They Called Her “Roe”

Writers in Residence Program

Dr. Scotty and Hsiu Huang History Center

Plant City History & Photo Archives

She was not afraid to try anything. She swam in the creeks or rivers avoiding the alligators, pumped handcars racing along the railroad tracks, and loved to fly. In 1925 she flew from Paris to London with her sister and landed unexpectedly in a cow pasture where the pilot repaired the plane and continued to London. At twelve years old she rode one of the first trains to travel from Plant City to Tampa, accompanied by her father, James Taylor Evers, a prominent Plant City merchant.

Rowena Lee Evers was born in 1871 in Suwannee County and moved to Alafia, Hillsborough County, in1876 when her father moved the family there to start a business in the booming days of free land and the new steamboat river transportation. With the rumors of the railroad being built across Florida, James T. Evers bought acreage in a new area he named Shiloh about 1878. There he built his store, a sawmill, a grist mill, a cotton gin, and offered merchandise from farm tools to ready-made clothing to shoes and farm produce.

Evers made frequent trips to Tampa for supplies using his own horse or mule and wagon. He dreamed of making that trip on a train. He followed  the stories about the soon to be railroad, and when he heard that it was now expected to run about 3 miles south of Shiloh, he bought land along the predicted route and moved his store and all his merchandise to the village that became Plant City. Rowena Evers was a part of all this. She loved the excitement of the store and talked about meeting the men from the Seminole Tribe who would exchange gator meat and skins for goods. The new store, built about 1883, was the first to be established in the new town later named Plant City. James T. Evers died in 1884 at the age of thirty-nine and was buried in Shiloh Cemetery.

Roe Evers was then thirteen; she loved her father very much and remembered all he taught her. She grew up in a young town bursting with activity and potential. The Evers family and the Mays family may have met in the Alafia area years earlier. Now in Plant City, Roe and Samuel Edward Mays, who moved from Alafia to Plant City in 1887, both with driving personalities, met and were married in 1892. Rowena Evers Mays was twenty-one; Samuel Edward Mays was twenty-eight and well established in the Plant City business world and the citrus industry.

Roe quickly became the most prominent Plant City socialite. She was an early member of the First Baptist Church of Plant City, across the street from their opulent home on Collins Street, and a leadership member of Order of the Eastern Star. In addition to her husband and later her son, both of whom served as Mayor, Rowena Mays was also active in civic affairs. In addition to the Woman’s Club of Plant City, Roe belonged to the Plant City Music Club and hosted many parties in her elegant home. Roe was also a talented golfer and belonged to the Tampa Women’s Golf Association, where she also played poker.

After Samuel Mays died, in 1932, Roe ran the business interests including real estate, their stores, and hundreds of acres of groves. She loved to travel and in addition to trips to Europe, she had immense pleasure in her frequent trips to New York City. When the movement to build a hospital in Plant City began, the leaders were able to acquire only five acres; in June 1945 Rowena Mays donated an additional five acres to the hospital campaign. In addition to the hospital there was to be a nurse’s home which would then be named for Rowena Mays. It was never built.

After her death in May 1964, at the age of about ninety-three, Roe had two parks named after her. In November 1964 Rowena Lee Mays Park was established on South Evers Street just south of Renfro Street. A bandstand was to be erected for the upcoming Christmas season. In March 1965, Rowena Lee Mays Park gained a monument and became the home of the WCTU (Women’s Christian Temperance Union) marble drinking fountain.

With the growing expansion of the McGinnes Lumber Company, the City of Plant City sold Rowena Lee Mays Park’s Evers Street property to the lumber company and provided for the name of the new park west of the tennis courts and Dort Street. Rowena Lee Mays Park has been situated at this location since 1978, being improved several times, and is now to be the site of Rowena Mays Athletic Park. Her new park will include basketball, tennis, and pickleball courts, a pavilion, grills and picnic tables, all of which we are sure she will enjoy. Congratulations Roe!

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