Lake Arietta, Auburndale: The Street Named for What the Loggers Left

Two men standing at base of old-growth longleaf pine tree, early 1900s, showing scale of pre-logging timber Old-growth longleaf pine, early 1900s. The trees took a hundred years or more to mature and could live five hundred.

The land around Lake Arietta was longleaf pine forest — old growth, the trees needing a century or more to reach maturity. What made those trees valuable was the resin. Processed into turpentine, tar, pitch, and rosin, it was one of the most commercially valuable substances in the world before petroleum. It waterproofed wooden ships, preserved rope rigging, and went into paint, soap, medicine, lamp oil, and printing ink. The products were collectively called naval stores, and for two centuries the American Southeast supplied most of the world's demand.

The work was methodical. Tree chippers cut a V-shaped notch into the base of a longleaf pine — the wound was called a catface — and fixed a metal gutter and clay cup below it to catch the flowing resin. Every few weeks they cut a new face higher on the trunk, driving the wound upward as resin continued to flow. Over six to ten years the tree was bled out. Then it was sold to loggers.

Man standing between massive cypress trees in cleared Florida forest, late 1800s early 1900s logging era Florida timber, late 1800s. After the turpentiners were done, the loggers moved in.

The industry reached Florida by the 1870s. By 1909 the state was among the nation's leading producers of naval stores. The camps that processed the resin were company towns in the full sense — housing, stores, schools, and enforcement controlled by the operator. Workers were paid in company scrip redeemable only at the company store, which kept prices high and wages functionally worthless. Many were never able to leave.

In Polk County, the turpentine camp of Nalaka operated from 1919 until 1928 across thousands of acres, staffed under the debt peonage system that bound workers through manufactured debt. Camps like it ran across central Florida in the same years. In 1923, after a young North Dakota man was beaten to death at a camp in Dixie County, the Florida Legislature abolished the leasing of convicts to private industry. The turpentine camps began closing. By 1950 the industry was effectively gone.

Workers sawing felled timber in Florida flatwoods forest, early 1900s longleaf pine logging Central Florida timber work, early 1900s.

What the turpentiners and loggers left behind was stumps — thousands of them across the central Florida flatwoods, each holding decades of accumulated resin. Farmers dug them out of their fields and sold them as lighter wood for generations. Some are still being pulled from the ground.

The longleaf forest itself did not come back. Across the Southeast it has been reduced to less than three to five percent of its original range. What grew back here was faster-growing slash pine. The open-canopy pine savannas that had defined this region for millennia, with their wiregrass understories and gopher tortoise colonies, went with the old trees.

Lake Arietta predates all of it. So do Lake Ariana and the dozens of others ringing Auburndale. But the pine stands that once ran to Arietta's edge were cleared, the stumps pulled or left to sink into the soil, and the land was eventually sold, subdivided, and built on.

Lake Arietta shoreline and open water, Auburndale, Polk County, Florida Lake Arietta, Auburndale, in the Peace River–Saddle Creek Watershed.

Lake Arietta today is 739 acres of private freshwater in the Peace River–Saddle Creek Watershed. People fish it for bass from their docks and ski it on weekends. The lighter wood stumps that gave the street its name are somewhere underfoot, still holding their resin, a hundred years after the pines that made them were cut.