Teacher, historian, and author Thelma Peters specialized in north Dade County, Miami and the Bahamas. She was active in the Historical Association of Southern Florida, 1940 until about 1989, and served as President of the Florida Historical Society, 1974-1976.
Born in Independence Mo., April 22, 1905, Thelma Peterson came to Florida in 1914 when she was ten years old. After spending a year in Sebring, the Peterson family continued on to Miami, where they settled on 12.5 acres of isolated pine ridge near Lemon City. Peterson graduated from Miami High School in 1922, and attended Brenau College in Gainesville, Georgia, on a $200 scholarship.
In 1926 she married Tom Peters, her high school sweetheart, whose father was South Florida's well-known "Tomato King" and the owner of the Halcyon Hotel on Flagler Street. The couple honeymooned in Bimini, where they endured the 1926 hurricane. At first presumed dead, they returned to Miami, which had also been devastated by the storm. That same year, after the land bust wiped out her father-in-law's fortune, Peters began teaching at William Jennings Bryan High School.
In 1930, at age twenty five, she became a teacher at Edison High School -- a position she was to hold for twenty-seven years. In later years she earned her M.A. at Duke University and her Ph.D. at the University of Florida. She taught at the University of Miami, became the first chairwoman of the social studies program at Miami-Dade Community College, and developed the first Latin American history class for Dade public schools.
Peters is perhaps best remembered for the energy and enthusiasm she strove to research and preserve South Florida's past. She gave countless talks and presentations that demonstrated the value and relevance of local history. Her years of research yielded three seminal works: Lemon City, Miami 1909, and Biscayne Country, which provide a detailed depiction of pioneer life in South Florida. As part of her efforts to preserve the region's history, she served as interim director of the Historical Museum of Southern Florida (1974), president of the Florida Historical Society, and associate editor of Tequesta the Journal of the Historical Association.
Peters also wrote articles for national magazines, including Colliers, Women's Day, and Seventeen. She published a novel set in the Bahamas entitled The Cove of the Silver Fish, as well as scores of published poems that her sister Rachel Roller later collected in a book. She biked across England, and traveled widely from Russia to India. She divorced her husband, but maintained friendships with his family. In 1993, in order to be near her son, she moved to a retirement home in South Carolina, where she remained until she passed away in 1996.
Author: Graham Andrew
Thelma Peters papers
| HistoryMiami Archives & Research Center
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