Florida's Forgotten Company Towns

By Joe Marzo

Drive north out of the Tampa Bay area and the landscape begins to change. The subdivisions thin out. The highways stretch longer between towns. Pine forests begin to take over the horizon. If you pass through places like Cross City, it feels quiet, almost forgotten in its own right. But a century ago, this region was anything but empty. It was alive with industry, noise, and movement, fueled by a network of hidden company towns that powered Florida’s early economy.

These towns were not built to last. They were built to produce.

In the late nineteenth century, North Florida became one of the centers of the American naval stores industry. Turpentine, rosin, and tar were essential materials, used in everything from shipbuilding to paint. The longleaf pine forests that once covered vast portions of the state became the foundation of this industry, and with it came the rise of turpentine camps scattered across counties like Dixie, Taylor, and Levy.

Around Cross City, these camps were often tucked deep into the woods, connected by rough roads and rail spurs. They were owned entirely by the companies that operated them. Housing, stores, tools, even the law, all fell under corporate control. Workers woke before sunrise and spent their days cutting into pine trees, collecting sap, and hauling heavy loads through the Florida heat.

The camps were isolated by design. Distance made oversight difficult and control easier.

Most workers were Black laborers, many of them descendants of formerly enslaved people who had few economic options in the post Reconstruction South. Wages were low, but what made the system particularly restrictive was how those wages were paid. In many camps, workers received scrip instead of cash. That scrip could only be used at the company store, where prices were often inflated. A worker might finish a week of brutal labor only to find that most, if not all, of his pay had already been consumed by debts for food, tools, and basic supplies.

Leaving meant abandoning whatever little you had and often meant facing retaliation.

Overlaying this system was the practice of convict leasing, which Florida embraced more aggressively than many other states. Prisoners, overwhelmingly Black men, were leased to private companies and sent into the same forests. In areas around Cross City and deeper into the Big Bend, these men worked under armed supervision, cutting trees, tapping resin, and living in conditions that observers at the time described as inhumane. Records from the period show high mortality rates, but the remoteness of the camps meant that much went undocumented.

What emerged in these forests was not just a labor system, but a controlled environment where movement, money, and daily life were dictated by a single authority.

Travel south into Central Florida, and the setting shifts, but the structure remains.

In Polk County, particularly around Mulberry and Bartow, the discovery of rich phosphate deposits transformed the region into one of the most productive mining areas in the country. Known as Bone Valley, this area became the backbone of America’s fertilizer industry.

To support the mines, companies constructed entire towns from scratch. Among the most notable was Brewster. Founded in the early twentieth century, Brewster was, at its peak, a fully functioning town. It had hundreds of homes, a hospital, schools, a hotel, and even recreational facilities. To an outsider, it might have appeared prosperous, even progressive.

But everything in Brewster belonged to the company.

The homes were owned by the mining operation. The stores were company stores. The infrastructure existed solely to support the extraction of phosphate. Workers lived within a system where their employment dictated nearly every aspect of their lives. If the mine thrived, the town thrived. If the mine declined, the town had no independent foundation to stand on.

By the mid twentieth century, that decline had begun. As phosphate deposits shifted and operations moved, Brewster’s population dwindled. By the 1960s, it was effectively abandoned. Today, little remains beyond faint traces and historical records. The land itself has been reshaped, carved into pits and reclaimed in ways that make it difficult to even imagine a town once stood there.

The story of Brewster was not unique. Across Polk County, smaller mining settlements followed the same pattern. They appeared quickly, served their purpose, and disappeared just as fast.

Further west, in Hernando County, another variation of the company town emerged in places like Croom. Here, lumber operations drove development. Camps were established to harvest timber from Florida’s forests, with portable sawmills and temporary housing forming the backbone of these settlements. Like the turpentine camps, they moved with the resource. Once the trees were gone, the camps packed up and relocated.

What remains in Croom today is largely forest, but beneath it lies the memory of an industry that once cleared vast stretches of land and left little behind.

What connects Cross City’s turpentine camps, Brewster’s phosphate town, and Croom’s lumber operations is not just industry. It is the idea that these places were never meant to become permanent communities. They were tools, built for a single purpose and discarded when that purpose was fulfilled.

This impermanence is one of the most striking features of Florida’s early development. While cities like Tampa and Jacksonville grew and adapted, these company towns existed on a different timeline. They rose quickly, often in remote areas, and just as quickly faded from existence.

But their impact did not disappear with them.

Environmentally, the effects are still visible. The longleaf pine forests that once dominated North Florida were heavily depleted by turpentine operations. In Central Florida, phosphate mining permanently altered the landscape, creating vast pits, waste stacks, and ongoing concerns about water quality. Even in places like Croom, where the forest has returned, it is not always the same ecosystem that existed before.

Socially, the legacy is just as significant. These towns were part of a broader system that defined labor and race relations in the South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The use of scrip, the control of housing, and the reliance on convict leasing created environments where workers had little autonomy. Understanding these towns means understanding how economic growth in Florida was often tied to systems of exploitation and control.

And yet, despite all of this, people lived real lives in these places. Children grew up in Brewster. Families formed in the turpentine camps outside Cross City. Communities, however constrained, developed traditions, relationships, and a sense of identity. There is a human story here that exists alongside the economic one, a story of endurance in places that were never designed for stability.

Today, most of these towns are invisible. You can drive through Mulberry and see the modern phosphate industry still operating, with little indication of the towns that came before. You can pass through Cross City without realizing how many camps once surrounded it. You can walk through parts of Croom and have no idea that entire settlements once stood among the trees.

Florida presents itself as new, constantly growing, always looking forward. But beneath that surface is an older story, one of places built quickly and erased just as fast.

The Forgotten Company Towns of Florida are not marked by monuments or preserved in the way other historic sites are. They exist in fragments, in records, and in the land itself.

And in many ways, they tell you more about how Florida was truly built than anything still standing today.

Sources

Outland, Robert B. Tapping the Pines: The Naval Stores Industry in the American South

Shofner, Jerrell H. Forced Labor in the Florida Forests

Florida Department of State,

Division of Historical ResourcesUniversity of Florida Digital CollectionsTebeau,

Charlton W. A History of Florida