-
A ‘then and now’ of the St. Cloud Library, now the city’s Heritage Museum PHOTOS/ ST. CLOUD WOMEN’S CLUB -
A ‘then and now’ of the St. Cloud Library, now the city’s Heritage Museum PHOTOS/ ST. CLOUD WOMEN’S CLUB
After a two-year pandemic-imposed hiatus, history in St. Cloud is coming alive again with a special series of tours later this month.
The St. Cloud Women’s Club- Heritage Museum is kicking off a round of tours of historic homes, murals, and the Mount Peace Cemetery over the weekend of Jan. 20-21. The combined tour, called St. Cloud’s Treasures, includes a narrated bus tour of historic houses and businesses, as well as a walking tour of murals in the city and the cemetery, where many of St. Cloud’s “pioneers” are buried.
These are special tours presented by the Women’s Club and should not be confused with separate historic and “ghost” tours available from the St. Cloud Main Street Program.
“If you are one of our many new St. Cloud residents or have lived here for a time and ever wondered about the history of the city, this is an excellent opportunity to learn about the ‘secret history’ of St. Cloud,” said Museum Curator Camille Levee.
Levee detailed one of the secrets: you might have noticed that the “state” streets in the “grid section” of St. Cloud are not laid out in alphabetical order. As you may know, Union Civil War veterans founded St. Cloud, and as groups of these veterans from individual states got together and purchased lots, the adjacent streets were named for their home states.
Some highlights of the tour are examples of “kit” houses, sold through the Sears and Roebuck mail-order catalog, the Amazon of its day. Everything needed to construct a two or even three-story house was shipped by rail. The house was assembled according to plans, and in many of these houses, the numbers and letters corresponding to the plans are still visible on house components in protected interior spaces.
The plans alone for these houses could also be purchased, and the owner of one of these plan houses, at 1500 10th Street, at the corner of Kentucky Avenue, substituted concrete blocks for many of the wood components. This house is on the tour. Later, concrete blocks made on the home site were used for many homes in St. Cloud.
Other historic properties featured on the tour will be several of the downtown area churches, and the rebuilt section of structures on Pennsylvania Ave. erected after the “Great Fire of 1917” destroyed most of the wood-framed buildings in that vicinity.
The Heritage Museum is located in downtown St. Cloud, at 1012 Massachusetts Ave., Saint Cloud, FL 34769. For more information and tickets, see https://bit.ly/3QpqvxB.
