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A Bit of Old England Finds a Home in Floridaby Dale Wilson (Tampa Tribune, 7/24/83)The Tudor homes of Forest Hills are like a touch of England in an otherwise typically Florida neighborhood. There are eight, scattered along the hills' curving, rolling streets, one of three Tampa subdivisions that have 18-hole golf courses running down their centers, and they blend in comfortably with the Mediterranean, ranch-style and bungalow houses that predominate. But they look different. The houses, set among pine and oak trees, were built in the mid- to late 1920's, in the typical tan- or cream-colored stucco, half-timbered style that says Tudor. They have steep, pitched roofs, sharp gables and rounded front doors. Inside, floors are linoleum, tile or oak, and most have a fireplace. Paneling and exposed woodwork are everywhere. They look masculine and quaint at the same time. No one knows who built them. My wife and I live in one. We fell in love with it on sight, when we first saw it more than a year ago, and learned it would soon be on the market. Since then, we've noticed the others, all different in final design but all similar in character. I decided to find out more about them. J. B. Hamner Miller is the oldest living relative of Burks Hamner, who, as head of the B. L. Hamner Corp., helped develop Forest Hills back in the 1920s. Miller remembers working on the golf course as a kid, shortly before the Forest Hills Country Club was built in 1923, for $190,000. Those were boom times for Florida and for Tampa, when $1,000 would buy a prime lot just about anywhere, and a developer would typically advertise his development in magazines and newspapers nationwide, attracting a new generation of Florida residents. Forest Hills, Miller says, was no different. "We laid it out in three sections," he says, "Southgate, Golfland, and Forest Hills Number Three. Six hundred and forty acres, with 100 acres for the golf course. Our motto stressed that it was high and dry, away from flood lands. 'Sooner or later," we said, 'people will take to the hills--Forest Hills.'" The target was aimed at "high-class folks," Miller remembers - "not rich-rich, but the middle-class people whom we called the nylon-stocking crowd." During one promotion, the great fighter Jack Dempsey staged a boxing exhibition in Forest Hills and 17 buses carried the crowd into the development to see him. Miller doesn't remember who built the Tudor houses of Forest Hills, but he does remember that if a person lived in a Tudor house on the golf course, "you were really uptown," he says. The magazine, "The Old-House Journal" of May 1983 says the English house in America "became a symbol of aspirations. If you were newly arrived in the moneyed class, and wanted to proclaim your cultivation and good taste, an English house provided an instant veneer of respectability. So many newly wealthy people built English houses in the suburbs during the boom times of the 1920's that it gave rise to the derisive term 'stockbroker Tudor.' " Those built in Florida were no different in style than their counterparts in New York or Minnesota. Not more than 10 were built in Forest Hills (and, of course, Tudors were built in other developments too, especially Temple Terrace, Palma Ceia and Davis Islands), and after the hard times hit Florida in 1929, some fell into disrepair. Mrs. Malcolm Wheeler, who lives in one near the golf course, remembers one that was sold in 1933 for $900. "The boom went bust," she says. "The plumbing was out of this one; the fixtures were gone. It had been vandalized, probably by kids." The ones that survive today are there thanks to caring owners who, during their homes' lifetimes, spent the necessary amount of money that has kept them going for these 60 years. Local historian Hampton Dunn speculated that the Tudors of Forest Hills were built simply because that was one of many styles prevalent in the boom-time 1920's. As for mine, records say it was built in 1928, basically as it sits today. Neighbors say it and the one next to it were built by a pair of English sisters who, because they wanted to be close to each other, had them constructed on the edges of their lots. It is a lovely house.
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