As noted in my previous column, the Drake Lumber Company, assembled in just a few years in deep South Dade in the early 1900s, was at the time the region’s largest business. Accompanying the lumber mill was Princeton – the company town named for founder Gaston Drake’s alma mater – comprised of workers and families, and segregated along racial lines.
From the Jean Taylor Collection at HistoryMiami Museum, 1986-283-0740
Field workers in Princeton, Florida, harvesting a bean crop, 1935.
The lumber mill represented a $100, 000 investment and included 5,000 acres of timberland. The complex contained a dry kiln, pining mill, two giant timber ramps, vast lumber sheds, offices, barn machine, blacksmith shops and the large main building, used for administrative activity as well as displays of finished lumber products.
Trains moved west over 12 miles of tracks from the mill into the piney woods, where newly cut long-leaf yellow pine from the virgin forest awaited loading onto rail cars by an A-frame arrangement called a skidder. It took 20 men and seven mules to run the operation. The cut timber was first treated to a boiler, then hauled by three cables pulled by hardworking mules to train cars for loading. Afterward, the wood was taken to the mill and transformed into boards.
At its peak, the mill cut one million feet of lumber each month – nearly 200 miles, enough to line the path from the mill into what is now Miami and back three times over. Much of the lumber was shipped via the Florida East Coast Railway. The station stood on the eastern edge of Princeton.
Work was demanding to say the least, with laborers toiling 12 hours daily from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Compensation was woeful and racially determined. White workers received $2.25 daily; Black workers were paid $1.25.
The business grew sharply. Sales in 1912, for instance, were three times what they were the previous year. A decade later, with the woods surrounding the lumber mill depleted of its hardy pine, Drake shut down the mill and opened another, short-lived version of it in Palm Beach County. The company later opened a lumber company in the same county. During the Great Depression, Drake drilled for oil – without success – west of Miami in what was Everglades swamp land, and owned and operated a lumberyard north of downtown Miami. He died in the 1950s, after a long, fruitful life.
The remnants of Drake’s original mill in South Dade, including its remaining equipment and buildings, were destroyed by fire. In subsequent decades, Princeton continued on as an almost exclusively agricultural community with a wide array of crops under cultivation at any time. It remains today a farming center. One structure from the company town survives, and was designated historic by the county’s historic preservation board in the 1980s.
Paul George is historian at HistoryMiami Museum. To order a copy of the photo accompanying this column, contact HistoryMiami archives manager Ashley Trujillo at 305.375.1623 or atrujillo@historymiami.org.