In an era and a place where the old routinely makes way for the new, a lovingly preserved 120-year-old house is as rare as the Aug. 25 vote to recognize its significance.
Margi Nanney and her husband, Pat, were married in the Johnson Helm castle on Highway 70 in Oneco, across the street from Oneco Elementary School. They raised their two sons there. Since 1985, they’ve fixed it up, replacing crumbling cedar shakes with Hardie board, restoring every piece of hardware possible, furnishing it with antiques, even repairing the porch when a car drove into it in 2017.
They compiled paperwork on the house from the former owners, got it placed on the National Register of Historic Places, and hosted the great-great-grandson of the house’s architect, J.S. Maus, at the celebration.
They fought efforts to remove a nearby 250-year-old oak tree and won. They fought the construction of a three-story development next door, and won.
With the historic landmark designation they requested and received from Manatee County commissioners on Aug. 25, they have a bit more ammunition to keep fighting to save a piece of old Oneco.
Garden spot
Break down the name of Oneco and you get One Co. — or “one company” — which, when the house was built, was all about citrus, Nanney told the board.
“Oneco is the garden spot of Manatee County,” she said.
In 1881, the Reasoner brothers, Pliny and Egbert, started a tree business that became Royal Palm Nursery. The first bud of the first pink grapefruit was grafted a block from the house, Nanney said, and Tropicana Products once used citrus from trees in the yard.
The Helm family arrived in Manatee County in 1877, according to county records, and in 1904, Johnson Helm bought the 5-acre property where the house now sits, planted grapefruit trees and sold the fruit to northern markets.
In 1906-08, he and his wife, Fannie, hired J.S. Maus, an architect and builder, to create what became known as the “castle,” Nanney said. Built from 90-pound blocks of concrete using sand from Sarasota Bay, poured into molds on site and left unpainted, the castle has withstood hurricanes ever since and has outlived the Reasoner family home, which has been demolished.
Helm lived in the home with his wife until his death in 1934. She sold the home the following year to Henry and Sarah Cogley, who divided the house into six apartments, enclosed the eastern two-thirds of the back porch, removed the stone fence around the yard and subdivided the land, according to county records.
About 10 years later, the Cogley family sold the home to the Griffith family, who lived on the first floor along the east side and rented the remaining units. During this period, the north veranda was enclosed.
The Griffith family kept the property until 1973, when the great-grandson of Johnson Helm, Edwin Wilson, purchased the property.
About a year later, the property was sold to Thomas and Jo Herzog, who sold to the Nanneys in 1985, who remain intent on saving the home.
“I think this is what we really want to encourage as a policy,” commission chair Tal Siddique said before the commission voted to start the process to grant a historic landmark designation for the house.
Cindy Lane is a staff writer for the Tampa Bay Beacons. She can be reached at clane@tbnweekly.com.