Hernando, named for Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto, was founded in 1881 by the Croft and Van Ness families, and its citrus groves prospered beside the Tsala Apopka lakes as development followed nearby phosphate discoveries and the arrival of the Silver Springs, Ocala and Gulf Railroad by 1892. Mary Storey Croft Nickerson surveyed and platted the growing town, but World War I embargoes, the 1929 stock market crash, and the Great Depression brought decline. On this site in 1934, Annie Lenthal Van Ness Croft founded the Church of the Nazarene, and a devoted congregation built it with volunteer labor on land given by W.D. and Ruby Croft. Materials came through local contributions: the Dunnellon Phosphate Company donated rubble limestone hauled in Fred Spooner’s converted school bus, T.C. Ellis provided cement, J.R. Parker supplied lumber and metal roof shingles, and Annie Croft purchased the clear glass windows. The first service was held on Labor Day 1935 in a one-story wood and limestone church with a basement and two-story steeple, officiated by Reverend C.K. McKay of Nyack, N.Y., who had helped with construction. In 1936 the church ladies bought a bell from the Dunnellon Fire Department that hung in the tower until the 1970s. As the congregation grew, it built a larger church nearby on North Florida Avenue that opened on March 10, 1974. The original church, remembered as an example of the local community’s perseverance and self-reliance, later underwent alterations, neglect, abandonment, and condemnation before being demolished in 1993. The building had stood on a nine and one-half acre parcel as a one-story masonry vernacular structure with a full basement, simple rectangular plan, and two-story bell tower. Its rubble limestone walls reflected a local building tradition that persisted in this area after the decline of the phosphate boom and into the mid-twentieth century, and a few examples of this rare type of construction still survive elsewhere in Citrus County.