TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Kin Of Pioneering Families Reunite

ADVERTISEMENT

By DAVID SOMMER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 19, 2008

DADE CITY - Susan Sumner shook hands with a distant cousin for the first time Saturday as about 75 descendants of some of Dade City's founding families did the same around her.

"There's not a person here, other than my two brothers, that I knew before today," said Elder Sumner, the cousin Susan had never met.

"Her great-great-grandfather and my great-great-grandfather were brothers," Sumner explained.

Almost everyone who gathered at the Withlacoochee River Park pavilion Saturday morning for a reunion of the Sumner, McMillan and Lanier families came from somewhere else.

Susan Sumner said she was born and raised in Tampa.

Elder Sumner grew up in Lithia and knew of - but had never met - the Tampa Sumners.

He now lives in Okeechobee and was one of the oldest members of the extended clan at Saturday's reunion, where he gave one of several lectures on family history.

He told the group that almost every one of them is descended from Hardy Lanier, who with wife Melintha moved to Florida prior to 1820; Jesse Cary Sumner, who also moved here from Georgia a few years later; and Robert and Alex Sumner, two of Jesse's younger brothers who brought their families south after Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's Union army burned their Georgia farms during the 1864 March to the Sea.

After that, the family trees mingle and mingle again, according to fellow family historians Joann Sumner Bandy and Susan McMillan Shelton. In fact, the families "all knew each other back in Georgia," Shelton said.

"For some reason they all picked Dade City, and they all ended up here on River Road," Shelton said.

For instance, one of her ancestors, Ashley McMillan, moved here from Georgia about 1875 and married Elizabeth "Betty" Sumner, daughter of Jesse and Caroline Sumner.

After initially settling in what was originally called Fort Dade, many of the related families moved their cattle to places as far east as Brevard County and as far south as Okeechobee County, Elder Sumner said.

There were so few settlers in Florida at the time that the men had to travel to distant counties to court spouses who often were their cousins, he said.

In those days, the alligator population on the Withlacoochee River was so thick they were threats to cattle and other ranch animals, he said. Cattlemen would hang beef carcasses laced with poison over the river, and the alligators would die in piles.

Family members raised cattle for the Confederacy. Indian raids, a post-Civil War breakdown in law and order and better grazing lands were all motives for the ancestors to move.

When Kissimmee was founded as the county seat of Osceola County, the Sumners and Laniers were there. But there were no family members around during the unanimous vote to make Osceola a dry county, he said, drawing laughter from a rapt audience of cousins.

In the 1880s, the Lanier cattle brand was the first to be registered in Kissimmee, and the Sumners and Laniers used the same brand in Hillsborough County throughout the 1900s, Elder Sumner told the group.

For Elba "Dena" McMillan Connell, Saturday was a long-deferred homecoming.

Connell, 89, said she grew up in Dade City but at 19 moved to Clearwater, where her husband and brother-in-law ran a kerosene delivery business in the 1930s.

Brian Sumner, a retired Air Force officer, said he traveled to the family reunion from his home in Niceville, in the Florida Panhandle.

"All three of my siblings are here," he said, adding that one brother came from as far as Texas.

Brian Sumner said he wonders why the 19-year-old Jesse Carey Sumner would have left a burgeoning family plantation in Georgia for the wilds of Florida.

Family lore has it that Jesse Sumner had heard there were wild cattle roaming the area that were free for the taking. He was not told there were still hostile natives in the area after the First Seminole War.

"Why did he settle in the territory that President Jackson had just cleared out?" Brian Sumner wondered. "Was it just the temptation of federal land grants? We're not sure it was."

Reporter David Sommer can be reached at (727) 815-1087 or dsommer@tampatrib.com.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT