In 1888 Wesley Lowe supervised construction of this home in Anona for his wife Mary, their children, and his father, Captain John Thomas Lowe. The Lowe family had expanded from a coastal shipping business into farming, raising a variety of crops, and they enjoyed candy pullings, horseback riding, and swimming in the Gulf of Mexico. Wesley lived here until the 1930s. During the 1870s and 1880s, Wesley and Captain Lowe operated a successful shipping business at a time when the nearest rail line was 100 miles north in Cedar Key and only a few dirt trails connected the peninsula to the rest of Florida; they carried farm products, vegetables, citrus, other cargo, and mail. The family had endured hardship during the Civil War along the Pinellas Gulf Coast, when relatives fought in distant battles and those at home struggled under the Union blockade of Florida; in 1862, three-year-old Wesley hid in the mangroves and watched Union forces board his father’s sloop. Captain John Thomas Lowe, a Bahamian native born in 1830, had spent 19 years shipping cargo from Key West along Florida’s west coast as far as Cedar Key, and in the late 1850s he chose Anona as the place to homestead with his wife Laura Meares Lowe and other family members. As Wesley built the house, the arrival of the Orange Belt Railway in 1888 brought faster and cheaper transportation, prompting the family to diversify into livestock, a citrus packing plant, a post office, and a general store. By the early 1890s, Captain Lowe retired and sold the family’s two largest schooners to sponges in Tarpon Springs. The two-story homestead-style house was built of pine and cypress, with decorative side porch roofs and large floor-length windows that improved air circulation and may reflect Bahamian influence. The house later moved three times: in 1951 Wesley’s daughter Corinna Lowe Condrick saved it from destruction and moved it to a lot in St. Petersburg, in 1970 it moved to the site of the former Haas Museum in St. Petersburg, and in 1991 it moved to Heritage Village. Workers numbered every board when it was dismantled in 1951 and reassembled it the following year. Anona took its name from sweet apples brought by early settlers from Key West, but those trees disappeared from Pinellas after the freezes of 1893 and 1894.