She is officially Mrs. Hiram Raulerson and has been a vibrant member of the Okeechobee community for more than 60 year. To the most of the community, she is affectionately known as "Miss Annie," a tireless worker for the Red Cross, a driving force behind the Okeechobee County Historical Society, a long-time member of the Church of Our Savior Episcopal, a loving wife, and a special one-of-a-kind grandmother.

The native of Marianna, Florida came to Okeechobee to visit Tom Conely and his wife in the summer of 1925. She returned a year later as a bride.

"It was during the boom and there was a lot of activity," she said of her first impressions of the community. "There were real estate salesmen all over and they were having dances at the Women’s Club. It was just real busy. My husband’s sister and I were about the same age and we had just such a good time." Several years after the marriage, Hiram became involved in politics. He first served as a member of the city council and was mayor for more than 20 years. He then ran for county commission. "He was always interested in the community and he worked in the store all that time. But, it wasn’t all that much. There wasn’t that many people her at the time," Miss Annie recalled during an interview in 1988.

Her husband’s interest in the community came from the example set by his father through the years. The son of the founders of Okeechobee, Lewis Raulerson opened the first store on South Parrott Avenue. He later built a large brick building on the south-east corner of Park Street and Fifth Avenue, where the building still stands.

Miss Annie said that her father-in-law, Lewis Raulerson, was a very charitable man and it carried over to his running of Okeechobee’s first retail store. "I know he never turned anybody down. The way they handled the welfare back then was the people would go to the county commissioners and they would give them $5 or $10 a week that would buy a lot of groceries. My father-in-law ran a big credit business, too, and when anybody came in and they didn’t have anything to eat, he made sure they had something. He had the first bank in the store and the first post office here," she recalled.

She told of the days when the lumber industry was a thriving part of the Okeechobee economy. "The mill was at Sherman. It was out on the Indiantown Road (State Road 710) about six miles. There were more people that lived there then there were in town. There’s very little left that even shows any more. There’s a little store on the left hand side of the road, and that’s where it was located. They had a huge commissary and there were a lot of houses, but I guess there’s just nothing left of it anymore," she said.

She said that the years of lumber harvesting changed the looks of Okeechobee County, and on a permanent basis. "They cut every tree in this county down. And they didn’t have any re-forestation program then. They just cut them down. Back in those early days, there were so few people that you knew everyone.