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We drive FL-60 between Bartow and Mulberry more than we’d like to admit. Every time, the same hills rise up out of flat land that has no business having hills at all.
They’re not hills. They’re phosphate mining Florida left behind, stacked higher than most buildings in this county
We never thought much of it. Until we did.
Phosphate Mining Florida: An Accident on the Peace River
In 1881, an Army Corps of Engineers captain named Francis LeBaron wasn’t looking for anything unusual. He was surveying the Peace River south of Fort Meade for a canal. What turned up in the riverbed was phosphate, and it barely registered at the time. The full story of that discovery, and the fossil-rich ground it sat in, is laid out well by the Florida Museum of Natural History.
Five years later, in 1886, John C. Jones and Captain W.R. McKee found high-grade deposits along the same river while on a hunting trip. That discovery didn’t stay quiet. Within a decade, land that sold for a dollar twenty-five an acre was going for three hundred. More than two hundred phosphate companies moved into the region. Fort Meade’s Middle-Senior High School still calls itself the Fighting Miners, more than a century later.
It was written at the time that many a homesteader who went to bed poor woke up a landowner worth real money. That kind of overnight wealth drew speculators from across the state, and it didn’t last. By 1900, most of the original companies had already failed or been absorbed.
What the Boom Cost
The work was brutal from the start. Miners stood in slurry for twelve-hour shifts under armed guards on horseback, paid roughly two dollars a day. Dynamite accidents were common enough to stop meaning much.
In April of 1919, three thousand miners struck against seventeen phosphate companies across the region, centered in Mulberry, Fort Meade, and Lakeland. Their demands were plain: an eight-hour day, a standardized minimum wage, and relief from twelve-hour shifts in deep, wet pits. It was a rare moment of interracial labor solidarity in the segregated Jim Crow South.
The companies brought in strikebreakers from Georgia and cut the electricity to Mulberry and Fort Meade. What followed wasn’t quiet. Armed skirmishes broke out, and company guards retaliated against striking workers and local residents. The standoff dragged on for eight months. It didn’t break until December of 1919, when the mining companies finally conceded to major wage increases and shorter hours, as WUSF’s reporting on the strike lays out.
What’s Still Here
The small mining outfits that flooded in during the boom didn’t stay small or separate. Over the following century, they consolidated, merged, and changed names, eventually becoming part of Mosaic, the company that still operates processing plants across this same stretch of Florida today.
What you’re looking at on FL-60 isn’t a mountain. It’s a gypstack, waste left behind after phosphate rock is processed into fertilizer. Some rise close to fifty stories. Federal rules have required this waste to be stacked rather than dumped since 1989, mainly to control the radon it can release. A dried crust forms on top and limits how much escapes, in theory, as WUSF’s environmental reporting on these stacks has covered in detail.
In theory, it holds up most of the time. In 2016, a sinkhole opened beneath a Mosaic plant in nearby Mulberry, and more than two hundred million gallons of process water dropped straight into the Floridan aquifer, the same aquifer much of Florida drinks from. Nobody outside the company knew for three weeks. In 2015, the EPA settled a case against the company over how this waste and wastewater had been handled at multiple Florida sites, addressing sixty billion pounds of it. The stacks keep growing. What to do with them long-term is still, functionally, unsettled.
Bartow Hides Other Things Too
This isn’t the only story we’ve found sitting quietly in this part of Polk County. Bartow, Florida hides other interesting mysteries, including a house we’ve written about before that a dying man built with his own hands and lived in for decades longer than anyone expected. If the hills on FL-60 got you, the Wonder House is worth the short drive too.
Drive It Again
The industry that started with one accidental discovery in 1881 never really ended. It just changed what it leaves behind.
Drive FL-60 again sometime. The hills won’t have changed. What you know about them will.
Further Reading
If this stayed with you, Ted Ehmann’s Boom & Bust in Bone Valley: Florida’s Phosphate Mining History goes far deeper into the industry’s full arc, from LeBaron’s discovery through the environmental reckoning happening now.
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What We Carry
If you’re out this way with a camera, the gear we actually bring is listed in full on the site.