As you sit waiting for the traffic light to change at the intersection of State Road 52 and Little Road, the impact of urban sprawl is difficult to ignore. But beneath the pavement and subdivisions lies the footprint of a forgotten community that at one time was the most populated town in West Pasco County.
In the first decade of the 20th century, this was the site of Fivay, a town that burned bright and fast — a “boom-town” in the truest sense of the word. At its peak, it boasted a population of over 2,000 people, and an industrial output that dwarfed anywhere else in Pasco County. Today, it is a ghost, with hardly a trace to be found.
The story of Fivay is inextricably linked to the Aripeka Sawmill Company. Around 1903, five wealthy investors from Atlanta and Boston — the “Five A’s” — saw the untapped potential in the massive stands of virgin longleaf pine and cypress that covered the land in West Pasco County. These men were Martin F. Amorous, Preston S. Arkwright, Henry M. Atkinson, Gordon Abbott and Charles F. Ayer. By combining the first letter of their surnames, they christened their enterprise and the town it birthed as “Fivay”.
The scale of the operation was, for the time, staggering. The company didn’t just build a sawmill. According to newspaper reports, they had two sawmills, a dry kiln, and a planing plant. To support the enterprise, they essentially built an entire city in an area covering about one square mile centered just south of the present-day intersection of SR 52 and Little Road. In September of 1904, the town officially opened its post office, marking its place on the map.
Fivay was a textbook example of a “company town.” The Aripeka Sawmill Company owned the land, the houses, the stores, and the very livelihoods of the residents. Despite this total control, for a few golden years, Fivay was the place to be in Central Florida. The town featured over 200 houses, a large commissary (company store), a hotel, a small hospital, and a dedicated schoolhouse.
At its height, the mill employed nearly 2,000 workers. While the management lived in relative luxury, the laborers — a mix of white and African American workers — lived in segregated quarters, a common and somber reality of the Jim Crow-era South. Fivay didn’t deal in standard U.S. currency internally. Like many industrial outposts, they issued scrip — metal or paper tokens that could only be spent at the company store. This kept the wealth within the company’s ecosystem.
The mill itself was a marvel of the industrial age. It boasted a double-band saw capable of processing 200,000 board feet of lumber per day. To feed this mechanical beast, miles of narrow gauge railroad lines were built out into the surrounding forests. Bear Creek, which flowed through the Fivay area on its way to the Gulf, was dammed to make a pond used to float logs to the mill.
To get the cut lumber to market a private railroad connected the mill to the Tampa Northern Railroad at Fivay Junction (currently along SR 52 just west of US 41). Eventually, this railroad branch was extended to the Port of Hudson.
The town was self-sufficient. It had its own electric plant — a rarity in rural Florida in 1910 — and a sophisticated water system. For a brief moment, Fivay was more technologically advanced than the county seat of Dade City.
The tragedy of Fivay, and many sawmill towns like it, was its lack of sustainability. The philosophy of the era was “cut and get out.” There was little thought given to reforestation or the long-term health of the ecosystem. The “inexhaustible” forests proved to be quite finite. By 1912, the signs of decline were evident. The timber within an easy haul of the railroad was disappearing. As the trees vanished, so did the profits. The “Five A’s” began to see the writing on the wall. Internal disputes and the rising cost of reaching more distant timber stands squeezed the company’s bottom line.
The timeline of the collapse was rapid. In late 1911, major operations began to scale back as the most accessible timber was exhausted. By the beginning of March 1912, the entire town was offered for sale to the highest bidder.
Rights to the remaining timber were sold to Gulf Pine Company, which established a mill at Odessa. The massive machinery was sold for scrap or moved to other mills. And many of the company houses — mostly built of the very pine they processed — were sold and moved to nearby towns like Port Richey and Hudson. The elaborate clubhouse was dismantled and moved to Tarpon Springs to be used as a hotel.
Even as the town of Fivay was dismantled, the remaining infrastructure and improvements were enough of an enticement to attract new investors. In October of 1913, a group of three local men purchased the town site with the intention of turning it into a residential resort. Then in January of 1915, two Indiana capitalists took it a step forward by founding the “Fivay Improvement Company” to purchase the town — with grandiose plans to create an elaborate resort with a golf course and expensive homesites. Those plans also fell apart. Decades passed, and the Fivay area gradually developed with other commercial and residential projects.
Archaeologically, very little remains. Local historian Jeff Cannon has probably done more than anyone else to help preserve the legacy of the Town of Fivay. He has explored the area where the town once stood and discovered remains of old brick and concrete retaining walls, pieces of rail, railroad spikes, glass bottles, and other artifacts. A raised railroad bed from one of the tram lines, and remnants of the bridge over Bear Creek can still be found just to the east of Little Road and south of SR 52.
Today, the name “Fivay” survives primarily as a historical marker. Fivay High School and Fivay Road serve as the only modern monuments to the thousands of people who once called this patch of land home.
Paul Herman is digital media archivist for the West Pasco Historical Society.