Thank you Kimmi for your warm welcome!
Oldsmar is in the Tampa Bay-Clearwater-St. Petersburg area, precisely at the northern tip of Tampa Bay and just 15 minutes from the Gulf of Mexico. It was founded by Eli Ransom Olds, the inventor of the Oldsmobile and REO cars. He bought almost 40,000 acres here in 1913 for $400,000.00 at the time and used engineers and surveyors from Boston to design a city modeled on Washington D.C. with tree-lined boulevards leading from the bay to downtown. The streets were originally paved with oyster shells but over the years most of that has become buried under the sand. Olds spent $100,000.00 drilling for oil here but only found water. He had over 4.5 million dollars invested here by 1923 but when he realized Oldsmar wasn't growing as he anticipated, he started liquidating his assets. The population was only 200 when he left, when we arrived almost 7 years ago it was about 10,000. Oldsmar has a small town feel with a feeling of space in a very densely populated county. We love it here, it's a real treasure!