GOOD MORNING Y’ALL FROM A ONCE-NORTHERN GIRL WHO IS TRYING TO COPE.

 

 

LOVE A NICE BIG HORSE….#OUTLANDER  FIX COMPLETE

 

Today we’re still wandering the inner recesses of Florida is  LACOOCHEE:

 

 

Lacoochee is a census-designated place (CDP) in Pasco County, Florida, United States. The population was 1,345 at the 2000 census.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacoochee,_Florida

 

 

 

A post office was established here early 1888 and by 1894 the Commercial Hotel was mentioned in the Tampa Tribune.   By 1919 (population 50) there was a general store and by 1922 Cummer Sons constructed a Cypress Mill which at one time was the largest in the state (Best Back Roads of Florida/Waitley).   By 1924 the town was growing again with two new “picture show” theaters going up.

 

By 1941 there were 800 laborers at the Cypress Mill and they closed the mill down in August with a strike starting on the 1st.  http://fivay.org/lacoochee.html

 

 

It is located on CR 575, east of I-75, about eight miles north of Dade City, west of the Green Swamp and just south of the county line. It appears to still be a viable community as it still has an active post office (33537), several churches, a school, fire station and hospital. One railroad line has been removed (along CR 575) and the main street is Pine Products Road.  http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~gtusa/usa/fl.htm

 

POINTS OF INTEREST:                                                                                      (Lumber Mill Helped Lacoochee To Prosper During Its Heyday (Tampa Tribune on June 7, 2003.)

 

Cummer Sons Cypress Co. Mill                                                                                  The 100-acre site is southeast of town along Bower Avenue. The complex consisted of a large cypress mill, a crate mill for making wire-bound vegetable boxes, a smaller sawmill for cutting timber and a large open-air lumberyard. The operation was self-contained and included an elevated water tank, along with the company store and housing for its employees.  Dilapidated sheds and abandoned portions of the mill remain today.

 

Cummer Sons Commissary                                                                                            at 20851 Bower Ave., was built about 1922 and also housed the company doctor. W.H. Walters was the last Cummer physician and kept his office there even after the mill closed. Walters continued to practice there until he died in 1982. The commissary building is now Winkler’s Custom Machining and Repairs.

 

 

 Pioneer Florida Museum and Village                                                          located in the vicinity of the Cummer mill

Includes:                                                                                                                              The one-room Lacoochee School –Although it was built in 1927, it is typical of one-room schoolhouses of much earlier times.

 C.C. Smith General Store once located northwest of County Road 575 and the railroad intersection.   Smith was the paymaster for Cummer Sons  at Cedar Key.  In 1927 he left the company and moved to Lacoochee, built the store and lived in the back. There were gasoline pumps outside, and inside he sold dry goods, hardware and notions. The C.C. Smith General Store was a fixture in the community for more than half a century, closing in 1980.

The Ranch , two buildings built in the 1930s by Cummer Sons Cypress Co.  the buildings include a guesthouse, dining room and kitchen. At the museum, they serve as a fiber arts building, where quilts are exhibited. They also house a pictorial display of Cummer sawmill days.

A 1913 13-ton steam locomotive once used by Cummer Sons to haul timber to its sawmill in Lacoochee

 

 

Lacoochee Cemetery                                                                                       according to Waitley this is a place to go to read the inscriptions for a nice muse.

 

AND A FEW COLLECTIBLES FROM FLORIDA’S PAST (DON’T FORGET MY STORE ABOVE) THAT MIGHT BE HIDING IN YOUR ATTICS AND CLOSETS

Massive Alligator Head – Vintage Taxidermy –   $210

Lake Conway Orlando, Florida British Polo & Cricket Clubs Photos  $375.00

 

Lacoochee it seems became an escape from a tragic event in Florida’s infamous history:    When Cummer and Sons approached the end of its timber supply [at Sumner] around 1920, company managers prepared to “get out” by establishing a second mill a hundred miles away in Lacoochee, Florida. Workers began to leave Rosewood as production slowed in Sumner, leaving a core of thirty black families and one white store owner by 1923. … Having turned a blind eye to the destruction of their employees’ property, Cummer and Sons managers arranged for a train to drive through the swamps, picking up survivors of the Rosewood massacre and offering them housing and employment in the brand new “colored quarters” in Lacoochee.  (The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Works in the Jim Crow South/William Powell Jones)

 

 

Florida isn’t so much a place where one goes to reinvent oneself, as it is a place where one goes if one no longer wished to be found.  Douglas Coupland

.