The Cummer Sons Cypress Lumber Company

In 1922, the Cummer Sons Cypress Lumber Company opened a sawmill in Lacoochee at the edge of what is now called the Green Swamp. This is the company that became the largest lumber supplier in the Southeast; the Cummer Sons Cypress Company.

The giant forests of cypress trees draped with bromeliads and orchids that once towered over the waters of the Green Swamp. These cypress forests were secluded in low-lying wetlands and along the banks of rivers flowing from the swamp. Pine forests grew across its dry ground up on the plateau’s. 

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During the Great Depression, the Cummer Company was the largest employer in Pasco County. It paid loggers 10 to 35 cents an hour to slog through waist-deep water shared by alligators and water moccasins to the cypress trees, which they felled with axes and two-man saws. Some trees so large, the loggers used dynamite was to break them down. However, year after year, as many as a dozen trains hauled logs of cypress and pine out of the swamp to Lacoochee. 

The Cummer Company laid hundreds of miles of railroad through the Green Swamp the great where cypress groves as ancient as the California redwoods grew.

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The sawmill alone measures 228 feet by 45 feet. The mill also included a veneer plant, which was 228 feet by 45 feet. It also had a crate factory, of 200 feet by 100 feet; and a lathe and shingle mill, with a capacity of 60,000 lathe per day, according to the story “Big Cypress Mill Completed at Lacoochee, Florida,” published in The Manufacturer’s Record on Nov. 22, 1923.

​To make sure that it was not all work and no play, the company sponsored a semi-pro baseball team called the Lacoochee Indians. 

Towns formed in the Green Swamp, such as Cumpressco, Ashley, Slaughter, and Sturkey. Cumpressco was around in the 20’s and lasted into the 40’s, it was located off of River Road. This was a point of entry for Cummer Sons Cypress Company into Florida’s vast multi-county Green Swamp. 

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Sturkey was another company town, which it’s remnants can still found in the Green Swamp today continued in operation until 1959. The town was a sawmill & box factory, vital to support the operations in Lacoochee in 1922. 

It would span 36 years, as generations would be born, grow up, and work in the Green Swamp until the Cummer Company sawed its last cypress board and closed the Lacoochee mill in 1958. 

To this day, you can still spot near the headwaters of the Withlacoochee River where the stumps of ancient cypress once grew.

Ron Daniel, while a Southwest Florida Water management employee, discovered an abandoned box car in the green swamp southeast of Brooksville in Sumter County.  It once belonged to the Cummer Sons Cypress Lumber Company and was left in the Green Swamp when the Cummer Company moved south in 1958.