history.htm October 4, 2004 Return to home
Narrative Histories of Trilby and Lacoochee as found in Dade City Library Book.
Trilbhis.doc
East Pasco’s Heritage
Edited by Eleanor Dunson
Published by
First Baptist Church of Dade City
417 West Church Avenue
Dade City, Florida 33525
1976
Obtained from:
Hugh Emery Branch, Pasco Library System
FL / 975.969 / EL3 in September, 2004
Chapter 39. TRILBY HISTORY
by Charlotte Tyer.
How's that? Tell you about Trilby, you say? It used to be called Macon, but the mail kept getting sent to Macon, Georgia. Someone who had read George DuMaurier's novel, “Trilby," published in 1894, suggested that the town be called Trilby. Some old plats show streets named after characters in the novel.
In the early 1900s, it was like many railroad towns in America. Folks didn't seem to be in such a hurry then. All the businesses in town would close every Thursday noon in the summer. Practically the whole population would go to the Withlacoochee River for a fishfry under the oak trees in what is now Peterson Park. The men would go to regular stands and shoot the biggest fish with rifles. The boys would splash into the water and pick up the fish. The women brought good things from their kitchens, which made mighty fine eating with the crisp-fried fish.
Folks worked hard, though. They raised most of their food – pork, peanuts, eggs, and vegetables. You could buy enough meal or grits for twenty-five cents to last a big family for a week. Most of the women sewed, though there was a community seamstress. The kids got their ideas from their parents and from Sunday School, though they were not a11 angels. Once a young boy was about to be baptized in the river and asked the preacher in other than Sunday School language not to drown him. That same boy played a fiddle made from a cigar box, strung with hairs from the tail of daddy’s horse.
With no TV, there was time for fun, like peanut boilings, taffy pulls, hide and seek, post office, spin the bottle, and a homemade game called board on deck. This was often played at school recess. As few as three or as many as liked could play. Catcher and batter faced the pitcher, with the only base behind the pitcher and “deck” just to one side of the batter. After the batter (using a bat, board, or axe handle) hit the pitched ball (softball or stuffed sock), everybody on the field tried to hit him with the ball before he could touch deck and run to the one base and back home. If someone caught the ball, he got a turn at bat.
Most of the kids were pretty well under control, with the help of daddy's razor strop. Still, they had ways of getting back at their elders. Most of it was innocent enough: just inconvenient, especially if you happened to be in the privy when it was turned over at Halloween. They also took the gates off hinges and put unusual things on roof tops. Once they put a railroad float on top of the two-story school house. This float had four iron wheels with a bed a little lower than the floor of railway express cars, and was used for transferring mail and baggage from one train to another.
In 1910, the school was a two-story wooden building on the west side of present Highway 301, across from Cummer Road. It burned on a cold night with frozen ground the sixty-odd students weren't too unhappy. The grownups built another two-story schoolhouse of brick, which later burned too. Earl Tyer's garden on that spot still turns up pieces of desks and old square ink bottles. He irrigates from the old schoolhouse well. Trilby School in those days was the center for political rallies and for social life. Cliff Couey remembers one special softball game when the fat women played the skinny men, with the proceeds going to the school. Everybody went to Friday afternoon programs or plays once a month, there being no electric light for night activities. People were friendly, inviting each other for meals and helping out in sickness. Mrs. Gregg O'Berry's mother and aunt helped nurse a relative through diphtheria in spite of putting their own lives in danger. Two doctors who practiced in Trilby were Dr. DeVonn and Dr. Byrd.
Of course there was some meanness going on in town. There were some all-night shooting sprees when all the street lights at the depot were shot out. During Prohibition there was homemade moonshine and some bootlegging. The county sheriff couldn't be everywhere at once. Walter H. Edwards, Bert's daddy, was either constable or deputy sheriff from the early 1900's until his death in 1936. Bert found his handcuffs handy for attaching his girl to the steering wheel. Walter Edwards had come to Florida at the turn of the century with his brother-in-law Tom McCorkle and Bert Fish, who became Volusia County Judge until President Franklin Roosevelt appointed him Ambassador to Egypt. Once the Trilby State Bank was robbed. Mrs. Gregg O'Berry's aunt, Lena Crum, was teller. Her husband, Lester Crum, bank president, was out at the time. He had earlier showed her how to open the vault from the inside, which saved her life.
Gregg O'Berry's daddy was the only mail carrier from 1905 to 1911. Gregg became postmaster in 1931, and was followed by Eunice Trunnell, Myrtle Hancock (Mrs John) Thomas, and now Mrs. Jeff Couey.
Meeting the trains and talking with the passengers was a favorite pastime for young folks and old. Most of the young boys made pocket money carrying passengers' baggage. This being in open-range days, one old three-legged pig met the train regularly for scraps thrown from the windows. Two taxis, one belonging to Mr. Edwards, took travelers to two hotels. One engineer named Dunbar had a special whistle to notify local people who brought food to sell at his stops. Once he got buzzard eggs at Lumberton and took them to his wife as turkey eggs to set under their turkey hen. Later when he asked about them, she told him that there were too few to set, and that she had put then in his lunch the very next day.
The railroads came to Trilby because of several phosphate mines in the area, and also the Peter son-McNeil Sawmill near present Peterson Pond. After the phosphate and the pines were used up, the railroads were the only big payroll in town. In 1925 most of the stores were along the railroad tracks. On the west side of the tracks, south of present Florida 575, were the Bankston residence, Bradham's Drygoods Store, John B. Stephens Feed Store, and the post-office. Then there was an alley going down an incline to Lake Malaria, now called Railroad Pond, where horses were hitched under the trees. South of the alley was Mr. Edwards's Redfront General Merchandise (which had the only gas pump in town, and stocked coffins before the days of embalming); Dick Pitts's Meat Market; Edgar Wade's Drugstore (nonprescription); a cafe; and Vemon Hilliard's Barbershop. Mr. Hilliard also worked for the railroads. His daughter, Mrs. Bob Greene, still lives in Trilby. There was also the Drug-Sundries Store (with soda fountain) owned by Bert Edwards's uncle, Tom Blitch. Then came a cleaning establishment, Bankston's Grocery, and Matt Lake's colored rooming house. Except for Blitch's, the backs of these stores were built up on pilings where the lake came up in heavy rains. On the east side of the tracks, facing present Florida 575 and going east, was the brick jail (regularly set on fire by a father to release his boys) and the present Methodist Church. South of the jail were the two-story Trilby State Bank, a printing shop, the old two-story Masonic Building, Joe Roller's Hotel (owned by Harvey Worthington's foster family), Hux's Rooming House, and Blue Goose Rooming House. Then came two rooming houses owned by a Mrs. Touchton; later she built the two-story Trilby Hotel now being renovated into apartments by Bill English. Between the tracks was an area where the railway express floats operated, and a 24-hour restaurant housed in a tall building with wide eaves over the tracks to protect passengers from the weather. Besides this downtown hub, there were scattered dwellings housing a population of 400 to 500. There were 300 children in the school.
That was the bustling little town of Trilby until one fateful afternoon in May of 1925. Cliff Couey, a boy then, remembers eating blueberry pie when he heard the train whistle long and loud for an alarm. He said, "I'm going to finish my pie even if the town burns!" However, when he heard pistols start shooting, he jumped up and ran out, leaving that pie. Young Bert Edwards was walking back from a fishing trip with Earl D. Tyer's daddy when they spotted the smoke. It was about 1:00 PM when the fire started up-stairs in the drygoods store, and it burned until about 5:00 PM. Bucket brigades were formed, using the water hauled from the watertank south of town by train, to protect the train shed. The Dade City Fire Department came out in a Model T firetruck with water hose cart trailing behind but the stores west of the track burned like tinder. One store, Blitch's Drug-Sundries, being farthest south and not on pilings, was wrapped with a cable and hauled away to safety by a locomotive. Very little merchandise could be saved. The coffins from the Redfront were rescued, and Mrs. Edwards carried out a 100-pound keg of nails that she couldn't budge later. It was a terrible fire, and looters added to the heartache. Some businesses tried to carry on, but Trilby was never the same. The post office reopened in the bank building, and the young folks still gathered there after meeting the trains.
The railroad depot was torn down and the present one built about 1927. The small restaurant there has been run in succession by Mrs. D. G. Tyer, Mr. Boykan, the Cliff Coueys, the Dewey Greens, and Mrs. Bob Greene. The railroad still did a lot of business, reaching its peak in World War II with fifty-five trains in twenty-four hours. Local women, including Mrs. Glen Whittington, passed out sandwiches to soldiers on the troop trains. Activity has gradually been cut back until there is now a possibility that Trilby depot will be discontinued.
It's sad, somehow, to see things change so in seventy-odd years. Things that seemed so important vanished, along with the people that lived with them. But people are still here (in 1976), old-timers and new folks too. We still work and play, laugh and cry, as always. We're all just part of a long stream of humanity that passes over this earth for a little while and moves on. We try to cherish what we can learn of the past, even the Indian arrowheads that turn up in the necessary diggings of this life. We muse over the old tombstones in Trilby Cemetery, and wonder about all the people who have walked the same ground we walk. Then we wonder what those who walk this ground in the future will remember about us. That's when we feel our frail mortality, and ask the good Lord to help us walk worthy of our heritage and preserve the God-fearing independence and grit that made America great.
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Lacoohis.doc
East Pasco’s Heritage
Edited by Eleanor Dunson
Published by
First Baptist Church of Dade City
417 West Church Avenue
Dade City, Florida 33525
1976
Obtained from:
Hugh Emery Branch, Pasco Library System
FL / 975.969 / EL3 in September, 2004
Chapter 22. LACOOCHEE HISTORY
by Lorise Abraham.
Prior to the year 1922, when Cummer first began construction of a sawmill in Lacoochee, the anticipated growth of this community in northeast Pasco County had not materialized. Prospective land buyers had once been brought in by train to invest in what promised to be a large manufacturing center. The area surrounding Lacoochee had prospered for a while by growing strawberries and running turpentine stills. At one time orange groves had lined the banks of the Withlacoochee River, just one-half mile from the center of town. It is said that the "Big Freeze" of 1898 completely wiped out every trace of any orange trees there. Eventually the remains of the homes of the grove owners also vanished.
In 1922 Cummer acquired the land in Lacoochee needed to construct a moderm, completely electrified sawmill and box factory, the largest of its kind in the South. This continued in operation until 1959, bringing the long-promised prosperity to this area. At one time Cummer offered the largest payroll in Pasco County.
While the mill plant, company office, commissary, hotel, and doctor's office were being built, as well as many homes for individual employees, a flurry of building activity began in the town of Lacoochee itself. In addition to the post office and general merchandise stores already there, many new private businesses were built. These included more general merchandise stores, garages and filling stations. restaurants, bakeries, dairy, drug stores, theaters, barber shops and shoeshine stands, grocery stores and meat markets, dry cleaners, pool rooms and bars, hardware stores, inns, and a social club, the Woodmen of the World.
The spiritual lives of the residents were enriched by the construction of several Protestant houses of worship, which included First Baptist Church, Oak Ridge Baptist Church, United Methodist Church, and Assembly of God Church. Christian fellowship in Lacoochee was not only a Sunday affair. The townspeople practiced their religion in an everyday manner by helping those of the community who were in need from sickness, poverty, or loss of personal belongings by fire or floods. To a community constructed mainly of lumber, fire was a daily hazard, not only to the mill site but to all the homes and businesses. Each fire was valiantly fought by Cummer's own fire department, assisted by local volunteers, and when needed by the Dade City Volunteer Fire Department.
During the Second World War, labor at the mill became a problem because so many of the young men were called to the service and so many people went to work in the shipyards at Tampa. Lacoochee contributed more than vitally needed lumber to the war effort, giving up five native sons in this conflict. Lost in the European theater of war were the Lessig twins, Gerald C. and Harold L. Lessig, Robert Holt, and L. Halkings. Paratrooper Carmen Thompson gave his life in the Pacific. Killed in action also were Francis Woods and Janes Kills of Trilby, both of whom had worked at the mill, and whose loss was deeply felt by Lacoochee people too.
Like so many Americans, Lacoochee people were devotees of our national sport, baseball. For many years the teams enjoyed a friendly rivalry with the teams from Dade City and Brooksville. Almost everyone in town turned out for Sunday afternoon ball games. These were held at a ball park built on land donated for that purpose by Cummer.
The history of Lacoochee is unique because of the feeling prevailing throughout the community of "one family." Many young people who grew up there have ventured out into the world to become leaders in their chosen professions. Lacoochee people take great pride in the achievements of their friends and neighbors. These accomplishments are spoken of without envy whenever two or more people from Lacoochee get together.
After Cummer reluctantly closed down the mill operation, the location was purchased by Wood Mosaic Corporation of Louisville, KY in 1960. Wood Mosaic operated a plywood mill there until 1964. From then until 1971 the site remained unused, at which time the property was purchased by Interpace Corporation of Parsippany, New Jersey.
At present (1976), Interpace, with a work force of about 110 people, is specializing in the making of reinforced concrete pressure pipes for the transmission of water. Interpace is now one of three main industries in east Pasco County, and the only industry in Lacoochee.
The town of Lacoochee still has a large population; several businesses continue to operate there. One of the most modern schools in the county was built there several years ago. This school operates day and night for the continued education of adults as well as children.