24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Kathleen, FL

Kathleen is a census-designated place in Polk County, in the northwest part of Lakeland, and is regarded as one of the most historic communities in the county.

The Census Bureau counted 6,486 residents in Kathleen in the 2020 census, up slightly from 6,332 in 2010.

Kathleen has about 2,300 households averaging just over three people each, and nearly 80% of its homes are owner-occupied, according to Census QuickFacts.

The greater Kathleen area is made up of eight historic pioneer communities - Kathleen, Galloway, Gibsonia, Green Pond, Griffin, Providence, Socrum and Winston - of which Socrum, settled in the late 1840s, is the oldest.

Kathleen's first settler, Henry Prine, named the settlement after his wife Catherine, but changed the name after learning that another Florida town already carried it.

Kathleen was once a hotspot of Florida's strawberry industry, a boom that faded after the community lost its train depot in the 1920s.

For a brief period the one-square-mile town of Kathleen was incorporated, from 1914 to 1928, with its own mayor, town council and sheriff, along with nine general stores and three doctors.

Lois Lenski's novel Strawberry Girl, published in 1945 and winner of the Newbery Medal, is set in Galloway, one of the Kathleen area's historic communities, and was drawn from the strawberry-farming families Lenski interviewed around Lakeland.