Local News

DADE CITY – Combat-injured Marine Corps veteran Mary Katherine Mason-Alston makes shortbread with a family recipe that dates back to her great-grandmother.

Mason-Alston stands as a shining example of a person who served our country and now works as an entrepreneurial shortbread maker.

“Her path to success is the exact model we hope others will follow,” said Whitney Elmore, director of UF/IFAS Extension Pasco County. “A dream, hard work and using the available resources effectively all led to her success.”

Mason-Alson opened her store in May 2021 and calls it “Lanky Lassie’s Shortbread.”

“Lanky” because she stands nearly 6 feet. 

“I’m a tall girl, and I make shortbread,” Mason-Alston said. “Plus, I wanted it to be alliterative.” “Lassie” means “young girl” in Scotland.

Her journey as a budding shortbread entrepreneur started when she worked as a sales representative for the hotel industry. She made shortbread as gifts for clients. After she lost her job at the height of the pandemic in 2020, she started making shortbread, partly, as she says, because she had to make enough money to feed her children.

“One of my co-workers said, ‘this is the best shortbread I’ve ever had,’” she said.

She later won the shortbread competition at the Central Florida Scottish Highland Games with her Great-Grandma Murray’s recipe and started her shortbread business, mostly as a hobby in 2011.

“My mother always made shortbread for Christmas, and her grandmother made shortbread cookies for Christmas. People loved it,” Mason-Alston said.

What’s the secret? She credits her thicker, softer shortbread.

Word began to spread, and people would drive to her home to buy it. But she wanted more exposure, so she messaged people through the Dade City Life Facebook page.

Dade City Life asked if she was selling to local businesses. But she said she could not without a commercial kitchen.

She hoped the people at Dade City Life could share posts from her business and they gladly did. Mason-Alston discovered the Pasco County incubator through Dade City Life as well.

Turns out the SMARTstart Incubator Kitchen was just three miles from her house.

“I wasn’t actively looking for a kitchen,” she said. “I was thinking I would have to go to Tampa. It’s awesome it all worked out.”

She contacted Dan Mitchell, director of SMARTstart.

Mitchell helped connect her with the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services and guided her through the licensing process. That led to her getting her food permit, allowing her to sell wholesale. She now sells wholesale and retail from her store.

“He always had the answers I needed or connected me with those who did,” she said. “When I learned about the incubator, I sought guidance on setting up the business correctly, including legal wholesale practices.”

In addition to the incubator, Mason-Alston credits her business success to her military experience.

While a freshman at the University of South Florida, terrorists attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. That fateful day, she decided to serve her country. She always had a competitive fire in her belly from her days as a high-school athlete. Also, her brothers were already in the Marine Corps and told her it wasn’t for girls. That only fueled Mason-Alston’s fire to join.

“I wanted to do the hardest branch,” she said. “They held themselves to a higher standard. I love that type of fierceness.”

Mason-Alston served in the Marines from 2002 to 2008 and was injured during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003.

“The grit and tenacity instilled in me as a Marine make it impossible to quit or fail,” Mason-Alston said. “I draw from the Marine Corps’ 14 leadership traits — JJDIDTIEBUCKLE: Justice, Judgement, Enthusiasm, Bearing, Dependability, Initiative, Decisiveness, Tact, Integrity, Courage, Knowledge, Loyalty, and Endurance. Living by these principles has been invaluable to my success.”

DADE CITY – Residents who attended a town hall meeting Oct. 24 were told by Pasco County officials that recovery from Hurricane Milton is going to be a marathon, not a sprint.

Several Pasco County government officials and a representative from FEMA presided over the town hall at the Historic Pasco County Courthouse. 

Several people attending the meeting said they believed the development of new homes and businesses in Pasco County over the past few years is what caused flooding to occur.

County Administrator Mike Carballa countered by saying the flooding caused by Hurricane Milton on Oct. 9 was likely to be considered a 500-year event that was unprecedented in Pasco County.

He also estimated that more than a billion dollars of damage has occurred in Pasco County because of the high winds and massive amounts of rain that fell on both sides of the county. He added that estimate is likely to increase as insurance companies and FEMA continue assessing the damages that occurred.

Of the more than 9,000 building inspections done by the county, 6,000 were declared as being “majorly damaged structures” and 500 were declared as total losses, according to J.P. Murphy, the county’s director of building construction services.

County officials announced that a new community developed in Holiday, known as Project Hope, would provide temporary housing to 100 people who have been displaced by Hurricane Milton.

There are 25 trailers on the property on Grand Boulevard that can each house two people along with 50 single-person pallet homes. Pasco County purchased the two-acre site in July with the intention of using it for a temporary low barrier homeless shelter.  

There were more than 5,800 people in shelters after Milton hit, according to Cathy Pearson, assistant county administrator for public services. The county partnered with Catholic Charities to get Project Hope up and running according to Pearson. 

Shelter is also still available at the Wiregrass Ranch Sports Campus in Wesley Chapel and at the Fasano Regional Hurricane Shelter in Hudson, according to county officials.

Currently four people with special needs are staying at the Fasano Shelter, said Christina Louv-Pickle of the Florida Department of Health Pasco County. They are likely to be there on a long time basis, she added. Meanwhile, numerous other people are staying at the part of that shelter that is overseen by Pasco County, she said.

The FEMA representative told attendees that the agency would help provide temporary shelter in hotels for people who qualified because they had been displaced from their homes. They were told to call 800-621-3362 to request assistance. 

It wasn’t possible to determine when the flooding in communities such as Dade City and Zephyrhills would recede, according to Andrew Fossa, the county’s emergency management director.

That’s because the Withlacoochee River has reached its highest flood level in years because of the 21 inches of rain the Lacoochee area received in less than four hours, according to Fossa. 

In addition, Dade City received 18 inches of rain in a little under four hours while Zephyrhills received 15-18 inches of rain. 

“That is historic rain in that short amount of time,” Fossa said.

It’s estimated that 1.4 million yards of debris would have to be removed as the result of Hurricane Milton, according to Kevin Pliska, the county’s solid waste director. 

PliskaHe said on Oct. 24 that more than 186,000 cubic yards of debris had already been removed from throughout the county.

People whose homes were flooded were urged to remove debris from them as soon as possible and place it where the county could pick it up. They were also told to remove up to four inches of drywall above the level where the floodwater was in their homes to help prevent mold from developing.

They were also told the county was going to soon have a place on its webpage where people could report they had debris needing to be removed along with posting their location.

And it was announced that volunteers from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were going to be helping Hurricane Milton victims to remove drywall from their homes along with providing other assistance.

Carballa said toward the end of the meeting that the county was working as fast as it could. He emphasized that the damage caused by Hurricane Milton “is a recovery that will take months, if not years, for us to really fully overcome.” 

DADE CITY – Six hundred years of the history of Seminoles was the topic of the Florida  Tradition event Oct. 26 at the Pioneer Florida Museum & Village.

This was the second year that the museum has held the event. 

“A Herculean effort by the community and the museum’s staff and volunteers was necessary to make this event possible because of the damage the museum sustained from Hurricane Milton,” Andy Warrener told event-goers. 

Warrener, who has been the museum’s curator for five years, thanked those who helped make the event possible. 

This year’s event focused on 20th century Florida and Seminole history, including two demonstrations of alligator handling provided by conservationist and educator Pharaoh Gayles; a 16th century arms exhibition; lectures from Annette Fromm, Patsy West and Dale Cox; and hands-on artistry and demonstrations with the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum and Seminole Tribe of Florida.

Florida Humanities provided a Community Project Grant in partnership with the museum for the second successive year to help fund part of the event’s expenses.

Pharaoh Gayles, a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission-licensed handler and alligator wrestling champion, explained that it was customary in the past for Seminole Indians to capture, transport, kill, cook and eat alligators to provide nutrition for themselves, their family and/or tribe members. The alligators weren’t killed where they had been captured because their bodies could decay as they were being transported back to where they were going to  be consumed, Gayles said.

He then demonstrated the method by which alligators could be handled safely after they had been captured. One of the most dangerous aspects of that was to hold the alligator’s closed mouth between his head and his chest as he fastened something around its head so the alligator couldn’t reopen its mouth.

Little Big Mountain, an educator and entertainer, told onlookers about the different types of weapons that Native Americans used as far back as 7,500 years ago. He and a partner then showed some of the types of weapons that were available to Native Americans 500 years ago. Spears of different types were then thrown to demonstrate both the length and accuracy they could attain.  

This was followed by a 45-minute lecture by museum specialist/folklorist Annette Fromm. 

Part of her presentation included showing digital copies of a large number of paintings that numerous artists, including some Seminoles, had painted over the past few hundred years.

She discussed how Native Americans of several different tribes had existed in North America for thousands of years prior to its “discovery” by explorers in the late 1400s. She added that those indigenous people were the real discoverers of North America.

She also talked about how safe the Native Americans had been prior to immigration by people from England, France and Spain as well as from other nations from the early 1500s onwards.

Those newly arrived people didn’t realize how peaceful and well-organized Native Americans were, Fromm said. They were mistakenly considered savages, and people new to North America in those days sought to either kill them or force them to relocate to places far away from where they had lived for generations, Fromm said.

This led to three Seminole wars that occurred in 1817-18, 1835-42 and 1855-58.

In addition, the “immigrants” misunderstood the leadership of the Seminoles as well as that of other Native American tribes, Fromm said. Chiefs did lead the tribes but there were also other rankings or hierarchies within the society of those tribes, she said.

For instance, many people were mistaken about the role of Osceola, one of the most well-known members of the Seminoles. He wasn’t a chief, Fromm said. Rather, he was an influential leader during the Second Seminole War who was renowned for his strategic thinking, charisma and ability to unite different factions of the Seminole tribe against common threats.

Although he was renowned as a warrior, Osceola died of malaria in a prison where he had been confined after Gen. Joseph Hernandez had captured him on the orders of Gen. Thomas Jesup. Osceola was attempting to surrender under a white flag when he was captured, according to Fromm.

About the museum

The Pioneer Florida Museum & Village is located at 15602 Pioneer Museum Road. Call 352-567-0262 or visit pioneerfloridamuseum.org to learn more about the museum.