Muscogee is a

ghost town Ghost Town(s) or Ghosttown may refer to: * Ghost town, a town that has been abandoned Film and television * Ghost Town (1936 film), ''Ghost Town'' (1936 film), an American Western film by Harry L. Fraser * Ghost Town (1956 film), ''Ghost Town'' ...

located twenty miles northwest of

Pensacola, Florida Pensacola () is the westernmost city in the Florida Panhandle, and the county seat and only incorporated city of Escambia County, Florida, United States. As of the 2020 United States census, the population was 54,312. Pensacola is the principal ...

, United States, in Escambia County, along the

Perdido River Perdido River, historically Rio Perdido (1763), is a U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map accessed April 15, 2011 river in the U.S. states of Alabama and Florida; the Perdido, a desig ...

."Muscogee, Florida"
Florida Hometown Locator Named after the Muscogee Lumber Company, formed by Georgia lumber men, the town was founded in 1857 by a group of lumbermen to harvest timber from the surrounding pine forests. They and the following company

clearcut Clearcutting, clearfelling or clearcut logging is a forestry/logging practice in which most or all trees in an area are uniformly cut down. Along with shelterwood and seed tree harvests, it is used by foresters to create certain types of forest ...

the timber, and once the forests were gone, lumbering ended in this area.Judith Richbourg Jolly, "History"
, ''Muscogee, Florida,'' Website with history and photos In 1889, the Southern States Land and Lumber Company bought the founding company; harvested pine trees were brought to the mills from Florida and Alabama by river, oxcart and rail. The company had five locomotives and seventy cars, and built approximately 50 miles of logging railroad and spur track. Its tugboat worked on the Perdido River, maneuvering

log boom A log boom (sometimes called a log fence or log bag) is a barrier placed in a river, designed to collect and or contain floating logs timbered from nearby forests. The term is also used as a place where logs were collected into booms, as at the ...

s. At the peak of production, the logging camps and associated four lumber mills employed over 1,000 men from the area. The town had a Southern States commissary and other stores, and schools to serve the children of the families. In one year, the company exported 60 million feet of lumber: 13 million feet to the eastern United States, and the remainder to markets nations of Central and South America, the West Indies, Europe and Africa. Businessmen stayed at the hotel or boarding houses in town, which was served by the

Louisville and Nashville Railroad The Louisville and Nashville Railroad , commonly called the L&N, was a Class I railroad that operated freight and passenger services in the southeast United States. Chartered by the Commonwealth of Kentucky in 1850, the road grew into one of the ...

and the Pensacola, Alabama, and Tennessee Railroad. In 1925 Southern States began to liquidate its holdings. It abandoned the mills, and in 1928 sold the town and surrounding 2300 acres to B.C. Davis, a land owner and turpentine operator from DeFuniak Springs. At the time, the town had a population of 300 to 400. Gradually the residents moved away to other places where there was work and a future.

Notable person

* Jackie Cochran, aviator, was born in Muscogee in 1906.

References

External links

Two other railroads that served Muscogee, both of which by 1928 were subsumed into the

Frisco Railway Frisco may refer to: Places in the United States *Frisco, Alabama, an unincorporated community *San Francisco, California, as a nickname *Frisco, Colorado, a home rule municipality **Frisco Historic Park – see Frisco Schoolhouse * Frisco, Idaho ...

:
Gulf, Florida and Alabama Railway (Deep Water Route)
- Took over the railroad lines of the Southern States Lumber Co. in 1911, extending them southward on its own trackage into Pensacola and northward to

Kimbrough, Alabama Kimbrough is an unincorporated community in Wilcox County, Alabama (We dare defend our rights) , anthem = " Alabama" , image_map = Alabama in United States.svg , seat = Montgomery , LargestCity = Huntsville , LargestCounty = Baldwin ...

.
Gulf Ports Terminal Railway
- A 1917 renaming of the merger of two shortlines (the Pensacola and Perdido, and the Pensacola, Alabama and Tennessee) connecting Pensacola, Millview, and Muscogee, with unrealized plans to build a line westward to Mobile. Ghost towns in Florida Former populated places in Escambia County, Florida Logging communities in the United States Company towns in Florida {{EscambiaCountyFL-geo-stub