Lake Pierce, Lake Wales: The Five-Day Haul From Net to Railroad

Burr Thomas "Pet" Jennings was born in Sumter County, Georgia, in 1885, came to Florida as a young man and worked for the Kissinger Springs Phosphate Co. in Bartow. By the timeline his family keeps, he found Lake Pierce in 1916 and began fishing it for a living — netting the lake, then hauling the catch out over log roads on a round trip that took five days. The fish were packed in dry ice, the timeline says, and shipped by railroad to the North. On August 1, 1917, he moved his wife, Mellie Mae, out to a makeshift accommodation on the shore at a place called Hickory Hammock. The Ledger, writing about the family in 2013, dated the start of the commercial fishing to 1918 and put it at the same spot.

The lake carried a different name in that era. A published history of Polk County, describing the years before white settlement reached the area in 1911, calls the water Cat Fish Lake, with Lake Pierce in parentheses. The creek that leaves the east side still goes by it — Catfish Creek, 8.97 miles from its headwaters at Lake Pierce to its mouth at Lake Hatchineha. That creek is how the 3,779-acre lake near Dundee feeds the Kissimmee Chain of Lakes, which the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission describes as the upper headwaters to Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades.

The netting ended in 1924, when commercial fishing was outlawed. Pet Jennings sold his nets and put the proceeds into a Model T Ford truck to haul citrus. On November 10, 1925, he filed a homestead on the property — a two-room house, a well, a car shed and three acres of cleared land. The family kept a garden and chickens and hauled produce into town to sell, and the boys harvested and sold alligator eggs.

In 1928 they started renting out boats. "In 1928, they started renting little boats," Marietta Jennings, who married into the family, told The Ledger in 2009. "It turned from a farm to a fishing camp, and it was out in the middle of nowhere."

Pet Jennings died on August 14, 1934, of a heart attack after swimming out to help a boater on the lake. The camp stayed in the family. The car shed became a store and storeroom during the 1930s. Electricity reached Hickory Hammock in 1948. Cottages 1 and 2 went up in 1952, the original store in 1953, telephone service in 1956. In 1969 a canal was cut through the old garden ground to add a marina and mobile home lots, and in 1975 the business changed its name from Jennings Fish Camp to Jennings Resort, Inc.

Robbye Jennings Major, who ran the camp with her husband, Douglas, died on March 10, 2009, at 94. A month before that, the family had thrown an 80th anniversary fish fry that drew more than 300 people. Her grandson Chris Beasley was running the place by then, on the north end of the lake above Lake Wales: 20 boats for rent, 12 rental cottages, 40 boat slips and 100 mobile home lots.

On December 15, 2025, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection announced that it had bought 74 acres along Lake Pierce, with more than 6,000 feet of lakefront, and added the parcel to Allen David Broussard Catfish Creek Preserve State Park — more than 8,000 acres of scrub, sandhill and flatwoods named for the creek that runs out of the lake.