By Tim Spain
Photos submitted
March/April 2019 GASPARILLA ISLAND 57
When you drive down Gasparilla
road, one of the last things you see
before you get to the Coral Creek
Bridge is a small working cattle operation. Though
it may be small, it has everything needed to raise
cattle including its own source of water, which
appears to have been dug, and the house must have
been built on the dirt dug out to make the pond,
so the cattle had water.
Now let’s drift back in time to about 1855.
Jacob Summerlin and his brother Charlie were
using the Punta Rassa docks to send cattle to
Cuba and Central America until the Civil War
began and the Army took over the dock and
used it to send cattle to Key West which
was then controlled by the Union. I’ll bet
that made “The King of the Crackers”
Jacob Summerlin pretty aggravated and
he had to find a different dock to use
until the war ended, so I think he used
the docks further north and even
smuggled cattle to Confederate
ships along the western Florida coastline. Any of
the cattle that weren’t eaten by the Rebels were
sold to the Union, ironically enough.
After the war ended, Summerlin donated
the land where present day Bartow and
Orlando are located and he built the Summerlin
Hotel and donated more land to create
Lake Eola Park.
To understand even more about the cattle
history in Florida, we have to go back in time
even farther.
Cattle were brought here by way of the
Spanish in 1521 when Ponce de Leon brought
the Andalusian Cattle to Florida during his
exhibition. More were brought here in 1529 by
Hernando Desoto and even more in 1540 by Don
Diego de Maldonado. Some of the cattle escaped
and survived in the wild because of the suitable
habitat of Florida.