Hardee Lakes, Bowling Green: The County That Had No Lakes Until a Mine Made Four

Before the 1990s, if you wanted to fish a lake in Hardee County, you left the county. There were none. The Lake Wales Ridge sinkhole lakes lie outside the county line; Hardee is drained by the Peace River, fed by creeks.

The four lakes at Hardee Lakes Park south of Bowling Green were dug by a dragline. Lake Hardee runs 120 acres, Deer Lake 110, Lake Firefly 97, and Gator Lake 47 — and every acre of them was scooped out to reach the phosphate underneath. The property was part of the Fort Meade Mine, worked by Cargill through the 1990s. When the ore was gone, what remained were the pits.

Those pits didn't get filled back in. Since 1975, Florida law has required that every acre the phosphate industry mines be reclaimed — put back to nature, agriculture, or some other productive use. Cargill's successor on the property, The Mosaic Company, did the reclamation work in partnership with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, and the choice they made was to leave the excavations as open water and shape the ground around them into lakes. In 2001 the 1,260-acre tract, then held by IMC, was deeded to the Hardee County Board of County Commissioners.

The water sits in ground that used to be a working mine, bordered by the Polk County line to the north and Ollie Roberts Road to the south, close to Fort Green Springs.

FWC manages the lakes as a fish management area, the same protected-regulation status carried by Tenoroc and Saddle Creek in Lakeland and Cargill Fish Management Area near Fort Meade. The lakes were stocked and managed as a fishery from the start rather than left to fill with whatever swam in. In 2004 The Ledger ran a piece under the headline "Hardee Fishing: The Secret's Out."

The mine origin shows in the shape of the place. Reclamation lakes tend to have steep, regular banks where the dragline cut, and the four here sit as a cluster rather than a natural chain, each its own body of water inside one property. There's a campground, boat ramps, shaded tables, and a five-dollar-per-vehicle entrance.

Hardee County's older history has nothing to do with lakes. Settlement of what's now the county traces to April 1849, when the Kennedy-Darling Indian-trading post opened on what is now Paynes Creek. For the century and a half that followed, there was no lake inside the county lines.

The lakes at Hardee Lakes Park are now a stop on FWC's Florida Fishing Trail. The 2001 deed to the Hardee County Board of County Commissioners is the reason Lake Hardee, Deer Lake, Lake Firefly, and Gator Lake are public water and not a mining company's.