Centralia Historical Memories 

Centralia was named after a lumbering and agriculture town by the same name in Wisconsin. Some of the people that worked at the Hernando County sawmill lived in a settlement called Wiscon, about 5 miles due west of Brooksville. These people came from Wisconsin and Connecticut; hence, they called their settlement Wiscon.  Today it is still marked by an important survey monument on surveyors’ charts with a U. S. geodetic bench marker which surveyors use quite frequently when taking geographic bearings in the west side of Hernando County. The Wiscon Road intersects State Road 50 about halfway between Brooksville and Weeki Wachee Springs.

Centralia was a short lived "boom town" that was born in 1910 and died in 1922 and was located 4 1/2 miles north of Weeki Wachee Springs and east of what we know today as U. S. 19 Highway, just north of Tooke Lake. Mr. Stan Weston, a Florida state farm forester, once wrote an article several years ago entitled, "The Death of a Forest and Town," which dealt with Centralia. With permission we borrow parts of the story to relate the historical memories to you.

"Seventy some odd years ago, a sea of virgin timber blanketed our state. Longleaf and slash pine, two and three foot in diameter, gave forth of their resinous gum, to tar the lines and shrouds, and caulk the planks and lapstrakes of the worlds Navies, and the turpentine was used for medicinal purposes, creating the first and largest industry in Florida naval stores. The lowlands and swamps contributed the greatest volume, highest grade, fastest growing, durable, red tide water cypress to be found anywhere in the United States of America. This wealth of timber seemed inexhaustible and lured men and industry from all corners of the earth.

Towns blossomed, nourished by the whine of the circular and band saw. Meanwhile, further west in the United States another boom had long since blossomed and was beginning to fade. A non-renewable resource, silver, gold, and other metals were running out. Once prosperous towns were being deserted. Sage brush, chaparral and desert sands were reclaiming their own as the flow of valuable yellow dust from mother earth trickled and stopped. Still the sawmills throughout the southeast whined louder and louder. No thought was given to the future of replenishing the forest. Was not this blanket of forest inexhaustible? Wasn't it a waste land of wilderness, jungle, something to be removed so that 'civilization' might advance? Leave seed trees, plant new trees, seedlings,—ridiculous they thought. Never would this sea of virgin timber be exhausted. How wrong they were! 

In this atmosphere the town of Centralia, in west Hernando County, was born. The mill in 1911 had an estimated daily cut capacity of one hundred thousand board feet. Centralia’s life blood flowed from this mill and when the timber was cut out, the stream dried up, and this thriving town of some 1,500 to 1,800 persons faded into oblivion. The prosperous stores, commissary, grocery and dry goods and hardware, carried more stock than any retail store in metropolitan Tampa or Jacksonville. The storeroom had a capacity of four freight carloads of merchandise.