Just like all but one of my previous books, Tracing a T to Tampa is a travelogue. Unlike any of those books, it is not about following a specific road or reaching specific destinations. It is about following a single specific trip. That trip is one made by my great-grandparents in 1920 in a Model T Ford. Throughout the 1920 journey, my great-grandmother sent a series of letters to her daughter in which town names were often included in her reports of what they were seeing and doing. Those town names allowed me to roughly reproduce their route. There are multiple reasons why my reproduction is a rough one. One is that roads have changed in the intervening years and another is that I usually had to guess at the path they took between the towns my great-grandmother mentioned. Some of those guesses are almost certainly wrong but proving it, should you be so inclined, would not be easy. Parts of the 1920 trip were clearly on the Dixie Highway and National Old Trails Road although neither is identified by name in the letters.

Frank and Gertrude, my great-grandparents, headed south from their western Ohio home and entered Florida almost directly south of Valdosta, GA. They reached Jacksonville and Miami on the east coast then crossed the center of the state to check out Tampa. Despite the book’s title, Tampa was not their stated destination when they left home but it was more or less where their exploration of new Flordia territory came to an end. The rest of their time in Florida would be spent mostly revisiting places from just a few “base camps”. 

I began the trip chronicled in this book on the exact 100th anniversary of the original: November 4, 2020. The original was four months long; the recreation a little less than four weeks. My great-grandparents reached Tampa after a little more than a month on the road. They would leave Florida a little more than two months later and spend just over two weeks getting home. Although they left Florida on the same path that brought them there, they would move away from it in the middle of Georgia to visit the nation’s capital in Washington.

Tracing a T to Tampa is illustrated with more than 100 photographs; primarily from the 2020 trip. There are, however, several historical photos mixed in. A transcript of the original letters is included.

1920 and 2020 can both be considered “interesting times”. Both contained a presidential election and were in a period of considerable racial unrest. 2020 was in the middle of a major pandemic and one had just ended in 1920. 1920 was also made interesting by the recent ending of a worldwide war and the passage of the 18th and 19th amendments to the U.S. Constitution. All of these are noted, but not dwelled upon, in the book.

Tracing a T to Tampa, Denny Gibson, Trip Mouse Publishing, 2021, paperback, 9 x 6 inches, 217 pages, ISBN 979-8739822550.

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