The Curry Houses are two of the oldest homes in Bradenton still standing on their original sites, and their age and connection to the Curry family make them important to the community’s history. Reflections of Manatee is dedicated to their preservation, restoration, and use as historic house museums. Captain John Curry, born in Green Turtle Cay, Bahamas, in 1811, was a ship builder, mariner, salvager, and cattle trader along Florida’s west coast and the Atlantic. After marrying Mary Ward Kemp, he moved to Key West, while maintaining extended family ties there and in the Bahamas. In 1859, during a cattle trading expedition and while docked at Andress Tavern on Snead Island, he bought the property known as the Manatee Mineral Spring from Dr. Franklin Branch. By the fall of 1860, twenty-nine members of the Curry family had migrated from Key West to the settlement, including married adults, children, and in-laws; six Curry homes appeared on the 1860 census and sixteen on the census of 1870. Family members who had not yet married soon married other settlers, and by 1870 the Currys were related to nearly every family in the settlement. John Curry captained and built many ships, and two of them served as blockade runners during the Civil War. The eighty-ton schooner Dudley held a special place in family lore after William and Amos Curry, spotted by Union forces during a run, set the vessel ablaze rather than let it be captured, then hid in the mangroves carrying the ship’s barometer, which local descendants still prize. Samuel G. Curry and Amanda Andress Curry, who lived in the large house in the 1860s, inherited both houses when Captain John died in 1884. Although many family homes had been built across his acreage, this marked the first subdivision of the land as the settlement of Manatee had grown and few original parcels remained intact. Miss Amelia Curry inherited the homes next; she taught in Manatee schools for fifty years, sometimes serving as principal, worked summers as postmistress, and used the two houses as rentals while living nearby in the home her parents had moved to in 1870.