 4th of July....
Kids spent their leisure time riding horses & swimming just like the children of today -- when they can tear themselves away from their video games of course.
Even ladies went swimming...as long as they had the proper attire on. This outfit included a ruffled skirt over pantaloons, and a cap to keep the hair dry, supposedly. Only the lower classes went skinny-dipping.
These two elderly ladies are having a spot of tea in the garden. Good thing they were wearing those heavy clothes against the inevitable swarm of mosquitoes!
Then there was the ever-reliable family picnic, again with a sure amount of biting skeeters and flies. People were braver then, I suppose.
This is how a street in the state capitol of Tallahassee looked:
And this is probably a typical upper-middle-class family. Here the father appears to be a preacher of some kind. Probably the only time those two servants got their picture taken back then: holding up the family young'uns. Make sure to see this pic in its original full-size format; they were a handsome family & I wonder what became of them.
I still see houses like these around the area; there are several in Plant City for instance.
Who knew that the water pflume at Busch Gardens had a predecessor?!
