HISTORY OF PASCO COUNTY

Fivay

According to MacManus, “At its peak in 1910 Fivay was probably the largest sawmill operation in Florida. At that time, the town had a population of 1,500. Employees worked round-the-clock in day and night shifts to keep the boilers operating continuously.”

Walter I. McNatt recalls: “In the early 1900s, five men whose last name started with an 'A' settled in the Griffin Park vicinity. They built a big saw mill and a railroad where Fivay Junction is now. Named Tucker at the time, the junction took its name from the five men. The town had a population of about 2,300 including children and was less than a square mile in size. When the supply of lumber was exhausted in 1914, the mill was closed, and the railroad track removed.”

On Sept. 19, 1903, the Atlanta Constitution reported, “Judge J. H. Lumpkin granted a charter to the Aripeka saw mills in the superior court yesterday. The petitioners for the charter were H. M. Atkinson, John J. McDonough, Martin F. Amorous and P. S. Arkwright. The concern is capitalized at $500,000, and under the charter granted has the privilege of increasing this to an amount not exceeding $3,000,000. The chief office of the company will be located in Atlanta. W. B. Stovall is attorney for the concern.”

An article in the Atlanta Constitution on July 7, 1905, reported: “Macon, Ga., July 6 — (Special) — Sidney J. and Bartow Stubbs are the purchasers of large interests in the Aripeka Lumber Company at Fivay, Fla. The purchase was made through a deal closed with Atlanta attorneys and over half a million dollars is invested by the new purchasers. They will take charge of the new business on August 1. Both men are well-known Macon capitalists and are also experienced in the lumber business.”

In 1907 Fivay had a population of 1500, according to a 1937 newspaper article.

On Sept. 30, 1908, a meeting was held at the office of the Aripeka Saw Mills Co. for the incorporation of the town of Fivay. The following officials were selected: Mayor, W. H. Hope; Council members: Ernest Christian, Ed S. Haines, J. T. Donaldson, C. A. Blatchford, M. E. Sperry, T. A. Hughes, T. H. Martin. Town Marshall: Robert Nix. Treasurer: L. E. Thornton. Assessor: T. J. Pearce. Collector: J. F. Gardner, M. D. Clerk: C. G. Puleston. Hope was sworn in as Mayor on Oct. 2; the others were sworn in the following day. The election was overseen by J. S. Calow, J. H. Smith, and A. A. McCullom. The eligible voters were: T. H. Martin, T. J. Pearce, L. E. Thornton, E. C. Baughman, C. H. Cook, W. C. James, W. C. Wills, J. T. Donaldson, W. P. Taylor, W. G. Perkins, A. A. McCallum, C. A. Blatchfort, W. H. Hope, T. A. Hughes, C. Deason, J. B. Kennedy, C. E. Marsh, J. L. Waite, H. S. Harman, J. T. Gardner M. D., J. S. Spaws, Irb Sessions, T. H. Hovard, A. B. Porter, D. B. Whittle, M. L. Wingate, W. C. Ray, W. A. Walden, John L. McCreery, J. B. Perry, Ernest Christian. The town was centered at what is now the intersection of Little Road and S. R. 52. It consisted of these quarters of sections in T25, R16E: SE 1/4 of S2, SW 1/4 of S1, NE 1/4 of S11, NW 1/4 of S12. Mayor W. H. Hope was presumably William H. Hope, who was 24 years old in the 1910 census. Information in this paragraph was provided by Jeff Cannon.

On Sept. 10, 1909, the St. Lucie County Tribune reported, “The Aripeka Sawmills, at Fivay, of which T. H. Martin is manager, are soon to build two additional mills at a cost of $250,000 each.”

On Oct. 28, 1909, the Atlanta Constitution reported, “Martin F. Amorous, well known lumberman and capitalist and member of council from the sixth ward, will soon leave Atlanta to make his home in Fivay, Fla., where he will take charge of the sawmills of the Aripeka Company. Mr. Amorous has acquired large interests in the mills. Recently he resigned from council to take effect January 1.”

On Nov. 26, 1909, the Fort Pierce News reported, “The Aripeka sawmills, located at Fivay, in Pasco county, have been purchased by Martin Amorous, of Atlanta, the entire property being valued at five million dollars.”

According to a website describing Florida ghost towns, “Along with the sawmill there was a railroad junction constructed. Between 1910 and 1914 there were about 2,300 citizens of the town of Fivay living in less that a square mile in area.”

An advertisement in the Atlanta Constitution on March 4, 1911, reads:

FOR SALE—Engines, boilers, complete band sawmill outfit, steel (?) dry kiln trucks, log carts and eight-wheel log wagons, pumps, locomotives, pulleys, shafting, trimmers, slashers, gang edgers, lath and shingle machinery, all sizes pipes and feed water heaters. Aripeka Saw Mills, Tampa, Fla.

A. S. Gower said that in 1912 the mills closed down for good, the machinery was junked, and the timber rights were sold to the Gulf Pine Company, which established a mill at Odessa.

The town of Fivay was offered for sale by Aripeka Sawmills in an ad in the Tampa Daily Tribune on Mar. 2, 1912.

The Fivay Improvement Co. was formed on Jan. 12, 1915, with officers William Sonntag of Evansville, Indiana, president; John H. Twaddel of Fivay, vice president; Martin L. Waggoner of Evansville, secretary-treasurer.

The New Port Richey Press of Apr. 3, 1925, called Fivay “a mill town of 2,500 population a quarter century or so ago.”

The Fivay post office was established on Sept. 23, 1904. It was closed on June 15, 1912.

In a 1937 newspaper article, A. S. Gower said the failure of this huge enterprise was because the timber was neither as plentiful nor as large as expected, and the proceeds failed to justify the expensive machinery and large overhead. He said that when the mills closed for good, the machinery was junked and the timber rights were sold to the Gulf Pine Co., which established a mill at Odessa. Many of the houses were sold to a Finnish colony established at New Port Richey at about that time and were moved there. Other houses were torn down and moved to Tampa or Clearwater.

The 1911-1912 R. L. Polk & Co.'s Florida Gazetteer and Business Directory has:

FIVAY. Population 250. In Pasco county, 33 miles west of Dade City, the county seat, 25 miles from Brooksville, the nearest banking point and 3 from Hudson, its shipping point.
Aripeka Saw Mills Co., J S Stubbs genl mgr
Caraway E J justice of the peace
Fivay Mercantile Co.
Greeg Alice, boarding house
Vincent Bros. general store

The 1918-1919 Florida State Gazetteer and Business Directory calls Fivay a discontinued post office. It reports a population of 250.

The following is taken from Tales of West Pasco, by Ralph Bellwood:

It is hard to believe that at one time there was an operation just South of State Road 52 about where the development known as Osceola Heights now is taking place, the Fivay operation had a community of between fifteen hundred and two thousand people living there. Fivay got its name from the five men that headed the corporation, all of whom had surnames beginning with the letter A. There is little evidence there now to substantiate the facts. However, there are some concrete foundations that are mute evidence of the mill's existence. Presumably, as in most temporary installations, the houses were frame buildings that were hurriedly erected, and after the harvest of timber from the surrounding area the town, if such it could be called, became a ghost town, and time and the natural destructive agents obliterated most of the evidence. Fires that burned for years consumed the tremendous piles of sawdust and nature took over again to heal the scars left by the ravages of man. It was this tremendous operation that brought the railroad over from what is now known as Fivay Junction, and from the mill site the road was extended to Hudson.

A 1929 newspaper article has: “They put up a big saw mill, dry kiln, planing mill and everything necessary to produce first class lumber. There were hotels, a club house, houses for workers, electric light plant, water works system, a railway, and whatever was necessary for the comfort and enjoyment of the five New England capitalists and their friends.”

According to Ralph Bellwood, a small brick hospital was built at Fivay. The bricks from the hospital were used in 1919 to construct the Land Office (Milbauer) Building, the first brick building in New Port Richey.

According to the Fivay historic marker, three hotels and a bank served the town. However, a 1911-12 publication described Brooksville as the nearest banking center.

Old Fivay Cemetery

Mitchell to Saw Logs in Fivay Mill Pond

Revives Memories of Once Golden Days of the Deserted Village

Many who have come to Pasco county in recent years do not know that within three miles of the Gulf of Mexico and a mile or two farther south than Dade City, was the most promising town in Pasco county some ten to fifteen years ago.

It was Fivay, an aristocrat among lumber camps. The company had some rather large ideas. For instance they built the mill of brick and connected it with the Tampa & Northern railway at Tucker, nine miles east with a railroad and built railroad shops to care for the rolling stock where as many as fifty men were employed. There was a large hotel, a commissary, a hundred good residences and other buildings that go to make up a town. The main street was planked. The social life was cared for by a fine club house, tennis court, golf links and a park, and it is said that guests came from as far as Jacksonville for week-end affairs.

Today there are a lot of decaying buildings under the charge of a solitary care taker. The company went broke about ten years ago.

All of which is intended as an introduction to the statement that J. M. Mitchell, the county commissioner, is in a deal to buy the logs in the log pond at Fivay, and saw them into lumber at his mill. It is estimated that there are between 500,000 and 1,000,000 feet of timer in the pond, a large portion of which is cypress, and it is supposed that the cypress at least is in good milling condition. Mr. Mitchell has a saw mill at Elfers and he has not decided yet whether to haul the logs to Elfers or the mill to the log pond.

Sawmill Town Went From Boom to Bust

By LELAND HAWES

From the turn of the century past World War II, sawmills ripped and whined through much of Florida's virgin timber land, crating brief boom towns that eventually turned to ghost towns.

One such mini-city sprang up in the woods of western Pasco County, yet its name survives today only in a road designation.

Recently John D. Weekley of Tampa, a retired third-generation lumber man, said he had just learned of the existence of Fivay and he wanted to know more.

In a response to an inquiry on this page, Ralph A. Gower of Temple Terrace came forth with background possible only because he's the son of the one-time superintendent of the sawmill at Fivay—and because he lived there as a boy.

Fivay existed as a town for less than a decade, and it started out being known as Five A's. Its designation came from the owners of the sawmill, whose names all started with “A.”

Ralph Amorous Gower gained a middle name from one of the owners—Martin F. Amorous, a prominent Atlanta businessman, who took an active role on the local scene.

Amorous and his four associates had been allied in another enterprise, the Atlanta Street Railway and Electric Co., which later became Georgia Power Co.

Gower's father, William Arthur Gower, went to work for Amorous at the age of 13 and had to engage in a fistfight to beat out another applicant for a job as office boy.

“I don't know if Mr. Amorous was aware of the circumstances,” Ralph Gower said, “but the relationship between employer and employee that eventful day lasted a lifetime.”

W. A. Gower worked in Amorous' various lumber operations, and his family lived in Georgia sawmill towns such as Cordele, Moultrie, Tifton, Ty Ty, Sunset and Crossland.

“Some of my earliest memories are the sweet smell of fresh sawdust and live steam—and the whine of racing saws,” Ralph Gower said. “We customarily lived in company housing, and only on rare occasions did we enjoy electric lights, running water and inside plumbing.”

In 1905, when Ralph Gower was only 2 years old, the family came to Florida after the Atlanta men bought some 280,000 acres of wooded land in west Pasco, Hillsborough and Hernando counties.

Evidently a sawmill had been started at the same site in 1897 by previous owners, Sessions and Bullard, and a spur line connected it with an early short railroad line, the Brooksville and Hudson.

Gower believes the earlier sawmill had burned, and the new Georgia owners started from scratch in building a huge operation that became known as Aripeka Saw Mills at the company town, Fivay.

“My father told me later that everyone involved in the operation then lived in Brooksville and rode a work-train to Fivay every day,” Gower related.

Because of health problems, Gower's father and his family soon moved back to Georgia. Not until about 1910 did W. A. Gower return as superintendent of the Fivay mills.

“By this time, the mills were in full operation, and the population of the town, as I recall being told, was around 1,500,” Ralph Gower said. Fivay was “bursting at the seams,” he added. “They were really hauling the logs in.”

From the perspective of time, Gower views it as a wasteful operation. “After they went through a place, it looked like a tornado hit. They took only the biggest trees, and left the tops on the ground.”

Crews laid tram roads into timber areas. Log carts with huge wheels would be pulled by mules once the trees were felled and logs attached by hooks.

Fifteen steam locomotives hauled the loads into the mills, and there were several steam “skidders,” Gowers said, describing them as huge portable winches for snaking cypress from swamps.

There were two large sawmills—one to cut pine and the other for cypress, he said.

John Weekley said the Fivay operation was probably the largest in Florida in that period, based on the equipment and manpower it used.

Since Fivay was a company town, it had the usual commissary, a company office and post office, a warehouse, and a “primitive” drug store and soda fountain, with a doctor's clinic upstairs.

Electricity came from a power plant fueled by sawdust and slabs. “None of the living quarters for whites or blacks had inside plumbing, although some had electric lights,” Gower said.

The town had its own water system, too.

“The mills were located beside a large mill pond, into which the cypress logs were dumped, to be retrieved later as needed,” Gower said, explaining that the pond was created by damming up Bear Creek.

A few hundred yards downstream, Bear Creek disappeared into Bear Sink, a huge sinkhole in the side of a sand hill.

“Water running into this sinkhole reappears at the very edge of the Gulf of Mexico, right in the middle of the town of Hudson four miles away,” Gower said. “This fact became known one very rainy summer when the sawdust dam at the millpond in Fivay washed out, only to boil up in Hudson.”

The late Judge J. A. Hendley, who wrote a history of Pasco County, said the town at Fivay “flourished like a green bay tree for a while.”

“Boilers of the plant were never cold,” he wrote. “A day and night shift kept the plant in constant operation.”

Judge Hendley and Gower both mentioned one point: Fivay was a hell-raising town on Saturday nights. The woodsmen pitched wild parties with moonshine liquor on their time off.

Casualties were so high in spontaneous shootings that the community cemetery filled rapidly.

“They hauled bodies out there every Saturday night,” Gower said. “There were stills in all those woods.”

One story had the area's justice of the peace assessing fines with a Sears, Roebuck catalog. He'd open a page and randomly point to an item. The price would determine the fine for an offense.

Gower remembers only two telephones in Fivay, hooked by a single wire to Fivay Junction on the Tampa Northern Railroad tracks some miles away. Incidentally, the railroad was founded by the Fivay owners, with Amorous as first president.

Amorous' home on a hill overlooking the mill site had one of the telephones. “There were two other large homes up the hill near the Amorous house,” Gower said. “one was occupied by the company auditor, George Broadhurst, the other was a large boarding house.”

The Fivay venture was never successful, Gower said. “There just was not enough timber on the land to support so large an investment, and the mills 'cut out' much sooner than anticipated.”

He believes production ended about 1912. “The company liquidated what it could, and Fivay became a ghost town.”

Gower's father, superintendent at the time, had the job of selling off the custom-made machinery for scrap. Junk dealers hauled away most of it.

Gower's mother filled in as Fivay's last postmaster, after the mills shut down. The family home was torn down, every board marked, and it was rebuilt in Tampa's Ballast Point.

W. A. Gower bought 80 acres of the remaining land, learning that U. S. 41 was coming that way. Eventually he opened a service station on a strategic crossroad that became known as Gower's Corners.

His son is disdainful of maps that leave out the apostrophe and call it “Gowers Corner.” He points out that his father owned all four corners at one time.

Ralph Gower said his father had dropped out of school after the sixth grade, but was well-informed. “He could do anything around a sawmill—splice a cable, repair a steam engine or run a saw.”

After the sawmills at Fivay went out of business, W. A. Gower built a portable sawmill of his own which he could take into the woods. “He would have woodsmen cut trees, then he would make 2-by-4 boards for lumber companies or crossties for the railroads.”

The older Gower kept up his contacts with Martin amorous over the years, and Ralph Gower remembers meeting Amorous at a dinner at his parents' home in Tampa about 1921.

“Physically, he was a stocky person,” he said. “He always wore a mustache, and he was practically bald. He and my father were still good friends.”

When Judge Hendley wrote his Pasco history around 1940, he said Fivay “looks like a western mining town after the gold ore had been exhausted.”

Today, the one-time ghost town is part of the population growth explosion spreading eastward from U. S. 19 along State Road 52. The highway follows the railroad right-of-way which once served the logging town.

Shopping centers and homes have replaced the sawmill community, with only the “Fivay Road” sign a reminder of its contrasting past.

A postscript on how this story came about: John Weekley and his wife were on a cruise on the Danube River in Europe, when they met Mrs. William H. Moore, of Saratoga Springs, N. Y.

When Mrs. Moore learned that Weekley had spent a lifetime in the lumber business in Tampa, she asked him if he knew anything about Fivay. Weekley had never heard of it.

Mrs. Moore is Martin Amorous' granddaughter, and she furnished some of the background on the Atlanta man who was one of the five “A's.”

Included was a handwritten letter Amorous sent to his wife with a Fivay postmark March 11, 1905. Obviously lonely, he wrote:

“My darling, I am alone in the banquet room of the club house. My last visitor Mr. Sizer left me today. I ate supper alone and laid down on the sofa....

“I will leave here Sunday a.m. by buggy for Tampa, thence lave there Monday night for home.”

What Remains of the Fivay Sawmill