County Road 39, running from Manatee through Hillsborough counties, is a road that time seemingly forgot. Fort Lonesome, at the crossroads of Highway 39 and S.R. 674 is one of the outposts along a journey back in time. Mitch Traphagen photos.
Dreams were made and lost along this road. At one point long ago, someone pounded in the last nail and probably looked upon this accomplishment with justifiable pride. The people here made their stand (and made Florida an agricultural powerhouse), and in the process opened the Sunshine State to the world.
The highway is framed by country grocery stores, from the Duette Country Grocery, to Fort Lonesome Grocery to the Picnic Grocery. Inside are the things you need and, likely, a nice greeting from the cashier.
A replica gas station stands near the Fort Lonesome Grocery at a private residence.
Looking down the road is a vista of a Florida that has largely disappeared into subdivisions and traffic jams. Food, rather than homes, grows here. Note: even though fairly quiet, standing on the road is most definitely not recommended.
Duette School, Florida’s only remaining “one-room schoolhouse.”
Just off Highway 39, north of the Picnic Grocery, is Alderman’s Ford Park, a beautiful and peaceful oasis that reveals nothing of the three million people living only a short distance to the west.
Just east of Sun City Center, Wimauma, Parrish and Riverview is a place and a road that time forgot, at least Florida time, anyway. Today, Florida time is where subdivisions larger than Midwestern towns go up with abandon. There are no subdivisions in this place, so close yet so far away.
Highway 39 begins as Manatee C.R. 39, continues on as Hillsborough C.R. 39, and has somehow remained far, far away from the Florida people are most familiar with — the land of snowbirds, tourists, beaches and stressed-out drivers in traffic jams.
And if you go there, at no point are you aware that only a dozen miles to the west is a metropolitan area of more than three million people, the second largest in Florida and the 18th largest in America. It seems almost impossible.
At any given time, you can pull over and stand on the highway, looking north or south into a Florida of a different age (note: It is indeed possible but certainly not advised — the occasional truck can’t slow down very quickly).
The road begins, assuming you start from the south, appropriately with a grocery store. Grocery stores somehow define it. No, these aren’t the Winn-Dixie or Publix grocery stores that you are accustomed to — they are country grocery stores where you go to get just what you need, perhaps a six-pack or a sandwich. And you’re pretty much guaranteed to get a nice greeting from the cashier.
From the Duette Country Store on S.R. 62 in Manatee County, C.R. 39 begins. The periphery of the highway holds an equal mystique. Just a bit further down 62 is the Duette School, Florida’s only remaining “one-room schoolhouse.”
Further north, less than a mile off the road at Bill Taylor Road near Fort Lonesome is a re-creation of a gas station that anyone of a certain age could probably recall from a distant youth.
And speaking of Fort Lonesome, it is the next grocery store that you would encounter on a drive north, standing as an outpost at the crossroads of 39 and S.R. 674, a heavily traveled artery through urban South Hillsborough that offers scant suggestion of where it leads for those who venture on to the west.
Particularly at the southern end, food grows along Highway 39, both the kind that comes from the ground and the kind that treads upon the ground. The farm and ranching operations are huge, with numerous numbered gates and pool-table-flat pastures pocked with trees bearing a look of mystery.
But the word “pasture” doesn’t begin to describe the sheer scale and size of the operations that are interrupted only with smaller, largely unseen acreages. The road runs through land that, decades ago, it was said that fences were few, allowing ranchers to drive their cattle to markets in the north without interruption. Survival, perhaps, meant counting on others in those days. And perhaps it still does today but urban life simply moves too quickly, is too demanding for such things. Not so much here, despite that trucks and railcars mean that fences are no longer barriers.
Also on the periphery are a labor camp or two, seemingly an anachronism in high tech 2016, but needed for the thousands of migrant workers who pass through, toiling in life, laboring in the fields to bring the food produced along Highway 39 to our dining room tables.
At various points along the journey, the pastures give way to forests, notably accessible at Alderman’s Ford Park. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the park lies just north of another country store, the Picnic Grocery.
At the park, you enter a different world still. The heat shimmering off the two-lane highway disappears, just as do the handful of visitors into the woods on the peaceful, silent trails and along the place where the Alafia River begins in earnest. There are few places so close to a densely populated urban area that offer such peace and solitude.
The city has a long reach, but its grasp is still weak. There are some businesses along the way among the country grocery stores: a Circle K convenience store here, a hair salon there, even a more modern elementary school. But the advance is slow and the businesses blend into scrub palms, the pastures and the hardwood forests that line the road.
At one time there was talk of expanding Highway 39 into four lanes, preparing for what was considered the inevitable expansion of the metropolitan area to the east. South of S.R. 60 that runs through Brandon, that expansion never happened, neither to the highway nor, by and large, to the population. The road remains much as it has for decades.
Along the way, near a beautiful hilly section of the highway, is what some consider to be one of the area’s few (if not only) Sears homes. In the early part of the last century, Sears, Roebuck and Co. sold complete homes — and the kit included everything from the wood and shingles to the doorknobs, screws and paint required to finish it off. The homes began for less than $2,000 and financing — some of the first financing for the purchase of a family home — was provided. The kit arrived, unassembled, of course, on a railcar and it was the buyer’s responsibility to pick it up, take it to their land and put the thing together — a task that surely would make an Ikea designer blush. But things were different in those days. People were different. The job was rarely an individual effort, as neighbors would often pitch in.
The house was the subject of a feature article in The Observer News publications a decade ago. It certainly appears to be a Sears house, but there was no perfect way to make certain, short of ripping out walls or floorboards in search of a Sears stamp. This reporter was younger then and climbed the steep roof of the two-story home hoping to find evidence on the stone and brick chimney. While none was found, the house exuded such warmth that in the end it really didn’t matter. No doubt the neighbors, the few that farmed this land back then, turned out to make that house into a home.
That’s the sort of thing that happened along that road. It may well still happen. And the home stands still, along the calm of a highway that runs through the past.
North of S.R. 60, Highway 39 emerges into 2016, with four lanes of pavement running into Plant City. But south … south is where time seems to matter little. At the Picnic or Fort Lonesome grocery stores. Along the river or in the woods. Or just standing along the road where the endless chaos and din of three million people lie a mere dozen miles to the west — but it might as well be a thousand miles. It isn’t the Florida that tourism commissions advertise but it is very much the real Florida. It is far away from the mega-cities that stretch along the coasts. It is the place where the people who carved their lives into what could be an unforgiving landscape made their stand. And in doing so, they opened the Sunshine State to the world. An irony, perhaps, but for today it’s okay. The city hasn’t reached out there yet.
Perhaps it never will.