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HAPB Minutes 06/16/202324.A.c COLLIER COUNTY HISTORIC/ARCHAEOLOGICAL PRESERVATION BOARD MINUTES JUNE 16, 2023 LET IT BE REMEMBERED, the Collier County Historic/Archaeological Preservation Board in and for the County of Collier, having conducted business herein, met on this date at 9:30 AM in REGULAR SESSION at Collier Museum at Government Center — Lecture Hall, 3331 Tamiami Trail East, Naples, Florida, with the following members present: BOARD CHAIRMAN: Austin Bell Barry O'Brien Janice O'Connell Hank Sentowski Candace Johnson Tim Finn Ray Bellows Betsy Perdichizzi, excused Zach Burch, excused ALSO PRESENT: Amanda Townsend, Museum Director Suzanne Miceli, Operations Analyst, Zoning Division Ailyn Padron, Management Analyst I, Zoning Division Packet Pg. 263 24.A.c 1. Roll Call/Attendance Austin Bell called the meeting to order at 9:29 AM. Thank you to Amanda (Townsend) who is hosting this today. Roll call was taken, and a quorum was established. 2. Addenda to the Agenda No changes. 3. Approval of the Agenda Janice O'Connell moved to approve the agenda. The motion was seconded by Hank Sentowski. All in favor — aye. 4. Approval of May 19, 2023, Minutes ■ Janice O'Connell stated a correction to Page 2, `Ms. Perdichizzi moved to approve the January 20, 2023' should be changed to April 21, 2023. ■ Clarification was made regarding Page 5, bullet two — `8CR 241' was in red but there's no technical reason for that and need not be addressed. ■ Austin Bell had no other issues with the May 19 minutes. ■ Janice O'Connell moved to approve the minutes as amended. The motion was seconded by Candace Johnson. All in favor — aye. 5. Old Business (A) Rosemary Cemetery (Plot W) Historic Designation • Amanda Townsend: I am disappointed to say that I don't have any updates. Real estate services have been handling/preparing quick claim deeds and having attorney review of those, and that's where we are still, which is disappointing to me that a month has gone by and it has not moved forward any. However, the woman who works for real estate services who has been assigned this project was also assigned the responsibility of preparing all the temporary access easements for the beach berm project. So, it's not like she hasn't been working. She just hasn't been working on our project. I sent an email to her before the meeting and asked for an update. She will move the project back up in her list. (B) Response Letter to Calusa Mound ■ Austin Bell: We were sent a draft of this letter and we'll open it up to discussion to the letter and its content. Thank you to the county staff for putting that draft together for us. ■ (Speaker 3 ?): When the property owner applies for a building permit they generally have a notice letter saying what to do if architectural artifacts are discovered, and this takes it a step further because we do believe there is a case for that. ■ Austin Bell: I liked that everything was spelled out. Not too much extra was included. My concern about the letter was the second sentence. • Discussion ensued about rewording "it was discussed that there may be an archaeological site on the property". Packet Pg. 264 24.A.c • Rewording the sentence to say `a concerned citizen raised the possibility of an archaeological site.' • A copy of last month's minutes would be sent along with the letter. • We'll have the staff update the letter and email it to us for approval so there won't be a month or so delay in sending out the letter and a copy of the May 19, 2023, minutes. • In addition, Betsy Perdichizzi will have a chance to look at the revision. • All in favor — aye. (C) Visit to Historic Sites ■ (Speaker 3 ?): Just a follow-up discussion from the first time we raised the subject. Have a process for looking at the next site(s) and when that might be; have a plan in advance to make sure we get the date, room and location when we need it. One of the sites that I'd like to go back to is Robert's Ranch. • Discussion ensued with regard to Robert's Ranch/ Immokalee, Marco Island, the Everglades Museums. • Make sure the museum is open or have a Ranger open the building. • Make an inquiry regarding the county providing transportation such as a van or explorer. Take a head count of who wants to ride or drive in their own vehicle. • We'll try to work this out for November. 6. Next Meeting ■ Austin Bell: Decision was made to skip the July 21 scheduled meeting. The next meeting will be held August 18, 2023. ■ Candace Johnson moved to approve cancelling the July 21 and approved the August 18, 2023, meeting. The motion was seconded by Janice O'Connell. All in favor — aye 7. New Business (A) Tour of Collier Museum at the Government Center ■ Amanda Townsend: We'll start at the far end of the campus and show you the Craighead Laboratory because that was somewhat of the impetus for visiting. There are two or three spots on the way; maybe come back and take an AC break; then go back out to visit other sites. WALK -ABOUT AND COMMENTS: 9:51 AM: Just leaving the lecture hall, Amanda commented on an original painting by Phil Fisher of a panther, Tracker, owned by Jim McMullen. Jim used to bring Tracker to visit schools to interact safely with the children. One of the things Amanda wanted to do for the Centennial was to adapt this painting to a Hawaiian print and get shirts. We were not able to accomplish that but perhaps for some other celebration. This is a steam locomotive used for logging as late as the 1950's/1960's. There were I believe four similar engines made by the Baldwin Locomotive Works. This one at the museum was used to transport Cypress logs. We do have a colony of registered feral cats on the property. When we feed them, we get the arrival of ducks. Packet Pg. 265 24.A.c • This is the Craighead Lab and it is a cooperative arrangement with the Southwest Florida Archaeological Society. They use it as their laboratory and they process whatever comes out of the field in local days. Sometimes they have lab hours where museum visitors can come. And when we have special days, family days for children, etc., they'll send a volunteer in to have the lab open and the kids can come through. The volunteer can do some demonstrations on various typical archaeological materials that are found here in Southwest Florida and what the Calusa (Indiana) did with them and their tools. There's not a terrible amount of archaeological work going on in Southwest Florida right now. This lab was very, very active in the 1980's/1990's, into the early 2000's. It seems like we're at a plateau with what we can learn with the technology that we have with what's around. I think the most exciting thing that's happening in South Florida in archaeology is LiDAR technology that's exposing variations in topography that otherwise we could not know about because of dense over cover and that's leading archaeologists to understand that there was actually a lot more habitation in the center of the state than ever thought before. The building itself, which actually was the field lab of Doctor Frank Craighead and the Craighead family is absolutely fascinating. Among members of the family were Doctor Craighead, who is an entomologist, came to be known as a scholar of the Everglades, as well as a pioneer in radio telemetry that was actually used first on Grizzlies but it's the same technology used to track panthers today. Jean Craighead George wrote "My Side of the Mountain," which is a famous children's book. Most kids read it in fifth grade. And we do have in our collection a number of his botanical specimens as well. • One of the founding members of the Preservation Board for the county was Arthur Lee. • Our office has recently recruited a couple of new members from the anthropology program at FGCU. • A large dark duck is sitting on the porch of the Craighead lab. Doesn't move and doesn't seem to be real. But it is. • When we feed the cats, the ducks come around. We had a young woman who was very slight and worked on Sunday. She was a nervous person and she would get a little excited about the duck so she learned to bring an umbrella with her to ward off any aggressive ducks — open it in front of the ducks and send them off that way. • This is a little backwards, but the hunting gallery where I'll take you in a moment and the garage came together to this site. They were slated for demolition. They were in the area of Pine Ridge and 26; then between 41 and Goodlett the neighborhood up there north of Naples High. • This is a great example of a historic (swamp) buggy. We don't know much about this buggy. It is typical of the 1940's and 50's. The guys who would put these together would get together whatever carriage, motor and transmission configuration and get them through the swamp to their hunting grounds. It was exclusively utilitarian in its origin invented by Ed Frank who had spent a little bit of time out in California. And so there was a development of the swamp buggy out of the dune buggy tradition. Of course, the boys put machines together and Packet Pg. 266 24.A.c boys have to see who's the fastest. So the first buggy races were held in 1949 and I think it was in a potato patch. And it's now just north of Airport Road near Corporate Square. If anybody's lived here as long as me, you might remember when both the swamp buggy grounds and the fairgrounds were both in that area and since then have moved out East. The Kokomis is the ferry boat that took people from across Gordon Pass from the end where Port Royal is over to the Keewaydin Club and was in service into the 1980s. It's been very nicely restored. There's still a member of the Sporter family, a very well known local family of boat builders who will come and make a few repairs for us every now and then. She is dry docked. She looks like she's in the water. Every now and then in a in a real flood situation that retention pond will come up, but basically we keep her dry. We try to keep her dry. The Huntoon Gallery is one of my favorites just because it is such a cute little building, real typical of the kind of cottage that folks would have been living in herein the post war but mid century. It was not owned by George Huntoon. It was in fact owned by Henry (?) who was another one of those members of the early families of Naples. You can see his initials there HD for Henry. George Huntoon, who was a founder of the Historical Society so we named the cottage after him. And then Dr. Baum started coming to Naples in the '20's. He saw an ad in Field and Stream Magazine for a Naples hotel, touting the fishing and hunting of the area. He eventually retired here and attempted to collect one of every species of fauna that would be typical for Collier County. There's a photo here of his home which was on Broad Avenue South in Naples and that home still exists and is part of the headquarters of the Naples Historical Society. He did a good job in his attempt to gather one of each species of fauna that you might find around here. We have otters sometimes here on this property that play in those ponds over there. They're super cute. But they can get a little feisty and can be fierce when they're protecting young. So they're like all wildlife. Where's the bear? We'll go down through the orchid house really quickly. It's pretty even if it's in need of some repairs. The Orchid house is in a little bit of a rebuild, but it's really pretty to look at nonetheless and is dedicated to Carolyn Craighead, Doctor Craighead's widow and a lover of orchids. The Orchid Society comes and helps us out and we've got a few bloomers right now. Often there are many, many bloomers, but the pond on the other hand is kind of always in a state of being rebuilt. One of these days we'll get in there and really get it done. The raccoons come and wash their food in here and poke holes in the liner. So that's our constant challenge with the Orchard House. I've taken you backwards through everything so all the signage we hit as we're leaving. We'll take an AC break and also take a look at our 1923 exhibit. As part of our Centennial celebration, Stephanie Long, Museum Manager, put these exhibits together to talk about what was going on locally but also in the state, the nation and the whole world during the year 1923. She put together a full timeline of interesting things that happened during that year and then just Tuesday afternoon she did a lecture. It was called, The Wild and Weird Headlines of 1923. She had some great stories of different things that happened and their effect on Packet Pg. 267 24.A.c culture in general, one of which was the opening of King Tut's Tomb in 1923. She covers a little bit about fashion and home decor and technology of the day. • I always loved the campaign buttons and stuff with the losers. That's so funny. • Kit homes by Sears Roebuck. The house that I live in isn't too dissimilar from this one, a little bigger but not much. I'm sure it wasn't a kit home because I know there's Dade County hard pine in there, but I wouldn't be surprised if they bought the plans. My house was moved. It used to be downtown Naples and just moved it over here at East Naples. I came home from work one day and there's this guy standing in my driveway. He said that he and his dad built the house when he was 13 years old. So I got to find out what the original address was and who the family was. They were the Earnshaw's and Rodney Earnshaw, the youngest of those brothers, has just passed away. We have a little mullet skiff built by one of the Earnshaw's. Their daddy was a boat captain as well as a carpenter. And we have a mullet boat built by one of the Earnshaw's at the Naples Street Museum. • Do you know if the (Mizner?) house is still standing? • I'm reading a book called Bubble in the Sun right now and it talks about all the Titans of the East Coast of Florida; talks a lot about him and the architecture and I didn't think there were any on this side of Florida. Just a few and this one looks modest. • The Naples Historical Society has worked very, very hard to promote historic preservation. There is a designated historic district in downtown Naples. Understandably the Council has always stopped short of putting in any specific protections. For Collier County to have an HPB — other cities aren't doing that. • Amanda, are all these items in your collections or where they sourced for the exhibit? They were sourced for the exhibit mostly, and so you know some go into the teaching collection. We are finding ourselves more and more wanting to build out that kind of exhibit props of collections so that we can do stuff like this. Oh, a Buffalo nickel. Let's get that. These are the Craftsman houses that you could order from Sears, and when a Craftsman house goes up for sale, they can get whatever price they want. That's how well built they are. I had a silver dollar, can't remember the year, but it was very, very old. I don't remember the year, it was quite a few years ago, but I ended up selling it for almost $600.00. The kinds that are worth the most are the ones that have mistakes on them. Wonder how big the Sears homes were? My guess would be about 600-800-1100 square feet. Back in the day you could get everything at Sears — the whole house. Think about the institution of Sears — how they lost their way, management, marketing. What a shame, such a household name. Subsequent generations that lost their way. • Here is our (?) Hall. And it's kind of a counterclockwise experience, starting with prehistory and going all the way around. I won't narrate too much of it unless you have questions because there's a lot here. We do have in this little corner here, a replica of the Key Marco cat. If you want to see the real one you have to go to the Marco Island Historical Museum and you have to go there before June, 2026.And when it goes back to the Smithsonian it will have to rest for a long, long time. It is interesting John Barrio is an excellent archaeologist and still around in town. I can look at his replica and say it's a fine replica. But it's nothing like looking at the real thing and 1 can't even say why exactly. When the original goes back why is it Packet Pg. 268 24.A.c going to have to rest a long time? It's extremely fragile. It's made of wood and it's hundreds of years old, so it's very susceptible to environmental conditions. The museum had to build a special case for it to monitor the relative humidity and the temperature, and keep the light levels very low. The Smithsonian has really strict standards and for it to be brought here. Austin has an app on his phone that tells him when the humidity gets too high. Well, I'm hoping that when my family comes, I'd love to take them here. It's like looking for things to do with people who are not from the area. And it's not just going to the beach every day. The first singer sewing machine. They don't have the year on it — perhaps the `20's? My grandmother had one like this. Look at this downtown Naples. A lot went for $2.50 in the day. • But we can start to move towards Naples cottage, the yellow and green building. This is actually a form of concrete that people were able to make to use as a sturdy building substance/material and it actually is part of the original foundation of this building. This is the Naples cottage. It was built in the `30s, owned by William Floyd, right? And if I remember correctly, he had a liquor store, but then he sold to John Pulling when he became mayor because they thought it would be unseemly for the mayor to own that kind of establishment. This house was over about where the Social Security office was and the Pizza Hut, where the Catholic Charities is now. This was along in there somewhere right on Tamiami Trail which of course got widened and widened. At one point the cottage sat nicely. So it was under threat of demolition and moved to this location to save it in 1989. We use the upstairs for storage and the stairs are treacherous so we don't let people go up there. It's interesting because in our jobs, telling the story of Collier County history, which sounds kind of finite, there's actually such a breadth of what we do, everything from archaeology, telling relativity using modern stories and then also putting on special events to designing the exhibits to this and that. Historic preservation is really one of my favorites and I love these old houses. My family owns a farmhouse in Ohio that was built in 1853, so that's probably why it's near and dear to my heart. But all these building materials and finishes and the way things were done, I find it fun and fascinating. (Someone turns on old music.) We actually have a new round of preservation going on all the small structures here. So they are ripe for a second round of preservation and TLC.So we're just going out to bid on that. We're going to build a ramp to the lab which is the only building that's not accessible, and the bid to include the garage, the Huntoon, the cottage, and the Rogers Studio. We'll probably spend $250,000. How do you acquire the money? Is it through donations of friends, government budgeting? Yes and yes; our predominant source of funds is tourist taxes. The museum system right now costs about $2.7M to run a year and we're funded up to $2M by tourists taxes, our earned revenue is little pennies (in comparison) and then we do secure grants and the general fund picks up what our expenses are beyond the tourist tax allocation and that gap is getting wider because it's a flat rate. And costs keep going up. I was very sad when I saw what we're paying for properly insurance this year. The items that are on display, do you cast the call out and say, hey, we're going to change something and this is what we're looking for? Yes, mostly through gifts and donations. We have a very ambitious project that we Packet Pg. 269 24.A.c would like to do to create a dedicated space for collections. Right now things are kind of squirreled away here and there, but very professionally. It limits our collecting practice just because of storage. And so, we always prefer to collect things that have a provenance locally, but sometimes, like some things you saw in the exhibit case from the 1923 exhibit, for example the toaster was bought on eBay. And then it might not become part of the permanent museum collection but we keep it for props basically. And the last place I want to show you is the Rogers Studio. Museums are a creative field and there is no end to the ideas there's just always an end to the money. So the Rogers Studio again is one of my favorites. I habitually favor underdogs. I would call the Rogers Studio sort of an architectural underdog. It's not a pretty building, but I do think it's a really important building that we saved not only because of the story of E. George Rogers, but also because you wouldn't know it by driving around downtown Naples now but all the buildings down there used to look like this. It's really important to remember that Naples had some pretty simple beginnings. George retired and moved here. He was quite wealthy. He lived to be 101. He lived in Naples for 50 years without ever needing to work. But one of the ways that that was achieved was by living very simply. So this building used to be on 6th Street in Naples. If you know where the 5th Avenue Coffee Company is this was in that same block. This was E. George's outbuilding — studio. This is a pretty faithful representation of how he did his work. He painted a painting every day and gave more than half of them away. He was considered a very good artist, at least regionally, but he had no interest in selling his paintings. Wouldn't sell them, only gave them away. Do they ever show up randomly at a yard sale? They do. In fact one of the partner organizations that we love to work with is the Southwest Florida Mental Health Society. E. George was a founder of The Mental Health Society as well as the Art Association as well the Historical Society. So we do an annual event called the Art and Soul at the Museum where we kind of bring those 3 concepts together. As we were planning the first one the Executive Director of the Mental Health Association said oh, I have an E. George Rogers picture hanging in my office over my desk. He retired as a CPA and he was one of those people who kept very good records. So he kept records of all of his paintings. After about 1967, he stopped naming them. He just numbered them and they number over 2000. He kept a log of each painting and who he gave it away to. And then he kept a cross reference log that was Alpha by the recipient and had the number. His record keeping was exquisite. What I find very interesting is that his style changes over time. The paintings go chronologically and of course he's painting for over 50-60 years. So you start over here in the `50's and as you move you see 1967. And then these little guys, when he was still painting into his 90's, he used to stand at that counter to paint but he wasn't well enough, so he'd pull a card table over to the bed and paint, and that's why the canvas in his older years got smaller and smaller. Did he only paint? I see pottery here. Yes all of these are his. You'll see some decorative arts, heated printmaking and painted jewelry and then he did these ceramics as well. No end to his creativity. I just think it's so interesting because he was a businessman too. He was a really great community leader and again, I think that's what this tells Packet Pg. 270 24.A.c about Naples. A story of these really wealthy people who retired from all over the country, if not the world, and then found Naples and started these amazing institutions and lived really simply, but built up a world class community. Great story. Served on the school board and volunteered. His daughters who are still alive helped us put all this together. But he held counsel for people in the community. They would come to him for financial advice. The Second Bank of Naples, somewhere in our archives we have the founding paperwork, the establishment paperwork and it has this address. So he really helped make the place what it is today. I think that's going to be our last stop. S. Review of Project and Activity Log We have nothing new that we need to go over. 9. Public Comments None. 10. HAPB Comments None. 11. Adjournment Motion to adjourn. All in favor — aye. NOTE: Candace Johnson had to leave the meeting at 10:20 AM There being no further business for the good of the County, the meeting was adjourned by order of the chairman at 11:00 AM. HISTORIC/ARC OLOGICAL PRESE%VATION BOARD Austin Bell, Chairman These minutes were approved by the board on _ L2o i 3 , as presented (check one) , or ad amended Packet Pg. 271