Amanda was just fifteen years old, while William was The family lived briefly at Parrish, what now is Manatee County, as well as at Simmons Hammock, an old name for the Seffner area. They settled in Tampa in , and when Meroba was born on January 29, , she was the sixth of their eleven children.
All but two were girls, and because women changed their names at marriage, the Hookers soon became absorbed into other pioneer Hillsborough families. They include such prominent families as Parker, Hollingsworth, and Stallings, with most settling in eastern Hillsborough or Polk County. The same source says that he employed a private teacher for his numerous children, as Florida offered almost nothing in terms of public schools.
He also owned as many as twenty slaves. Amanda Hair Hooker died at age 48, leaving several still young children. Her death on October 10, was in the midst of the Civil War, in which her husband was an active participant. She was a war widow with seven children; her first husband had died of disease at Camp Lee, Virginia in The marriage did not work out, and they separated in Like her mother, Meroba Hooker wed at fifteen.
She married Simon Turman, Jr. He had been born in Indiana in , but his family moved to Tampa when he was young. He and his older brother, Solon, returned to Indiana briefly, but by , he was back in Tampa and publishing a weekly newspaper, The Florida Peninsular.
He had joined a Confederate unit headed by his father-in-law, William Brinton Hooker, and was shot in northern Georgia. At 19, she was a widow with a child. The rest of her life would revolve around the Orange Grove Hotel, which her father gifted to her in It was built in , just before the war began.
