Pine Castle Pioneer Days, 1974

Boggy Creek

About six miles from Taft is a small cluster of houses known locally as "Boggy Creek." The area was probably first settled by squatters after the Civil War.

In 1890, Orange County named Boggy Creek School on its list of schools. It was an eight grade, one teacher school, and was in use until the thirties.

Boggy Creek was cattle country. Bert Wetherbee tells of going on cattle drives with his father in the early days when they would be gone for two and three weeks at a time. As Florida was open range, their cattle roamed from Winter Park to Holopaw and had to be rounded up twice a year.

Turpentine stills were also prominent in the area. The chippers would go into the woods and cut large notches in the pine trees. Then they would clear a large space around the bottom of the tree, for pine tar caught fire easily. The "cut and gutter" methods were used for gathering turpentine. Under the large notches the men would insert a Y-shaped gutter and hang a cup or bucket to catch the turpentine. Some of the still owners rented prisoners from the county or state to gather the turpentine. It was a common sight to see men wearing their "balls and chains" being guarded while they worked.

Boggy Creek also had a few scattered citrus groves. The fruit that was picked was hauled by ox cart--twenty-five boxes to the load--to the railroad at Kissimmee.

At one time Boggy Creek even had a post office, and a lot more people than you can find now. But the few who have styaed are a proud lot.

The Boggy Creek Monster

"Bigger than a bear and twice as mean looking! He stood there on two hind legs just looking at me! I ain't seen anything like it before or since!" So goes one actual sighting of the Boggy Creek Monster. Florida's Boggy Creek, that is, not Hollywood's.

The monster began to rear its ugly head in the early forties when the Army Air Force came to town. At that time, McCoy Field was known as Pine Castle Auxiliary Air Field for the old Orlando Air Force Base. The men who manned her were members of the Army Air Force.

In their spare time, many of the soldiers went hunting in the woods to the south and southeast of the base. Soon rumors began to fly of a monster having been seen. He was supposed to be roaming the woods between Holopaw and Boggy Creek.

There are differing opinions as to whether the monster was real or not. Many believed that it was nothing but a huge Florida panther. As a mother panther and her three cubs were sighted going from Boggy Creek to the Green Swamp as late as 1970, that is a possibility. Still others believe that the tale was invented by the natives to keep the hunters out of the woods and away from their moonshine stills.

Whatever the monster was--whether it was only a panther or simply a figment of an active imagination--it was very much a part of the local folklore for a time.