The Laker/Lutz News

Great Depression

Cummer Sons Cypress played huge role in Lacoochee

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Two events occurred in 1923 that would have a significant impact on the community of Lacoochee, in Northeast Pasco County.

Arthur and Waldo Cummer — as the grandsons of Jacob Cummer — brought the Cummer Sons Cypress Company to the county.

The fully electric cypress sawmill and box factory would go on to become one the largest sawmill operations in the United States.

The company also would play a role in providing jobs for survivors of the Rosewood Massacre, which occurred in January 1923.

Nearly a century ago, one of the largest sawmill operations in the United States was located in Lacoochee, in northeast Pasco County. (Courtesy of Bob McKinstry)

Contemporary news reports said that massacre — which destroyed the tiny Black community in Levy County — resulted directly from a white woman’s false claims that she’d been raped by a black man.

In his book, published in 2005, author William Powell Jones recounted how managers for Cummer “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.”

Arthur and Waldo Cummer’s father, Wellington Wilson Cummer, first arrived in town with his riding gear, complete with jodhpurs and boots, holding a riding crop under his arm.

“It was strange attire compared to the casual dress (of the day),” noted Nell Moody Woodcock, a long-time resident of Lacoochee and later a reporter for The Tampa Tribune.

Woodcock’s name is among nearly 100 links on the Pasco County history website, Fivay.org — featuring people sharing memories of the Cummer Sons Cypress Company.

Jacob Cummer, known as “Uncle Jacob” to family and friends, had vast timber holdings in several states.

Arthur Cummer explained why the company chose to locate in Lacoochee, in testimony given before the U.S. Interstate Commerce Commission, in 1934.

“We located the sawmill plant at Lacoochee in order to be in reasonable reach,” Arthur Cummer said.

Described as a point of entry for what is now known as the Green Swamp of Florida, logs arrived at the new Lacoochee sawmill from land that totaled more than 50 square miles in Pasco, Sumter and Polk counties.

Bill McKinstry, a company manager for the Lacoochee sawmills, rides a logging train to Lacoochee on April 25, 1939. (Courtesy of Bob McKinstry)

The Green Swamp is one of the state’s largest watersheds as the headwaters for the Peace River, Withlacoochee River, Ocklawaha River and Hillsborough River.

In the 1920s it was “a vast reservoir of 100-year-old cypress trees,” as described by Woodcock, in her recollections on the Cummer mills in Lacoochee.

At its peak, workers lived in approximately 100 homes along sand streets with wood sidewalks in Lacoochee.

Cummer was the largest employer in Pasco County with more than 1,100 employees, and it was one of few employers across the country that provided jobs during the Great Depression.

Having the largest payroll in the county made the Lacoochee office a prime target — and the company fell victim to three masked bandits who escaped with $11,700 in cash.

The work was grueling.

Ronald Stanley, who was put on a logging train by his father one summer in the early 1940s, was among the workers.

He described the tough working conditions he faced, recorded on the Fivay.org website.

He awoke at daybreak and spent hours waist-deep hauling sawed-down cypress logs out of the swamp.

It was hot, and there were mosquitoes, and the danger of snakes and alligators.

“For all this summer fun, I was paid $.45 per hour (typically under $5 per day),” Stanley recalls on Fivay.org.

One of three steam shovels that had been used to dig out the Panama Canal later was purchased by the Cummer lumber company to haul logs at the Lacoochee sawmill. (Courtesy of Pioneer Florida Museum & Village)

During World War II, Cummer employed 50 German soldiers from the prisoner of war work camp in Dade City.

One POW was 18-year-old Arthur Lang, a tank commander from Erwin Rommel’s famed Afrika Korps.

He was smitten by a teenaged girl named Mildred.

He managed to exchange handwritten notes to Mildred when no one was looking. She worked with her mother at the Cummer’s crate mill.

“I regret it to this day that on the last day there, I could not shake her hand,” Lang wrote after he was back in Germany, after the war.

At Lacoochee, the Cummer operations were immense for this self-contained company town.

The sawmill alone measures 228 feet by 45 feet. The mill also included a veneer plant, which was 228 feet by 45 feet. It also had a crate factory, of 200 feet by 100 feet; and a lathe and shingle mill, with a capacity of 60,000 lathe per day, according to the story “Big Cypress Mill Completed at Lacoochee, Florida,” published in The Manufacturer’s Record on Nov. 22, 1923.

From 1934 to 1940, the Cummer mill in Lacoochee averaged 13 million board feet each year. The company set a record in 1937, producing 25 million board feet.

To make sure that it was not all work and no play, the company sponsored a semi-pro baseball team called the Lacoochee Indians.

That team won the Central Coast championship in 1947, in a league that also included San Antonio, Dade City and Brooksville.

James Timothy “Mudcat” Grant recorded memories of his father working at the Lacoochee mills. He later became the first black American League pitcher to win a World Series game in 1965.

Mudcat also recalls weekend movies starring Gene Autry and Roy Rogers.

“Every time I go to Angel Stadium, Gene (Autry) comes through, and we get a chance to speak,” Grant told the St. Petersburg Times on April 9, 1989. “The first thing he says is: ‘How is everything in Lacoochee?’”

Autry was the owner of the Angels Major League baseball team from 1961 to 1997.

Alyce Ferrell, who worked at the Lacoochee Post Office, met her future husband at a dance at the armory in Dade City.

He would fly low over Lacoochee in his Corsair F4U fighter aircraft and dip one wing of his plane. That was a signal to let Alyce know he needed to be picked up at the Army/Air base in Zephyrhills.

In 1945, Alyce married that instructor for Marine fighter pilots: Edward Leo Peter McMahon Jr.

Years later ‘Ed McMahon’ would begin a 36-year career as the announcer and sidekick for television talk show host Johnny Carson.

During the decade of the 1950s, the Green Swamp was heavily logged by the Cummer Sons Cypress Company.

The company, which hummed along for decades, finally came to its end near the close of the 1950s.

“It took time to process all the logs which had been gathered at the Lacoochee sawmill, but the last cypress was finally milled on June 5, 1959,” wrote historian Alice Hall for The Tampa Tribune on July 14, 1984.

Although the community voted against incorporating as a town in 1954, several companies have attempted business operations at the old Cummer site including Wood Mosaic Corporation, Interpace, GH Lockjoint, and Cal-Maine Foods.

A precast concrete plant is currently up and operating as a supplier for major road projects in Florida. The Dade City Business Center bought this site in 2019 for $1.2 million and is leasing the land to the concrete plant. Nearly 100 new jobs are expected, once the plant is running at full capacity.

Doug Sanders has a penchant for unearthing interesting stories about local history. His sleuthing skills have been developed through his experiences in newspaper and government work. If you have an idea for a future history column, contact Doug at .

Published August 18, 2021

Here’s a fish story for the ages

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Here’s a big fish story that has its origins in the year 1923.

The recounting of it begins with a visit to a house in San Antonio in 1974, to repair a ringer on a wall telephone.

Ken Zifer was assigned by Florida Telephone Company, at that time, to maintain the San Antonio 588 exchange.

Will Plazewski, local historian and water clerk for the City of San Antonio, helped to obtain this photograph, which shows, from left: Matt Klassen, an unidentified man in the center, and Frederick Joseph ‘Fritz’ Friebel holding his record largemouth bass in 1923. (Courtesy of Jack Vogel)

“When I left his house to put my hand tools back in the truck, Mr. Walter Friebel followed me outside,” recalls Zifer, who now lives in Cleveland, Tennessee.

“Being an avid fisherman all my life and associated with Great Bass Fisherman, I asked him if he was doing any fishing in this neck of the woods,” said Zifer, who was 27 at the time that he made the telephone repair.

Friebel lived across the street from the San Antonio City Park and the St. Anthony Catholic School, so Zifer knew the house was not far from Clear Lake, in neighboring St. Leo.

Friebel told Zifer that he had not been fishing for quite a long time.

Then he told Zifer: “I (once) was paddling the boat when my brother caught the World Record Bass.”

Zifer asked: “Would you mind telling me about it?”

And that begins a look at a relatively unknown chapter in Pasco County history.

Born in Germany in 1893, Friebel’s brother, Frederick Joseph “Fritz” Friebel, had used only one fishing rod and reel, and he did not let Walter fish that day.

Fritz Friebel was a traveling salesman.

Francis Finn was 75 when he told the St. Petersburg Times in a 2005 story that his uncle Fritz was a generous man who would bring roller skates, baseball gloves, bats and balls for the kids to play with during the Great Depression.

Fritz Friebel reportedly caught his bass from Moody Lake north of San Antonio. He wanted to keep other fishermen ‘off the track’ from where he really was fishing at Big Fish Lake (pictured here) on the Barthle Brothers Ranch northwest of San Antonio. (Courtesy of Southwest Florida Water Management District)

Fritz Friebel was an avid angler, too, who lugged his tackle along with him, as he made his rounds across Florida, selling hardware.

Sources say he went fishing with a couple of friends at Big Fish Lake in 1923.

Online records with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) indicate his famous fish catch happened on a Saturday, May 19, 1923.

That wasn’t the way the fisherman recalled it, in a story published on Oct. 12, 1952, in The Tampa Tribune.

In that account, he said: “It was a Sunday morning when I should have been in church, and I had to call a grocer to open his store to get the fish weighed.”

Fritz Friebel had landed a 20-pound, 2-ounce largemouth black bass that measured 31 inches long with a 27-inch girth.

According to Ken Duke’s story for ESPN Sports on Aug. 7, 2009, Fritz Friebel used a Creek Chub No. 700 Straight Pike Minnow “to catch the giant fish.”

Five years later he was featured in a rod and reel catalog under the heading: “The Black Bass Record has been Broken, Not Cracked or Bent, but Crushed, Torn Apart and Split Wide Open.”

The catalog added this: “Gentlemen anglers all! Please leap to your feet and throw your hats into the air. Rah, Rah! To Mr. Friebel and his black bass!”

Onlookers in 1923 accused Fritz Friebel of cheating by adding pounds with lead sinkers in his fish.

The family of Fritz Friebel had this new marker built and shipped to Florida, where new generations can read about the fishing legend in the San Antonio City Park. (Courtesy of Doug Sanders)

But, the fisherman debunked that assertion.

“Friebel pulled out his pocketknife,” Duke writes, “slit the fish’s belly open and suggested that they reach inside to find out.”

Fritz Friebel was a no-nonsense angler.

As his daughter explained to ESPN Sports, “Daddy didn’t own a boat. He wore the worst-looking clothes because he often waded into water up to his armpits while fishing.”

After he made the catch, the big bass was put in a block of ice at the Knights hardware store for people to come by to see it.

According to the FWC’s website, Fritz Friebel’s catch in Pasco County “…was weighed on a postal scale and witnessed, but a (state) biologist did not document it at the time to establish an official record.”

In other words, it is the largest unofficial big bass landed in Florida.

ESPN Sports says it registers as the 11th largest largemouth black bass ever caught in the world.

For years, a wooden sign commemorating Fritz Friebel’s accomplishment has stood in San Antonio’s downtown park.

Most conservation-minded anglers release large fish because of their future spawning potential.

Not Fritz Friebel: He treated his family to a big fish dinner.

Whoppers
WORLD RECORD
George W. Perry, 1932, Lake Montgomery, Georgia, 22 pounds, 4 ounces

FLORIDA RECORD: Uncertified
Frederick Joseph “Fritz” Friebel, 1923, Big Fish Lake, Pasco County, 20 pounds, 2 ounces

FLORIDA RECORD: Certified
Billy O’ Berry, 1986, unnamed lake, Polk County, 17 pounds, 2 ounces

Source: Florida Trend Magazine

Doug Sanders has a penchant for unearthing interesting stories about local history. His sleuthing skills have been developed through his experiences in newspaper and government work. If you have an idea for a future history column, contact Doug at .

Published March 24, 2021

World War II vet celebrates 100th birthday

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VFW Post 8154, in Zephyrhills, was packed with people to celebrate Edward Bruno’s 100th birthday on Oct. 12.

“I think he will be absolutely stunned to see how many people have come out today to honor him and celebrate his birthday,” said Suzanne Ahmad, his niece.

And, so he was.

Edward Bruno, of Zephyrhills, donned a golden crown as he celebrated his 100th birthday on Oct. 12, with family and friends. (Brian Fernandes)

“It’s a surprise to me,” said Bruno, a decorated U.S. Marine Corps veteran, during an event that attracted relatives, devoted friends and dignitaries.

He sat at a long table, in a chair festooned with balloons, donning a birthday crown emblazoned with the number 100.

Like many of his fellow VFW members in the room, he also wore a signature red polo shirt.

Friends and relatives swarmed him, giving him hugs and handshakes, and taking photos of him.

VFW dignitaries took to the stage, offering their birthday wishes, as Bruno relaxed, taking occasional sips of his wine.

Fellow Marine veteran Glenn Shaw, who lives in Zephyrhills, welcomed the crowd.

His eyes welled with tears as he spoke about his friendship with Bruno.

“I go to his house at least once a week. If nobody makes his bed, I make his bed for him. [I] do little things around the house for him. He’s a good man. He’s my buddy,” Shaw said.

State Rep. Randy Maggard was there, too, to help celebrate the day.

“This is a special event and a special time. Truly he has epitomized the spirit of those we call the greatest generation,” said Maggard, who represents District 38 in the Florida House of Representatives.

Bruno’s extended family sat near him during the celebration, including nieces, a younger sister, a grandson and a daughter-in-law.

They celebrated Bruno’s 100 years of life, which began when he was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1919.

He grew up there, in a family of 13 children.

He enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1942, at the height of World War II.

The same year, he fought in the Battle of Guadalcanal, and earned a Bronze Medal.

As his military career progressed, he served as a drill sergeant and was stationed in Guadalcanal, New Guinea, Georgia and Cape Gloucester.

“I think he’s always been very proud of his service, his devotion to his family and country,” Ahmad said.

Longevity is a family trait, she added.

However, while enjoying a lengthy life, Bruno has outlived his wife, Barbara, and his only son, Bobby.

There have been challenges, too.

He had to be fitted with a prosthetic leg, after an accident in a factory.

But, he always has made the best of his situations, Ahmad said.

And, his example has been a life lesson for her, she added.

Bruno’s two other nieces, Paulette Kline and Louise Cantwell, also were at the party, reminiscing fondly about their uncle.

“We would have a lot of happy memories of being in his home,” Kline said, “and [he was] always a very gracious host and very loving.”

She said her uncle helped her to develop a sense of gratitude.

Cantwell recalled that at family gatherings, Bruno and her other uncles would talk about growing up during the Great Depression.

She said it reinforced the importance of being there for one another.

“The solidarity is what we get from it. The family solidarity – to be together when we can and help each other when we can,” Cantwell said.

She also noted his upbeat attitude.

“He’s always got a positive outlook,” Cantwell said. “He just kept on being the same happy person.”

Plus, she mentioned, Bruno has been quite a “chick magnet,” and that’s still true today.

“At 100 years old, he can still get the women to come give him attention,” she said, laughing.

The nieces also agreed that their uncle also has an excellent sense of humor.

Besides offering kind words of congratulations, VFW members also gave Bruno gifts to mark the occasion.

They gave him a framed plaque, a case holding a certificate for his service and a Tervis tumbler cup engraved with his name.

But, Bruno wasn’t the only one celebrating a birthday that day.

Jack Henry Dias was celebrating, too. He shares Bruno’s birthday, and he was turning age 1.

Bruno held little Dias in his lap, while people took photos.

The pictures kept coming, as Bruno was helped outdoors by his grandson, Eric, before partaking in a special meal.

There, Bruno posed with his family and caregivers in front of a big military truck.

They were creating yet another memento, to celebrate Bruno’s century’s worth of life experiences.

Published October 23, 2019

Clay Sink remains; others fade away

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Small communities with names such as “Mexico,” “Drexel,” “Ehren,” and  “Chipco” appeared on Pasco County maps more than 100 years ago.

They were located along the Orange Belt Railway, the first — and last — railroad to cross Central Pasco with a potential for future development.

Still moss-draped as it was when the Slaughters buried their infant daughter in 1873, the Clay Sink Cemetery is located on a hill and is the final resting place for six generations. Descendants still live in Pasco County. (Courtesy of Doug Sanders)

The names of those small towns now are mere footnotes in Pasco County’s history.

But, a tiny community has survived.

Surrounded by hundreds of acres of the Withlacoochee State Forest, a 2-square-mile area is still known as “Clay Sink.”

Call it a quirk of fate.

Unlike many of Florida’s rural outposts, by the 1930s, the greater Clay Sink area had a complex economy.

In addition to farming and ranching, the expansion of the Atlantic Coast Line railroad spurred a timber harvesting industry and a turpentine business.

“It was lonely living oftentimes, but we had the radio to listen to programs like the ‘Grand Ole Opry’ and ‘Fibber McGee and Molly,’” recalled Jean Brinson Ward, who was 7 years old when her father monitored the area in the 1940s from the fire tower for the U.S. Forestry Service.

A wood-frame building, erected in 1904 on this site, served as the Clay Sink Missionary Baptist Church until the present building was constructed of heart pine in 1956. It remains one of the few churches still located on state forestland. (Courtesy of Doug Sanders)

The settlement has been known by different names.

In a land transaction on May 20, 1862, Jesse Sumner sold 120 acres to Harrison H. Slaughter and Martha Ann McKinney Slaughter.

Martha had three children from a first marriage in 1859, and at least 10 children with Harrison, who had escaped a Yankee POW camp at the start of the Civil War and fled to the Everglades.

The settlement that soon developed initially was called Slaughter, after this pioneering family.

But later, it was called Clay Sink, after the local clay sinkhole.

Life wasn’t exactly easy.

Farms were worked in the intense heat of a Florida sun without the benefit of modern air conditioning or diesel tractors.

Families grew their own pork, chicken, beef, and planted gardens for vegetables.

And, they saw plenty of wildlife.

During an oral history with the Citrus County Historical Society on August 26, 2006, Frances Pritchell, a lifelong resident of Clay Sink, described what happened to her husband when he came home from a late shift at Pasco Packing in Dade City: “It was dark, and when he turned out the lights at the front gate and opened the gate, something ran into him and like to have knocked him down. He thought it was a dog. He came out around the house, but the dog was in the yard. Well, when he got along there about the chimney, it squalled out. It was a panther, and he had to go on around it to come in the house. About that time, it hollered again. A panther. And then about that time the dogs taken after it, and that was it. But, there are panthers here.”

Built as a one-room schoolhouse in 1912, this structure has served as the fellowship hall for the Clay Sink Missionary Baptist Church since school consolidation in 1943. (Courtesy of Doug Sanders)

During Prohibition, the Dade City Banner reported this news item on Sept. 22, 1925:

“Saturday a raid in the Slaughter neighborhood resulted in the capture of two stills, both small ones.”

No arrests were made in one instance, the newspaper reported. But in the other, “Bob Johnson, colored, not only lost his lard can outfit and a gallon of shine, but was also lodged in Jail.”

A year later, the Dade City Banner reported on the burial of Roy Slaughter at Clay Sink Cemetery. He was a veteran of World War I and also…”a member of Pershing’s punitive expedition into Mexico during the border troubles caused by the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920).”

During World War II, a bombing range less than a mile east of Clay Sink was operated by the U.S. Army for testing Mustard Gas, an oily liquid used as a shell filling, according to Jean Brinson Ward, vice chairman of the Dade City Historic Preservation Advisory Board.

Now the home of the Florida Bass Conservation Center—the state’s major freshwater fish production hatchery—the bombing range was used to test the effects on goats and rabbits.

Details from a 1956 Pasco County map show Slaughter as a settlement in the extreme northwest corner of Pasco County. Richloam is locatedDetails from a 1956 Pasco County map show Slaughter as a settlement in the extreme northwest corner of Pasco County. Richloam is located across the county line in Hernando County. (Courtesy of Fivay.org)

“We could feel the earth shake when the bombs were dropped, and our house was in Richloam, which was about 9 (miles) or 10 miles from the range,” Ward said.

In an article published by The Tampa Tribune on Dec. 26, 2007, Pasco County Attorney Robert Sumner said people wanted to live in Clay Sink “where they were free to do what they wanted to do without being fenced in, where they could develop their own church.”

Back then, Sumner added, “the people who came to Florida came for the same reasons people originally came to the United States.”

Sumner’s own family history dates back to the 1820s, before Pasco County was created.

In October 1936, the federal government started buying forestland around Clay Sink, first from the Schroeder Land and Timber Company for $3 an acre, and then from area families such as the ancestors of 84-year-old Henry Boyett.

“They didn’t want our cattle eating the young pine trees they had planted,” Boyett recalled during an interview at the fellowship hall. “We tried to convince them there was too much turpentine in those saplings for cattle to digest.”

By 1939, the purchase of private-owned farms was completed to begin restoring the forests and wetlands under the U.S government’s Withlacoochee Resettlement Act.

To this day, Clay Sink remains a small cluster of farmsteads and homes due to the Great Depression and the loss of grazing lands.

For Boyett, though, it’s a desirable place.

He describes it as “peace and quiet, and it can never be developed.

“It’s the most fantastic thing I can tell you,” Boyette said.

In the stillness of this place, rainfall could be heard falling on the tin roof of the fellowship hall.

Doug Sanders has a penchant for unearthing interesting stories about local history. His sleuthing skills have been developed through his experiences in newspaper and government work. If you have an idea for a future history column, contact Doug at .

Published July 24, 2019

‘He was our own Indiana Jones’

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After 91-year-old Bill Smith was laid to rest on Aug. 11 amid the emotionally riveting melody of bagpipes from quaint Smith Cemetery, a group of Smith’s fans gathered at Lake Jovita to swap stories and remember the rugged Wesley Chapel pioneer.

Dr. Christopher Darby Immer, the pioneer’s son, was among those paying homage to Bill’s memory.

Bill and Luther Smith on horseback in Wesley Chapel in 1940. (Courtesy of Madonna Jervis Wise)

“He was our own Indiana Jones!” said Immer, recalling his initial encounter with the legendary Bill Smith.

“Do you remember the Indiana Jones character that was created by Harrison Ford in “Raiders of the Lost Ark?” Immer asked.

“Well, I was 10 years old and star-struck by Indiana Jones. Around about that same time, I encountered Bill Smith.

“Modest and unassuming in demeanor, he shared a few quips on Wesley Chapel…ranching, open range and the like.

“Understanding a thing or two about the attention span of a 10-year-old, Bill pulled out his authentic Florida Cracker Whip and — reminiscent of Harrison Ford — Bill wielded his braided rawhide with painstaking precision.

“Just four effortless thrusts and he peeled each of the four letters from the label of the aluminum Coke™ can in sequence,” Immer said.

Timing was important to Bill Smith — along with honor, friendship, legacy and savoring life’s gusto.

Unpretentious and keenly aware, Bill was much more than merely his folksy humble Florida-boy persona.

He traveled the world with his beloved Lillian.

He had a map that chronicled their extensive travels and his hunting expeditions throughout the world—every continent.

He was well-read and, on things he deemed important, held strong opinions.

It was only after one got to know him well, that Bill would humbly reveal glimpses into a life well-lived.

For instance, his division was first to enter bomb-ravished Nagasaki, at the beginning of allied occupation of Japan at the conclusion of World War II.

And, during a 1963 work project on the Wesley Chapel overpass at the construction of Interstate 75, Bill remembered the fellow who waved him down off his tractor to tell him the sad news: “Our President was assassinated!”

Bill’s wife Lillian found a 2004 handwritten memoir, drafted in Bill’s classic self-effacing fashion.

Bill Smith, Michael Boyette and Ruth Smith Adams had a wealth of knowledge about the Wesley Chapel of long ago.

In part, it reads: “I was born William Rollie Smith on November 15, 1925, to Luther Daniel Smith and Louneta (Stanley) Smith in a two-story home about 200 yards from where I reside on Smith Road. A Fourth Generation Floridian, many would see my years as simple … it was a day-to day survival. I could not grow up fast enough to leave the farm during the Great Depression years.

“My sister, Ruth and I had a hard life but a good life, and we were always close. Everyone should have a sister like mine. We completed the eighth grade at a two-room schoolhouse with no electricity (electricity came in 1947), near the 1878 Double Branch Baptist Church, which was the center of the community, before subsequently graduating from Pasco High.

“My grandfather was Daniel Henry Smith, a man I dearly loved who told stories of the past. He died in 1955—a great loss. He and dad had cattle and hogs…running in the woods…from San Antonio to the present day site of the University of South Florida. This was the time of Open Range. You fenced the animals out of your yard or farm. Cities were fenced in!”

A descendant of homesteaders, William Riley Smith and Anne E. Sims Smith, Bill was eager to share that the Homestead Act of 1862, provided a 160-acre piece of land for a person who had resided on the land for five years and improved it.

Smith’s family was recognized at the September 1987 centennial ceremony, which commemorated the formation of Pasco County (including Precinct 4, Wesley Chapel). Fittingly, the homesteaded land now belongs to the Pasco County School Board.

Preserving history was an important mission for Bill.

In recent years, he lamented that his cohorts were decreasing.

His boyhood friend and close neighbor, Frederick (Dick) Tucker, passed away in 2012.

More recently, Wesley Chapel lost other keepers of the frontier history.

Michael Boyette, who spearheaded the placing of the Wesley Chapel historical marker, died on June 30, 2017. Bill’s own sister, Ruth Smith Adams, passed away on May 24, 2017.

The Smith cracker home is on display at ‘Cracker Country’ at the State Fairgrounds as a hands-on living legacy of frontier Florida. (Neighbors of Daniel H. and Elizabeth Geiger Smith built the cracker home in barn-raising fashion as a wedding present in 1894.)

The house was donated in 1979, as a tribute.

The fairgrounds exhibit reflects life on the Florida frontier, which included farming, ranching, charcoal producing, gator hunting, turpentine stills and moonshining.

Frontier independence permeated Wesley Chapel pioneer settlers who possessed a character of hard work and strength. Eking out an existence was a challenge, and Wesley Chapel was known for its gator hunting and moonshining.

Bill donated his moonshine still to the Florida Pioneer Museum in Dade City.

Wesley Chapel, as well as Bill’s many friends and family, will mourn the loss of his wisdom and insight.

One such lifelong friend and a member of Bill’s weekly fishing group is local sports hero Keathel Chauncey, who offered this reflection: “From the times that I spent with Bill, I realized that he was a straight shooter (literally and figuratively).

“Taught from early in his life what life is about, Bill experienced families that respected each other, worshipped together, and helped anyone in need. When you asked him a question or advice about anything, his answers came from his heart and his upbringing. ‘Find a quiet place, think of the teachings of the Bible, and you will find your own right answer, you don’t need me.’

“Bill Smith taught me self-respect, self-reliance, honor, patience,” Chauncey said.

By Madonna Jervis Wise

Madonna Wise, who lives in Zephyrhills, has written three local history books and is actively involved in preserving local history.

Published September 27, 2017