TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Rhodin House Gone, Name Remains

Tribune photo by SUSAN M. GREEN

This forlorn wood-frame house along U.S. 301 near Rhodine Road stood for about 96 years before it burned down June 3.

ADVERTISEMENT

By SUSAN M. GREEN

The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 22, 2008

RIVERVIEW - The old house stood empty and forlorn for years before it was set on fire and then reduced to rubble by a bulldozer and a mechanical shovel.

Before the June 3 blaze, thousands of motorists zoomed by daily on U.S. 301, likely paying little attention to the two-story, wood-frame relic. Whether the house came down through arson or a vagrant's carelessness remains under investigation.

But a few people still remember that the house at U.S. 301 and Rhodine Road once was the homestead of the Rhodin family, who came in the early 1900s to the huge expanse of pines and palmettos south of Riverview. The Rhodins cut a dirt road for their horse and wagon off the Tampa highway and started a dairy.

Over time, the dairy became a landmark, and the drive to the dairy became Rhodine Road - now two lanes of pavement that stretch from busy U.S. 301 across Balm-Riverview Road to Boyette Road.

Urban-style development has leap-frogged the old dairy, with the clustered homes of Rivercrest stretching to the north and Panther Trace and South Pointe subdivisions sprawling to the south. But remnants of the Rhodin enterprise, expanded and operated in later years by dairyman Bill Martinez of Brandon, linger along Rhodine Road, less than a mile east of U.S. 301.

A white shell of a building visible from Rhodine Road is part of the original dairy, Martinez said. The pasture carried up to 700 cows before the dairy closed in 2005. Martinez and his brother, Albert, had another 500 cows at a second dairy that straddled Symmes Road to the north. That dairy closed in 2000.

Martinez worked at the old Rhodin dairy in the 1960s, when it was owned by cattleman Ralph Diez. The Martinez brothers bought the dairy in the early 1970s.

Cow Country Heritage

Simone Finuff of Sundance lived next door to the Rhodins in the late 1950s, after they retired from the demands of milking cows day and night. She figures the spelling of the name on road signs changed to reflect the Swedish pronunciation of Rhodin.

Lewis and Betty Symmes of Sun City Center, formerly of Riverview, say the house used to sit on the east side of U.S. 301, next to the old dairy barn. Apparently it was moved to the west side of the highway when the dairy was sold, possibly in the1950s.

"They had the most marvelous milk," said Betty Symmes, who was a dairy customer around 1950. "Everybody loved the Rhodins' milk."

Her husband remembers riding his bicycle down the rough-hewn road to the dairy to earn spending money for mending fences or painting. When he was a boy in the early 1940s, "there was nothing else on that road, except the Rhodins."

He said the Rhodins used to leave a pint of fresh milk in a cooler for him.

The Rhodin dairy likely was among early businesses of its kind in rural Hillsborough. Before 1900, most families kept their own cows to supply milk, said Jay Boosinger, president of the Florida Dairy Products Association in Tallahassee.

Dairies that bottled and delivered milk by horse and buggy sprang up in the Tampa area around the turn of the 19th century, according to longtime dairyman Julian Lane. The former statesman and Tampa mayor was interviewed by The Tampa Tribune before his death in 1997.

Other large dairies in eastern Hillsborough, including enterprises founded by the Campoamor family in Palm River and Guagliardo family in Brandon, started in the 1920s.

Eight members of the Rhodin family, all siblings, are buried in Riverview's Hackney Cemetery. Newspaper death notices indicate that most of the brothers and sisters moved to Riverview from Illinois in 1919.

At least one sibling, Frank Rhodin, who died in 1949, is listed as a native of Sweden.

The sprawling territory the family would have arrived to find in 1919 was dubbed Riverview north of the Alafia River and Peru on the south side. Row crops and citrus groves dominated the cultivated land, according to information compiled by historian Norma Goolsby Frazier.

A narrow state highway of glazed brick stretched from Tampa to just south of the river and continued as a shell road to Wimauma. In the 1950s, the road became U.S. 301.

The Rhodins were members of Riverview United Methodist Church. Matilda Rhodin, who moved to Ellenton to live with a niece shortly before her death at age 91, was church secretary for 22 years, according to her 1975 obituary. The church has little information, other than membership rolls.

Matilda Rhodin was survived by a niece and nephew, both outside the Tampa area. Neither could be located for comment.

Midcentury Memories

By 1958, when Finuff met the family, four surviving Rhodins had moved their house to the west side of U.S. 301, where Rhodine Road is still a dirt drive. A brother, August, and three sisters, Hannah, Anna and Matilda, spent their final years there, Finuff said. Their dairy had been sold to Diez.

Finuff cleaned house and ran errands for the Rhodins. Her husband, the late Oliver Finuff, worked for Diez.

The Rhodin sisters kept a neat house and liked to entertain visitors, often from the Methodist church, Finuff recalled. The women and their brother used to tell stories about traveling to Tampa by horse and wagon to buy white uniforms during the dairy's early days, Finuff recalled.

Finuff's son, David, said he did odd jobs for the women of the house, and they treated him like a son.

"You would think they would be hardened by working so hard, but they were very much ladies," he said. "They liked their fine china."

Comforts Of Home

Matilda was the last of the Rhodins to live in the house. After she packed up for Ellenton in the mid-1970s, the Bahr family moved in. Brian Bahr, who recently moved to Cody, Wyo., from Wimauma, said he considers the rambling wood-frame house his childhood home. He lived there for about 10 years, moving away some time during his junior high school days.

His father, Max, worked for Diez tending beef cattle on a spread a little to the south off Cowley Road. The family rented the former Rhodin residence until 1984, Brian Bahr said.

The Diez family owned a big swath of land, mostly pasture, stretching to Bullfrog Creek, Bahr said. Ralph and Carmen Diez, now deceased, lived in a house farther west of the Rhodin place.

"We remember when all of that was backwoods country and dirt roads," Bahr said. "Everybody knew everybody."

The Rhodin home was bigger than it looked from the outside, said Bahr, one of six children in the family.

"The house was very, very nice," he recalled. "It was all wood floors. It had a large kitchen in the back. ... You could actually put a table that could seat at least 10 people in there."

Pillars and glass shelves divided a great room that dominated the first floor into a living room and family room, Bahr said. The house originally had a red-brick fireplace, but it was replaced with a furnace.

Part of the back porch had been renovated to provide the home's only bathroom, Bahr said. There was a first-floor bedroom under the staircase.

Upstairs were a spacious sitting room and three more bedrooms. Bahr was intrigued by a long closet that lined one wall and spanned two bedrooms, so that a child could enter the closet from one room and emerge in the other room.

"We used to play back and forth in there," he said.

Bahr remembered a variety of citrus trees in the backyard. The family had their pick of oranges, tangerines, lemons and grapefruit.

Family lore had it that the house was haunted. Bahr said lights mysteriously were turned out and doors opened or closed.

"Mom used to joke that Mr. and Mrs. Rhodin were looking out for us," Bahr said.

Tribune researcher Stephanie Pincus contributed to this report.

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT