While the United States of America is blowing out the candles on its 250th birthday cake, Heritage Village will also be celebrating a milestone. The historical park and museum commemorates its 50th anniversary with the launch of the “Power of Place” oral history program, designed to capture, preserve and celebrate the stories of the people of Pinellas County through first-person narrative accounts.
Founded in 1976, Heritage Village was part of a movement in the 1970s across the country towards local and social history preservation.
“The bicentennial movement in 1976, which celebrated the USA’s 200th birthday, really spurred tons of different historical societies nationwide to pop up other local open air history museums, like Heritage Village,” explained Monica Drake, Historical Museum Operations Manager at Heritage Village Museum and Park. “Public History capture really became a big deal.”
“Heritage Village is really special because it connects Pinellas to the larger narrative of the US. Local history is really people’s first foray into interacting with their ancestors, or where they come from, or what it means to be from Pinellas County or Florida or America.”
The 21-acre public park, located at 11909 125th Street N. in Largo, is owned and operated by Pinellas County Government’s Parks & Conservation Resources Department. Heritage Village offers public education events including a rotating speakers series, meetups for historical crafts such as basketmaking, and public demonstrations of traditional trades like blacksmithing. It also houses an extensive archives and library collection of thousands of volumes and artifacts pertaining to Pinellas and Florida history.
Heritage Village, which bills itself as a “living museum,” has nearly 30 different historical buildings on display, offering “a window into the past and [by] allowing visitors to connect with the history and culture of the region in a meaningful way.” The buildings, which are mainly from the 1850s to 1930s, have been restored and preserved in line with the architectural standards of their time, and each building has been outfitted with artifacts depicting the lifestyle and societal happenings of their respective historical periods.
The first building to be moved to what is now Heritage Village was the Plant-Sumner House. Constructed in the 1890s, the home was part of the Bellevue Biltmore Hotel campus and housed employees working on site.
“Throughout time, it was lived in by different families that were in Pinellas County, up until about the 1970s when the current owner decided to sell it,” Drake explained.
The home was an important part of Clearwater history that was at threat of being destroyed and developed, so the Junior League of Clearwater rallied to make sure that it was preserved. They teamed up with the Pinellas County Historical Commission to acquire the home and move it to a place where it could be preserved and appreciated by the public – thus Heritage Village was established.
“Heritage Village was an act of civic love,” explains Drake. “There were a lot of different stakeholders who were instrumental in making sure that it happened.”
The organization is celebrating 50 years of this sort of civic love with the launch of its oral history initiative. “Power of Place” was selected from one of six themes put forth by the American Association for State and Local Histories to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary.
Heritage Village is interested in capturing the history of the legacy buildings, historical societies, multigenerational residents, and ethnoburbs that make Pinellas, well, Pinellas. There’s a marked interest in uplifting the stories of lesser-known residents and establishments.
“As a museum professional one, of the things that we do is often assess our collection and say, ‘Wow, we have done a pretty miserable job reaching out to these groups and talking with them or having anything that would explore or explain their existence.’ You know, in Pinellas County or wherever your museum might be,” said Drake.
“For us, that’s a problem, because 50 years from now, if somebody were to come to the Heritage Village repository and say, ‘I heard a rumor that this organization or this group existed’ and there’s just nothing there, you have a hole in your collection, right? My due diligence as a collections person is to reach out to those communities and ask them to share their story.”
Participation is free and open to the public. Application forms were made available in December and will remain online for two years. Interested groups can fill out a form on Heritage Village’s website, and opt in to receive technical support and training for oral history capture – or they can take the DIY approach and record interviews on their own. The oral histories will live online as part of Heritage Village’s archives.
Anyone and everyone is welcome to contribute, says Drake. “If you live and work and play in Pinellas County, we want to hear your story.”
Apply to share your story here.
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