Believe it or not there was actually a railroad spur that came into Tosohatchee many years ago. I'm not sure how old it is, but I have seen the tracks on several aerial maps dating as far back as 1939. It was actually on some of Orange County General Highway maps during the 1950s.
Even today you can still find signs of the old railroad. All you have to do is walk down the white blazed trail along Fish Hole Road. There you can see old cross ties and a 18 foot rusty rail lying along side the trail.
There's even an old pair of friction bearing journal boxes discarded in the woods nearby. They normally sit on the ends of the train car axles and are typically filled with oil soaked wool waste to keep the bearings lubricated.1
The railroad was probably put in during the 1910s or 1920s to harvest the huge cypress trees that were in the Jim Creek and Tosohatchee Creek area. Back then the land was primarily owned and leased by big timber companies like Rupp-Holland Logging Company and Brooks-Scanlon Corp. Typically these companies would run narrow gauge tracks out to the harvest site from a nearby sawmill, then use steam locomotives to haul the timber out.
So where was the sawmill? That's a good question. If you were to follow the old Tosohatchee railroad spur heading west, it would eventually tie into the Florida East Coast Railroad Kissimmee Valley Line about 2 miles south of Bithlo. According to William Blackman's book, the History of Orange County, Florida, there was a sawmill in that area operated by Mr. John H. Tucker for the Rutherford Lumber Company. The book also refers to a tramway that was built by the Osceola Lumber Company to take out cypress trees along Long Branch. The Tosohatchee railroad spur just so happens to go right by Long Branch. Makes you wonder if they are the same two railroads. There was also a sawmill in the heart of Bithlo called the Brown and McIntosh mill. So the timber from Tosohatchee could have gone to a number of places including all the way down south to Holopaw where there was another large sawmill..
