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Forgotten Town: Sumica

Originally contributed to Polk County FLGenWeb on or by 13 Oct 1999.

Forgotten Town

Ruins All That Remain of Sumica, Once a Mill Town

Tuesday, January 19, 1999

By JULIA FERRANTE
The Ledger

LAKE WALES -- Under a shaded oak hammock off State Road 60, between fields of salt palmettos and pines, lie the ruins of a once-flourishing turpentine mill town.

Rows of concrete piers, bricks and a retired rail bed are most of what remains of Sumica, a company town east of this city that once had 50 homes, a school, a commissary, a church and even its own currency.

"I've taken my metal detector out here and found some old pieces. They're square, aluminum and they say 'SUMICA' on them," said Harvey Suber, the real estate appraiser negotiating the sale of the land. "I found about two or three pennies and nickels."

Sumica comprises about 50 of 4,077 acres that Polk County and the South Florida Water Management District board have agreed to buy next month from Louis Speer of Tennessee. Speer sought as much as $5.6 million for the property, but it sold for $3.9 million.

"One of the reasons the state is interested in the property is it has about 2 1/2 miles of frontage on Lake Walk-in-the-Water, which is part of the Kissimmee Lake Chain," said Steve Blaschka, an appraiser with the water management governing board.

Plans are not complete, but Sumica will be the second county purchase of land designated in part for recreational and preservation use. The first was of 470 acres along Crooked Lake, Blaschka said.

The deal was approved under the water district's Save Our Rivers program, which aims to protect the state's streams and rivers. The county's portion will be funded with a 1994 tax referendum for environmental lands.

Sumica is an acronym for Societe Universelle Mining, Industrie, Commerce et Agriculture.

Few people remember the community as it was, but records show the post office opened in March 1917 and closed in 1927, probably indicating when the town shut down, said Raymond L. Driver of Lakeland, a historian who's studied Mulberry and surrounding areas. The post office later moved to Lake Wales, according to the "1962 Chronology of Florida Post Offices," by Alfred Bradbury and Story Hallock.

Some accounts say Sumica included a dense forest of longleaf pines, two-arms-width in circumference, Suber said. Spindly pines now line up like match sticks, and palmettos and huckleberry cover the ground, except where the oaks are.

Clay floors and shallow wells indicate where homes stood, Suber noted. A few pine ties on a raised bed and a concrete base, presumably for a water tank, mark where steam engines passed through Sumica.

"It was tough living out here in the woods, but the train came right through," Suber said. "They could get just about anything they wanted."

Sumica was linked with a number of timber communities in Central Florida, between Plant City and the Avon Park bombing range, Suber said.

There were many such mill towns, probably because there were a lot of pine trees in Florida, Driver said. Similar communities included Florinda, Kicco (pronounced Kiss-o), Eulica and Nalaca.

The process of collecting turpentine was fairly simple.

"They'd take a big pine tree, score it and take the bark off of it and put a little container under it. It would fall, and they'd have a little bit of turpentine," Driver said.

Sumica is next to Kicco, a community owned by the Kissimmee Cattle Co. whose remains were destroyed by a bulldozer a decade ago, said William Lloyd Harris of Bartow, who has researched the town. The ruins of Kicco included an old schoolhouse and a water tower.

The area once had a turnaround in the Kissimmee River for steam boats as long as 60 feet, Harris said.

Former residents of Sumica are hard to come by. Harris' grandmother-in-law, Sarah Fahrenback Padgett, lived in the community when she was a child, he said, but she is too ill to be interviewed, he said.

"Her father was a sawyer," Harris said. "She remembers going to the lake when she was 4 or 5 years old. It's an old ghost town now. There were several little sawmill towns there."

A letter written by W.F. "Frank" Martin of Lake Wales says Sherman Lumber Co., which cut most of the timber in Polk County, owned Sumica.

He said the community included a rooming house. Workers' homes were made of clapboards with tin roofs.

"A postal accommodation was provided in the commissary. The company sold just about anything a person needed from the commissary," Martin wrote.

The sawmill burned in 1920 or 1921, Martin said, but two years later, it was rebuilt.

The companies moved the camps and the Seaboard Rail Co. moved the tracks as the timber ran out. And sometimes, the communities' names changed, Martin said.

Sumica had at least four other names. It was called "48-Mile Post" first, after its location along the track, Martin wrote. It later became "62-Mile Post," then "Slab Town," "Tyson," and later Sumica. The name "Slab Town" came from the slabs the workers took from the mill to make shanties.

"I haven't found out just who 'Tyson' was, but that was the second name given to 62-Mile Post. As the mill developed, Sumica was decided on."

Although living in company town made residents completely dependent on the owners, life in Sumica by all accounts was pleasant.

"I can well remember walking to school by myself through the woods, which were occupied by wild cattle that belong to Mr. M.W. Keen, who had a homestead," Martin wrote.

An unsigned letter dated May 14, 1923, from Sumica is written on the back of St. Andrews Bay Lumber Co. stationery to "Dearest Mamie." The writer appears to want to persuade his wife to join him in his new home, Suber noted.

It reads in part: "Mamie, you will like it down here. Everybody looks good and feels good too," the letter says. "I have got a good job and a good horse to ride. . . . Mamie they is the prettiest lakes down here, . . . I will show them to you when I come. I am going to homestead me a place here. . . .

"They is the most cattle here I ever seen and the best range. I bet I see 500 head every day and they have got these big buffalo bulls here. . . . We have got a good camp. I haven't heard or seen a mosquito since I've been here. It's a good place. We have a good house. You can bring all your things, for we are going to stay a while."