Nokomis

Knight, a staunch Methodist, his wife and 15 children, began a Bible study and worship in his home, and became known throughout the area as Reverend Knight, even though he was never ordained. A cattle rancher by trade, Knight’s success allowed him to build a schoolhouse that doubled as a church, and eventually built a separate chapel to house the locomotive bell he had acquired years before.

Around 1862, John S Blackburn and his wife Belinda Fields Blackburn (heir to the Marshall-Fields fortune), relocated to area. They bought 90 acres north of South Creek, and John established his medical practice. The bay between his land and Casey Key would later be christened Blackburn Bay.

In 1884, his son, Benjamin Franklin Blackburn, would move to the area and homestead his own 160 acres. As luck would have it, Benjamin Franklin Blackburn’s daughter would fall in love with and marry James Robert’s son Julian. Their descendants still live in the Nokomis area.

In 1870, the Roberts family moved to Florida from Georgia, spreading across the Gulf Coast, from Bartow, all the way down to Pine Island. Richard, Mitch & James Roberts chose to make the Sarasota-Venice area their home, and the Bay was named for Richard. James would marry one of Rev. Knight’s girls, and go on to have 12 children.

In 1883, Richard Roberts sold a portion of his land to Frank Higel, a chemist who had come to the area to prove his idea that starch could be profitably derived from the root of the cassavas plant. Unfortunately, Higel’s primary investor visited him during 1885, the coldest winter ever recorded, and decided that Florida was no place to grow tropical plants.

Higel would go on to develop high grade cane syrup and several citrus-related foods with the orange and lemon groves he had bought from Roberts, and established the area’s first, but short lived post office. In 1888, he was instrumental in getting a new post office established, with the help of Darwin Curry. At their request, the US Government designated the area the post office served after the canal city of Venice.

The Seaboard Air Line Railway had rolled into Sarasota in 1903. Within 2 years, they had extended the tracks to Fruitville. In 1910, philanthropist Bertha Honoré Palmer acquired 140,000 acres south of Roberts Bay, both for her winter home and as an investment in the future. Shortly after the purchase, she convinced the railroad to add 10 more miles to the track, now stopping at a new depot, just outside of the heart of the new community she was looking to build. A community that she also named Venice.

When the train arrived in Southern Venice for the first time, it christened the new station the Venice Railway Station. Because of an obscure law, the establishment of a formal hub for transportation gave the railway stop precedence in the eyes of the US Government, and the process began to change the Northern Venice Post Office & region’s name.

Needless to say, this didn’t sit well with the residents in Northern Venice, especially when the decision was made to honor Ms. Palmer by renaming the area Potter, after her maiden name. For the next 6 years, a political battle royale would rage between the leaders of both communities.

In 1915, with pressure from the US Post Office and the Railroad making things difficult, the folks in Northern Venice relented, and voted to let the railroad choose between one of 3 native American names: Verona, Nokomis, and Eyota. However, a poorly worded, if well-meaning letter from Ms. Palmer, asserting her right to the name Venice sparked the battle back to a fever pitch.

Finally, on January 5, 1917, the post office was officially redesignated as Nokomis, FL. Just three months later, the United States entered World War I, and Ms. Palmer suspended the work on the town of Venice. Within a year, she had died and the project all but abandoned until 1925.

After the War to End all Wars concluded, Dr. Fred H. Albee, an orthopedic surgeon who invented bone grafts, moved to Nokomis and built the Polyanna Inn, the area’s first true luxury hotel. He also hired John Nolen to work begin developing the central area of Nokomis. Albee and Nolen would later move south and start platting out the town of Venice before selling it to the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers.

Today, Nokomis is home to just under 4,000 residents, although it attracts a fair amount of tourists and snowbirds. The small, still unincorporated area boasts one quarter of the historical buildings in the Sarasota area – 11 officially on the state’s historical register, and a handful more still being debated.

Rev. Knight’s church still exists, although it has been extensively remodeled and had to be completely rebuilt after a hurricane in 1926 devastated the old chapel. The Nokomis School, built in 1924 near Tamiami Trail was closed in 1992, but now serves as the entrance to Nokomis Community Park.

Frank Higel’s Nokomis Groves is also a popular place to visit and purchase several of the jams and jellies based on the recipes he first concocted over 100 years ago.