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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. MBisanz talk 01:09, 24 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Harker, Florida[edit]

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Harker, Florida (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)
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Topos show this as a siding in the middle of a substantial swamp, and aerials going back to 1940 confirm this. There is just nothing there except the rail line and the surrounding land, with no sign of any other human structures until the 1970s, when they start to reclaim the area from what appear to be citrus groves. I'm also having trouble with the citations, as for instance the Arcadia book only mentions Harker in a table of railroad mileposts. The notion that anyone lived here seems far-fetched, and certainly needs better sourcing than what we have. Mangoe (talk) 06:15, 16 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep per my reasoning of the last AFD: Per this book which said Harker was a community "known for its squash, potatoes, and large tomatoes. It was mostly home to farm workers who road the daily train south to various work sites". According to the index, it looks like there is more on pages not available in the google book snippet. I'm convinced this was an actual populated place at one time. Page 202 of this book says Harker is one of at least 15 communities in a contiguous 40-mile line that are now gone. There is a page or two on the community in the book. The railroad was built circa 1921. It was abandoned in the 80s, but most of it south of Harker was abandoned in the mid-50s. So my guess is that the peak population was in the 30s-40s. MB 06:57, 16 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment...source:"Historical Map of Collier County, Florida". Naples Daily News. July 31, 1976. Retrieved February 15, 2022. Harker....Believed to have been settled as a farming area in the 1930's.
    • "Believed" is not a great word; it tends to imply a lack of knowledge. Also, we're still at the same problem with that 1940 aerial. There's just no sign in it that anyone set a shovel or a plow into the earth anywhere except right at the road and the trackbed. It's one thing not to see any signs of former buildings, but the whole area looks completely untouched, and the contrast is all the stronger when you look at more recent photos where people had started farms and orchards. Mangoe (talk) 05:19, 17 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      • "Believed" refers to the date being dubious, not to whether it was settled. Djflem (talk) 15:28, 17 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak keep: Seems to have existed as a community well into the '60s, based on passing mentions on newspapers.com. (Passing mentions by year: 1936 1946 1948 1963). Note those are all passing mentions and don't necessarily demonstrate notability. However, this 1976 clipping regarding the origins of the town, as well as the account provided by MB, shows there's at least some merit here, if just barely. Curbon7 (talk) 00:43, 17 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • I've discussed the last above; the others are all using Harker as a location reference, but none of them say anything about what Harker was. And once one gets into the 1940s, there's ample aerial documentation to the fact the "Harker" of those references is a large indistinct area and not a town. Mangoe (talk) 05:19, 17 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      • Are you suggesting that while maps can not be used to prove nobility, they can be to disprove it? Isn't that a sort of an invalid just existed/just didn't exist argument? Djflem (talk) 15:24, 17 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
        • Part of what xe is saying is that neither maps, nor the GNIS record, tell you whether something is a city, a town, or a single building. The GNIS "populated place" designation covers them all. The fact that this has had the attention of multiple people over two AFD discussions and still has the information-free cop-out "unincorporated community", which is Wikipedia editors' direct translation of "populated place", instead of what the place actually was is very telling. Establishing that basic fact is of core importance. If this were a 19th century thing I'd be reaching for Polk's or Lippincott's gazetteers because they would at least say something like "township" or "post-village" or "post-office" and we'd know this basic fact. They're no good in this instance. But the observable absence of stuff on the maps at least eliminates what this is not. It's definitely not a city or a large town. But we still don't know whether it was simply a single inhabited farmhouse. "populated place" includes that. Uncle G (talk) 19:39, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • By the way: Curbon7's newspaper source about the Humble Oil company isn't very useful, as the oilfield was in fact named the Sunniland oil field, not Harker. (Pressler 1947) Uncle G (talk) 19:39, 18 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. Settlements are wikipedia-notable. --Doncram (talk) 07:25, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Harker,_Florida_(2nd_nomination)

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