Becky Ayech threw some food to the chicks in her chicken coop, and she watched with glee as they broke out in a fuzzy little football match. What constitutes fun for Becky Ayech might seem prosaic to some, but she likened her life in the country to something like therapy.

“Once you hit that country,” she said, “you feel better already.”

For 40 years, Ayech has called Old Miakka home. She and her husband met in Paris, France, then moved back to Indiana for a period before her job in hospitality carried them south to Sarasota in 1979. A tiny apartment downtown inspired them to look for something out east, and when they found a home off Verna Road built the same year she was born, she took it as a sign and made an offer.

“This is it,” she remembered thinking. “I wanted the country.”

The draw to her was the promise that life would remain slow, the land rural, and the night sky visible. Soon, she found a covalent bond in the Miakka Community Club, an organization that has operated out of a 106-year-old schoolhouse in the community since 1948. Simply put, its aim over the past 72 years has been the preservation of rural heritage.

“For over a hundred years, this community has been here,” Ayech explained. “It still remains a close-knit community, and while we may argue with each other over every single thing, when people come and try to impose their ways of life on us, we all get together and say that is not going to happen.” When developers proposed a store at the terminus of Fruitville Road, the community said no. When they proposed an airport, they said no. A military training facility, juvenile detention center, paintball range, or golf course? Absolutely not.

They sent letters, filled the County Commission’s chambers, and over the course of decades the core of the Old Miakka community assembled around the notion of preserving their own values and histories. As Ayech once said to a commissioner, “We’ve been here since 1850: This is our home — not an investment portfolio.” But of course, the histories they promulgated obscured others, as is the case with any record.

The myths tied to Myakka only deepened when I tried to parse the region’s demographics and racial history. Few records precede the emancipation proclamation, although harrowing stories float from generation to generation about slavery here. Myakka City, the settlement founded in 1914, once had a black community, inextricably tied to the short lived turpentine industry. The Bradenton Herald’s Roberta C. Nelson noted in 2001, what led to its disappearance remains a mystery. White residents she spoke with conjured up memories of the Ku Klux Klan entering their church during a sermon that appeared to coincide with their black neighbors leaving town without word in the mid-1930s. Residents who asked to remain anonymous conjured similar stories in Old Miakka, and all throughout Sarasota County. Racism was as central to this part of Florida as the confluence of thunder and lightning.

Scanning the records, two lynchings, one murder, and one mass killing appear in Manatee County, of which Sarasota was a part until it formed its own county in 1921. The first was the slaying of a black man, Henry T. Stewart, in Palmetto on June 9, 1895. The local paper, the Manatee River Journal, reasoned that self-defense was evident because spectators applauded the fatal shot. Yet little was revealed about why the assailant, C.E. Hill, found himself in the woods at 4 a.m. at what the paper described as a “negro festival in the hammocks.”

The second grew out of an altercation between children in 1896, one black, one white, the latter the son of a sheriff. Under the cover of moonlight, a white mob knocked on the door of the black child’s home, demanding to see him. His father, who answered the door, instead fired three shots, killing three men including the sheriff. That week in January led to the death of six unidentified black men and earned no mention in the Manatee River Journal, although a story about a “masquerade” graced its pages that week. The report noted the presence of the “terrible ku klux klan, which proved to be very amiable affable persons.”

Soon after, newspapers further north began reporting on the violence: Black families were targeted, their homes burned, and notices were posted advising them to leave Manatee County. At the turn of the century, an exodus took shape. Seven years later in 1903, Henry Thomas was lynched for the alleged assault of a 15-year-old white girl. Nine years after that in 1912, the Manatee River Journal reported on a mob lynching of William English, who was accused of attempting to rape a white woman.

In this deeply proud region, the legacy of racial terror was the one thing that nobody I spoke with felt comfortable talking about.

Since the 1990s, there has been a continual and sometimes acrimonious conversation between the community of Old Miakka and the Sarasota County Commission due to unforeseen population growth: 12.5 percent in the past eight years, predicted to grow 40% by 2045. In the past four decades, the county’s population doubled itself to 426,000, according to a 2018 U.S. Census Bureau estimate.

In the early 2000s, the county implemented a plan for the development of rural areas in eastern Sarasota County, allowing certain chunks of land to be developed with the two primary caveats of leaving half the land undeveloped and making 15 percent of the housing “attainable” — an important distinction from affordable. Colloquially, the growth management plan is known as the “2050 plan,” and what tapped into the community’s discontent was the unanimous approval to better accommodate village-like developments on ranchland, like the Hi-Hat Ranch. Over the next two to three decades, that plan would allow the development of 10,000 acres. In the past few years, the changes sparked contentious debate among those out east and set off a domino effect of landowners and developers vying for precious lands. In the past year, the issue reached a fevered pitch, and Ayech became in some ways embroiled at its center.