By Ray Roa
Last year alone, more than 1.2 million people set foot across the Tampa Riverwalk. The 2.6-mile trail connects three of the city’s most popular neighborhoods, and features 30 historical monuments, but there’s even more to dive into at the southern end of the path.
Inside the Tampa Bay History Center, a team of about 35 staffers and 60 volunteers helps visitors and locals alike unpack more than 12,000 years of local history and cultivate a deeper sense of place.
The journey starts with a dugout pinewood Indigenous canoe that’s about 2,000 years old. It was recovered somewhere near Newnansville, a two-hour drive north from the museum. The vessel replaces one that in the ‘80s was stolen straight out of a small, second-floor museum inside the county courthouse on nearby Pierce Street, which was where some historical items from Hillsborough County were stored.
“There was a lot of concern about the safety and care of those artifacts,” Rodney Kite-Powell, tells Current.
Kite-Powell is the Director of the History Center’s Touchton Map Library—the only cartographic research center of its kind in the state—and has a story for seemingly every artifact inside the four-story museum.
Rodney Kite-Powell sifts through the archives inside the Tampa Bay History Center’s 60,000 square feet.
No one could fault volunteers for the disappearance, but then-County Commissioner Jan Platt created a task force to build a free-standing history museum, complete with a professional staff, for Hillsborough County.
Twenty years later in 2009, Tampa Bay History Center cut the ribbon on its 60,000-square foot home. And while staff hasn’t looked back in its efforts to grow galleries with award-winning exhibits, one of the team’s main functions is to give visitors a glimpse into the past so they can better understand their future.
Beyond the canoe are the collection’s Seminole and Miccosukee artifacts, including patchwork patterns and tools. When the history center couldn’t find an original Chickee home, staff mailed a palm frond to an Indiana fabricator who could recreate part of the thatched roof dwelling.
“Imagine this much fresh palm frond,” Kite-Powell says, arms spread wide, illustrating the volume of finished product when it arrived. “It had that kind of that freshly mowed lawn smell, almost a sweet palm—it smelled great.”
A sharp nose will pick up another pleasant aroma from a nearby gallery that captures the spirit of the most famous Tampeño export. The collection inside the glass cases and on the walls is a treasure trove that tells the story of the manufacturing and marketing of cigars.
Some items come from hardcore collectors, and others are things someone inherited from a relative who passed away. Kite-Powell—who’s also Hillsborough County’s official historian—says the latter is harder to come by because the new owners often don’t feel the same connection to the things that their relatives did. But as the history center’s stature in the community grows, people know he’s interested in having them.
“They didn’t play any kind of role in the events. ‘It’s just dad’s stuff, or grandad’s stuff,’” Kite-Powell explains. “But we want to make sure that we’re always up to date with reflecting the community and its people.”
Visitors can feel that humanity across the breadth of the museum, from the cattle ranchers of the Lightsey Family Ranch to the increasingly harrowing tale of Florida’s citrus growers. Military families are represented, and port workers are, too.
A new permanent exhibit, “Travails and Triumphs,” covers five centuries of Black history in Tampa Bay from the first locals of the African diaspora, Tampa’s once-booming Central Avenue, the hardships their communities endured, and their victories, too.
“I think it’s a very great example of a mix of great objects and technology and these really interesting stories to help tell that 500-year story,” Kite-Powell said.
On the top floor, the very kid-friendly “Conquistadors, Pirates, and Shipwrecks” deploys a 60-foot pirate ship and hands-on features in its exploration of real-life pirates who stalked Floridian waters more than 300 years ago.
Even past generations of downtown denizens who used to walk past the iconic, since-demolished Maas Brothers building in downtown Tampa felt seen. One part of the store’s concrete facades now occupies a heavily fortified wall in the history center stairwell.
The famed shopping destination closed in 1991, but when news of the structure’s destruction reached the History Center in 2006, staff quickly contacted the demolition company who used their cranes to help the team preserve nearly all of the sign. Kite-Powell didn’t notice it until a day later, but part of the second “A” in “Maas,” was missing.
“I went back the next morning, but the building was on top of it. They tore the rest of it down that night,” he says, illustrating how much history we lose every day.
For the most part though, the History Center helps visitors fill in the blanks. Behind the scenes in the high-security, unmarked collection storage area lies even more archival material waiting for a turn on the floor. Some of that made it into two separate-but-related temporary exhibits which tracks the evolution of the Bay area during the ups and downs of the 1920s.
“Decade of Change: Florida in the 1920s” does it with interactive elements—a tutorial on the foxtrot dance craze, and a Pentecostal tent revival—and with artifacts like underwear worn by the mother of late Tampa Tribune journalist Leland Hawes and blueprints for local landmarks like the Tampa Theatre.
Across the hall at “Sharps & Marks in Paradise: Selling Florida in the 1920s,” gems from the history center’s Touchton map library show how developers and planners during the Florida land boom of 1920-1930 hoped to expand neighborhoods and roads as the state’s population skyrocketed—kind of like how it’s growing right now.
There are lessons in history that can be beneficial for us as we are planning our future and living our present.
“There are incredible parallels to the 1920s and the 2020s, and you can only hope that they don’t end in the same way, right? Because it wasn’t good,” Kite-Powell says, alluding to the Great Depression while noting there are more safeguards in place now.
Outside the History Center, anyone can see the promise being poured into Water Street Tampa. The museum itself even changed its address—now 801 Water St.—to further plant a flag on its plot of land.
And as another 1.2 million people walk down the Riverwalk towards the History Center, Kite-Powell simply hopes anyone who walks through its doors can take a break from daily life and leave with a better appreciation for the neighborhood, whether they live here, are just visiting, or happen to be part of a family that’s been Tampeño for generations.
He wants visitors to be able to appreciate new development, but also adopt an ability to see past it and reflect on those who came before them.
“Why they were here, what they did here. Their struggles and successes—all of those things,” Kite-Powell says. “It’s very cliche, but you can learn from that. There are lessons in history that can be beneficial for us as we are planning our future and living our present.”