Blog

One of the neat things about living in a community for a long time is that if you don't know the answer to a question you know where to go to find the answer...enter my classmate Phyllis Norman Nodaros who is the daughter of Dorothy Riggs Norman. Eureka! I emailed her and she quickly gave me some facts about that family property. Addison Henry Riggs bought the property in 1922 about a year after the 620 square mile area was established as Sarasota County. According to Phyllis the house was one heck of a solid concrete structure. A wonderful old place and behind it was a boat house with boat and an old wringer washer and 2 large tubs for rinsing clothes, a back yard with long clothes lines and poles to prop them up when loaded with laundry, a hen house with chickens and a rooster or two where we used to gather eggs and eventually he built a garage apartment over a 2 car garage right on the water. There was an old pump there that supplied sulphur water that was pumped up, aeriated and used by Theresa and Earl Riggs, Emily Yentner (Theresa's sister and Marion Marable's grand mother)and Cora Belle Gallagher (Theresa's mother) and several cats. The location is on Bay Street just west of Osprey Ave a block south of US 41. There is a condominium there today. Phyllis has passed my email on to her brother and she is going to further search her own memory bank and hopefully, she will have more remembrances that can be shared.