Hidden ghost town in woods florida1/13/2024 ![]() I think of the old Spanish cemetery and it reminds me of ‘Fodderwing’, the savant-child in Rawlings’ “The Yearling”-a blissful innocent, sort of a Forrest Gump of the Florida scrub. Sloughs of a swamp appear and disappear on both sides of the trail. I pick up a nut from the trail, recognize it as hickory, and finally see the large and majestic mother tree nearby. Shoestring ferns, invigorated by the rains, flap out from the smooth trunks of the tall sabal palms, and the young fiddleheads of cinnamon ferns poke up from adult clutches, as if someone has dusted them with the sweetness of spice. I see palmetto fronds chewed down to the quick, likely by white tail deer. We step over a pile of bear scat, black and thick with berries of some sort. A pair of swamp warblers flit nearby, and then all is still. We walk at a good clip through the hammock of live and laurel oak, following it as it falls and rises through the gentle slope of the terrain. If Bill said there was a cemetery here full of old Spanish bones, then there’s one here-although few are likely ever to find it without precise directions. I met Bill years ago and once wrote of him in a book entitled “River of Lakes”. The great old folk historian Bill Dreggors, who lives nearby in DeLand, has told of seeing an ancient and heavily overgrown cemetery back in here, a place where some of the Spanish who first settled the high bluff on the river were buried. ![]() The village boomed after the Civil War, and by 1888, it had a post office, a hotel, a general store, a newspaper and a “sanitarium”, the later to lure invalid tourists into a faux cure promised by the Florida climate. Francis Dead River” splayed away from the St. Ox-drawn carts would bring lumber and citrus to a landing at a high midden where the “St. Like many river towns, this one was nurtured by the utility of the grand and noble San Juan. Francis had once existed, at the edge of the St. We passed the only spur, a little two-mile loop that wrapped around a spring, and we kept moving towards where St. The clouds that hid the sun earlier become darker, and with the thick canopy of foliage overhead, it seemed as if it were early evening rather than mid afternoon. That explained the third vehicle in the lot. We meet two people walking out with a small dog-sort of semi-friendly, just a howdy on the way out for them. Both of us had paddled past the site of the ghost town on the river on different sojourns, but had never tried to reach it by land. Michelle brought along her video camera to shoot some b-roll for her independent film and I packed away a digital, along with some trail food-in this case, a half loaf of nut bread from the bakery and a container of crab salad I had spiced up with some sun-dried tomatoes and Old Bay. We had been looking for new ways to get down to the river, maybe see some wildlife, and at the very least do a bit of exploring on our own. It took me a bit to settle back down and when I did, I was finally able to open myself up to the fine Old Florida landscape that spread out around us. My caution level spiked a bit, and by the time we started walking the trail, I was wary, listening carefully for any unusual sounds, like the zinging of arrows through the leaves. There were only three vehicles in the lot-the bow hunter’s pickup, mine, and another. At the trailhead kiosk, I park next to where a hunter fully outfitted in camo is busy sticking arrows into a quiver attached to his belt.īy the time my friend Michelle and I had loaded and shouldered our backpacks, the guy had pulled out his bow from his truck and disappeared into the forest, vanishing as fully as the little town of St. I turned soon after, onto a dirt road leading to where we will begin our hike. ![]() We had driven west on HW 42 through the Ocala National Forest to get here, far beyond the swarm of Octoberfest bikers and into and out of a rural hamlet named Paisley.
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