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According to the recollection of Des Little (below), Ezra J. “Pop” Carter and “Mother” Maybelle Carter purchased this house in Port Richey in 1962. According to Jeff Cannon, county records indicate that the Carters bought the home in February 1966.
Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music by Mark Zwonitzer and Charles Hirshberg has:
Pop Carter had been thinking about it for a while, researching it in consumer magazines. He’d decided it was time to retire, and according to his research, New Port Richey, Florida, was the place to go; the little fishing village just north of Tampa was the best value the country offered. He found a bungalow there, on a crystal-clear freshwater river, a short boat ride away from the Gulf of Mexico. The fishing was great. Heck, he already had the deep-sea poles. So one night in 1961, Pop made his announcement. “Mom came in off the road, and he had decided that it was time for them to retire and go to Florida,” says Becky Bowman. “And he had already bought a place and made two trips with his truck moving stuff down there!”
Their daughter June Carter married Johnny Cash in 1968. Johnny Cash visited Port Richey on numerous occasions. The photo above, from a post card postmarked in 1915, shows the historic house which in the early days was owned by A. S. Leach and later Morgan Davis. The photo to the left shows the house in 2002.
When he died in 1975, the New Port Richey Press reported that Ezra J. “Pop” Carter “was a frequent visitor to the Port Richey area where he owned a house on the Pithlachascotee River. ... While in Port Richey, he spent most of his time fishing and writing music.”
In Cash: The Autobiography (1998), Johnny Cash wrote, “Several names, several homes. I'm part gypsy, part homebody, so I live according to a rhythm alien to most people but natural to me, splitting my time on a semi-predictable basis between my big house on Old Hickory Lake just outside Nashville; my farm at Bon Aqua, farther outside Nashville; the house in Port Richey, Florida, that June inherited from her parents; an endless succession of hotels all over the world; my bus; and my house in Jamaica, Cinnamon Hill.”
He also wrote:
Today I'm in Florida with June at the little house she inherited from her parents, Ezra and Maybelle Carter. ...
Their house is in Port Richey, a community identified by Consumer Reports in 1961 as the best and cheapest place to live in the whole United States. That’s what prompted Ezra, or Pop Carter as we all called him, to come looking for property, find this house on the river, and begin negotiating. About a year later he'd talked the owner into a good deal.
Naturally, many other citizens followed the beacon lit by Consumer Reports, and in short order Port Richey began growing at such an explosive rate that very soon it lost many of the qualities that made it so desirable in the first place. These days it’s just one in a string of little coastal towns that have blended into a solidly urbanized strip running forty miles, north to south, between U. S. 19 and the Gulf of Mexico. The highway is so clogged with traffic most of the time that people talk about it the way Californians talk about earthquakes or New Yorkers talk about crime, and in some of the souvenir shops you can buy T-shirts boasting I Survived U. S. 19.
Still, once you're on our little street, on Pop Carter’s front porch with the river right across the pavement from you and your boat bobbing at the dock, waiting to zoom you out into the open waters of the Gulf just a few hundred yards away, all that stuff could be in another country. Here you have the tide, the meeting of freshwater with salt, the seabirds and marsh birds and land birds. The weather cooks up its sudden subtropical tempests out over the horizon or, on the landward side, takes the whole afternoon to build one of those immense, imposing fortresses of thunderheads, and then, as afternoon begins its long transition to evening, turns the whole towering edifice purple-gray and brings it all tumbling and crashing down on you, transforming everything into wind and water. Mostly that’s a summer treat, so I don't experience it very often, for like other nonnatives with enough money and sense, we go elsewhere during Florida’s months of eighty percent humidity. Whenever I see it, though, it always makes me marvel: at the sheer scale, power, beauty, and complexity of God’s creation, at the simplicity and strength of my human root in nature.
The house itself is quite and comfortable, and it’s not at all grand in the manner of Cinnamon Hill or our main home on Old Hickory Lake. It’s just a regular Florida family bungalow from the early part of this century — 1912, I believe — wood-framed, with painted clapboard and a big screen porch in front. It reminds me a lot of the farmhouses you see in the hotter, more northerly parts of Australia. Unlike there, though, our neighbors are close. Next door is only twenty feet away. That helps us feel less like celebrities, and the people in the neighborhood help in that regard, too. They're friendly, but they allow us our peace and quiet. Strangers knock on the door sometimes, wanting to say hello or get an autograph, but not often enough to bother us.
The house inside is a maze. The rooms aren't very big, and most of them are decorated and furnished very much like they were in Pop and Maybelle’s day, with many of Pop and Maybelle’s things still in place. Which is good; it feels right to have such a palpable connection to them and their days. At times when our money has gotten tight, we've seriously considered selling the place (as we have Cinnamon Hill), but we've never absolutely had to, and I'm glad we've always decided to keep it. It belongs in the family.
