In 1993, she dedicated a flower garden and a bronze plaque in the southwest corner of Bayfront Park, honoring her parents, who owned large tracts of Brickell-area property and helped the city of Miami assemble 62 acres for the park just before the 1926 hurricane.

In 2003, the Miami-Dade School Board named Lamar Louise Curry Middle School, 15750 SW 47th St., in her honor.

A passionate steward of both her family’s and South Florida’s traditions, Miss Curry was serving as honorary chairwoman of the “Save Old Miami High School Building” committee at the time.

“It would be a sad thing for Miami to lose,”" Miss Curry told The Miami Herald. “It is a link to our past that we must preserve.”

She shared her own past in the UF oral history, which runs 57 pages.

She begins with a maternal ancestor, the Queen of Holland’s grand nephew, who settled in Virginia in the early 1700s. The family ran a South Carolina cotton plantation, held slaves, sent its sons to The Citadel and to fight for the Confederacy.

In 1866, her grandmother’s brother “divided his lands in South Carolina and gave each one of his former slave families land and livestock, and he moved to his [Marion County] Florida plantation,’’ she said. “That is why we became Floridians.’’

She talked about how Miami was “a pretty little medium-sized town’’ when the family arrived, “clean and very attractive...The people were friendly, and we enjoyed it very much.’’

Her father predicted that Miami would become “the largest city on the East Coast south of Baltimore, she said. “Also, it was going to be the gateway to all Latin America. People looked at him in amazement in those days when he said that.’’

Among his early land purchases: a 12-grave plot at Woodlawn Cemetery. Miss Curry was buried there on Friday alongside her parents and her Aunt Lamar.

To read her UF oral history, go to http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00006424/00001.