At the crossroads of Redland Road and Bauer Drive sits one of the last surviving landmarks of early Redland: the little wooden building now known as Redland Grocery (don’t be fooled by the antiquated service pumps… they don’t sell gas anymore, so fuel up before you visit).
This structure began its life in 1912 as the Pioneer Guild Hall, built by the women of Redland on land donated by John Bauer, who also built the Episcopal church that once stood next door. Crafted of Florida pine with board-and-batten walls, the hall originally had no porch—just a clean front face topped with its distinctive diamond-shaped louvered gable vent, a detail already visible in early photos and unique to the Guild Hall.
Inside was a stage and dance floor, and it quickly became the center of community life. Dances, dinners, teas, lectures, art and music classes, even summer etiquette lessons for local kids all happened right here. William Jennings Bryan once gave a lecture on “The Origin of Man” inside these very walls.
The Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 tore through the crossroads, badly damaging the church, store, and Guild Hall. The church was never rebuilt here and a new one rose closer to Homestead. But the Guild Hall endured.
In the early 1940s, Ludolf Andersen and his wife bought the property, moved the Redland Grocery sign onto the old hall, and opened the front for business. The back half was their house. Their son Dave grew up here, remembering summers spent refilling the old slide-mechanism Coke machine, because on hot days, the neighborhood drained it faster than he could pack it with ice.
That tradition lives on. Everyone stops here for a cold glass-bottle Coke pulled straight from the ice chest. It’s a Redland rite of passage. And their breakfast? Legendary.
Today this is the last surviving building from the original Redland crossroads, a quiet little store with a century of stories in its bones, still watching over the groves with that old diamond vent shining above the porch.
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