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Speaker highlights Tampa’s 1925 growth: Booker T. Washington School, West Tampa annexation, Davis Islands and Temple Terrace
Summary
At Archives Awareness Week, Rodney Kite Powell reviewed Tampa’s 1925 milestone events: the founding and construction of Booker T. Washington School, the annexation of West Tampa, early development of Davis Islands and bonds for Tampa Municipal Hospital, and the origins of Temple Terrace.
At an Archives Awareness Week program, Rodney Kite Powell, director of the Tuttle Map Library at the Tampa Bay History Center, summarized major developments in Tampa in 1925, including school construction, annexation of West Tampa, real-estate growth, and early infrastructure projects that shaped the city.
Powell highlighted Booker T. Washington School as a significant educational investment of the 1920s: a brick school built near the Scrub and Afro‑Cuban sections of Ybor City. He said the building’s substantial materials and large windows reflected the era’s investment in school infrastructure for Black students. Powell noted faculty and alumni who played local roles, including Howard W. Blake and educator Hilda Turner, the latter involved in a lawsuit for equal pay for Black teachers that Thurgood Marshall argued at the Supreme Court level before he became a justice.
Powell reviewed municipal growth in 1925: the city annexed the separate municipality of West Tampa in January 1925, bringing into Tampa an industrial and population base that previously made West Tampa, at one point, the seventh-largest city in Florida. Powell said the annexation, with other boundary changes, briefly made Tampa among the state’s largest cities in that decade.
The presentation also covered the development of Davis Islands, where developers built the island and early residences during the 1920s; Powell noted bonds issued in 1925 to pay for what was then Tampa Municipal Hospital (later Tampa General Hospital), which opened in 1927. He explained that the island’s original construction began after the 1921 hurricane had submerged the smaller islands that were later connected to form Davis Islands.
Powell closed by noting Temple Terrace’s origins as a planned orange‑grove suburb and that it marked its centennial the same year as the celebration. The program was historical and educational; it did not propose city policy or actions. Powell encouraged attendees to view other Archives Awareness Week events for deeper dives into specific topics such as the Booker T. Washington School centennial program at the Tampa Bay History Center.
