Lacoochee, FL

Lacoochee grew beside the Withlacoochee River as a Florida timber town. In the 1920s, Cummer Sons Cypress Company built a large mill complex there, including a sawmill and box factory that became one of the area’s main employers. The company added a hotel, commissary, doctor’s office, recreation area, utilities, and employee housing, drawing workers and families toward a settlement shaped by the mill whistle and the rail line. That prosperity had a hard edge: housing and facilities were segregated, with Black workers receiving smaller homes and fewer indoor amenities.

ATTRDanTD / CC BY-SA 3.0

The mill closed around 1959–60, and most of the physical town disappeared, but Lacoochee’s story did not. The Pioneer Florida Museum holds Cummer’s steam engine and former ranch-house buildings, including a Lacoochee exhibit. The surrounding Green Swamp still carries the marks of the timber era, including the rail corridor built to move cypress to the mill, while the Withlacoochee keeps the landscape connected to water. Lacoochee also belongs to a local triangle with Trilby, Trilacoochee, and Dade City, where schools, roads, churches, and family gatherings have long crossed community lines.