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.