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Historical person
1864–1929
Frank Stranahan was an American trader and civic entrepreneur closely associated with the early development of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He arrived on the New River in 1893 to manage a ferry and soon established a trading business that served both settlers and Seminole customers.
Stranahan became postmaster and expanded into general merchandising, banking and real estate as the settlement grew around his trading post. He married schoolteacher Ivy Cromartie in 1900, and their New River home and trading post became a social and commercial centre whose surviving building is now preserved as the Stranahan House.
In Jane Kirkpatrick’s Mystic Sweet Communion, in 1900 Ivy Cromartie Stranahan joins her husband Frank at a remote trading post on Florida’s New River and becomes one of the region’s first English-speaking teachers.
Series
The Dreamcatcher series gathers four biographical novels about women and families who shaped communities across Oregon and Florida from the mid-nineteenth century into the early twentieth. Pioneer settlement, Indigenous displacement, coastal wealth and frontier education create very different settings, but each book centres on the consequences of belonging…
All books in this series
