They Owed Their Souls to the Company Store

Unless you’re hauling a truckload of debris to the Seminole County Landfill, you probably have no particular reason to be driving along desolate Osceola Road, which originates just northeast of Geneva and rambles through the oak hammocks, hardwood swamps and floodplain marshes where Lake Harney flows into the St. Johns River.

So, when you happen upon a lonely brick and masonry ruin guarding the grassy right of way along the forest’s edge, you’re puzzled. You might even pull over and walk around the squat, bunker-like structure, looking for clues.

You’re unlikely to conclude that you’d found the remains of a bank vault. After all, there’s no evidence of a bank. Or of any other buildings, for that matter. In Central Florida, this is as close as it gets to the middle of nowhere.

But a bank vault it is. The bank itself is gone, as is the bustling sawmill town whose residents it served.

Osceola, named for the legendary Seminole Indian chief, was once home to more than 700 people. Most of them worked for the Osceola Cypress Company, a Cedar Key-based logging partnership that built a huge mill and a tightknit community to support it in 1916.

The town, which covered some 350 acres, boasted rows of tidy cypress homes fronted by white picket fences and lush St. Augustine lawns. The homes had electricity and indoor plumbing, neither of which was a given in most rural communities at the time.

There was a red schoolhouse, a boarding house, a commissary, a barbershop, a doctor’s office and a post office. The police force consisted of a single night watchman.

The mill, a sprawling hodgepodge of buildings, machinery and conveyers, dominated the town physically as well as psychologically. Trains hauled cypress logs into Osceola, where workers produced an astonishing 60,000 feet of lumber per day.

“Our lives were ruled by the sawmill,” says Mary Riley Henderson, who was born in Osceola in 1921. Her father, John, was a mill supervisor and therefore among the community’s elite. “A whistle blew when it was time to get up, when it was time to go to work, when it was time to go to lunch and when it was time to go home.”

And when it was time for bed, there was another none-too-subtle signal. At 9 p.m., the mill generator shut down, cutting off the town’s electricity and plunging the homes into darkness.
Rigid, yes. But Osceola, like many company towns, was progressive for its era and quasi-socialist in some respects. The mill owned and maintained the homes, for example, and most basic needs – from laundry service to medical care – were provided free of charge. It was, however, hardly a bastion of equality.

Managers lived on the main drag in larger homes, some of them two stories. Laborers lived in modest bungalows, and there was, of course, a “colored quarter” with its own school, church and even a “juke joint.”

Mrs. Henderson remembers her father enlisting a black gospel quartet called the Osceola Four to entertain visiting dignitaries from mill headquarters. And she remembers the chilling ghost stories told by older black residents.

Osceola was indeed a lively place. There were birthday parties, community picnics, holiday celebrations, baseball games, fishing along the St. Johns, hunting arrowheads at an ancient shell mound near the railroad bridge and playing hide-and-seek among the stacks of drying lumber. What more could a child want?

But it didn’t last. It couldn’t – not after the timber was exhausted and the economy collapsed.
John Riley retired in 1938 and the family left Osceola for Miami. Two years later, the Osceola Cypress Company moved its operation to Port Everglades. Osceola was then dismantled and the boards were sold or scrapped.

During World War II, the U.S. government built an airfield on the site for training Navy fighter pilots. Today, mountains of debris stretch as far as the eye can see, creating a surreal landscape that’s indicative of a society in which just about everything, including our history, is disposable.