Asa's Adventures - Local Archaeology Of Railroads

        When people think of archaeology, they will most likely think of rocks, pith helmets, and artifacts from ancient civilizations. The definition of archaeology according to the dictionary is “the study of human history and prehistory through the excavation of sites and the analysis of artifacts and other physical remains,” and our view of what this looks like is often affected by pop culture: ancient cities, buried treasure, and dinosaur bones receive plenty of screen time in television and films. However, archaeology can take various different forms, and what fits within those parameters can come in all kinds of shapes, sizes, and age. Allow me to explain.
        A few years back, I was gifted a railroad spike by prominent Umatillian Mr. Dalton Yancey. The spike was unique—being for “narrow gauge” tracks, it was much smaller than a “normal” railroad spike—and had some local relevance; it came from tracks laid by the “Hodges Lumber Company,” a sawmill that used to operate in the Umatilla area over a century ago. Mr. Yancey shared that the spike had been found buried beneath the foundations of a barn that had been built in the 1920s but had since been torn down, and that the spike had been contained in a keg with various others like it. The keg itself had long since succumbed to the destructive Florida climate. If that isn’t full-blown archaeology, I don’t know what is!
        I gratefully accepted this artifact and information into my collection, and believed the story finished. However, during a recent visit to the Lake County Historical Society’s museum in downtown Tavares, I was confronted by a new, interesting piece of Umatilla’s forgotten railroad history. In an exhibit in a gallery were displayed several photographs of various steam locomotives from around Lake County in the early 1900s, one of which was owned by the Hodges Lumber Company—the same lumber mill that owned my spike! What a gold strike for a railfan!
        As it turns out, there were logging railroads all over Lake County and Central Florida back in the day, everywhere from Cassia and the St. Johns River to Groveland, Leesburg, Sorrento, and of course, Umatilla. These primitive railroads tore a page right out of the Wild West with their rough track, wilderness terrain and colorful steam engines. There may only be one surviving photograph of the locomotive of interest to this article, and the interpretive exhibit explained that the engine had been photographed in the vicinity of what is now Highway 19, near the curves across from the Twin Lakes neighborhood. While the exact date of the photo is unknown, it is entirely possible that this elegant steamer could have dated from the 19th Century.
        Today, the remnants of these pioneer railroads are reduced to little more than a ping on a metal detector and the knowledge that families pass down from generation to generation. The tracks are long gone, as are the locomotives that rode upon them and the sawmills they fed. But the fact that they once existed remains, and in the 21st Century, archaeology does not always have to mean dinosaur bones and Aztec gold. A rusty spike and a family history can bear fruit for one who wants to find out about the way things used to be, and a photograph in a local museum can serve as a treasure map to discover facts that would otherwise fade away without even a page in the history books to mark their passing.
        The world is full of discoveries to be made; what are you going to find?