Wood you believe this?

Powered by the steam engines of the industrial revolution the earliest large scale industry in Florida was timber. Florida was heavily forested with huge ancient trees and there were sawmills everywhere which cut boards for export to the north and local construction.

The Goethe Sawmill at Bamboo

In places we often ride around there was the Waterman Sawmill at Moss Bluff which opened in 1876, the Stanton Sawmill 1861 (Lake Weir on the site of Kiwanis Beach), Hesters Sawmill (south of Lady Lake), and the Goethe Sawmill (c1900) at Bamboo (where the Rohan Recreation Center now stands). There were also mills in Wildwood and Leesburg.

The circular saw was invented in 1850

All the towns we ride by were built with wood. It was used for factories, farm buildings, houses, furniture, railroad cars, wagons, fences, barrels and crates. Wood was burned to power the steam engines to generate electricity, pump water and the sawmills themselves. About the only thing you can't do with wood is eat it - sure you can grow fruit - but it's not the same thing!

Huge pine logs - not what we see in the Ocala Forest now.

Fortunately, in 1908 President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Ocala National Forest into existence and since then the Florida Forest Service has been formed to make sure that forests, which still cover 50% of the state, are protected and the timber industry sustainable.

Strava

I wish I'd kept a log of my rides when I was a junior rider - it would be nice to look at them today. Back then some riders did keep ride logs with locations, maps and distances but being young and foolish I never did. It would not only be nice to look at those rides but it would also be a reminder of those I rode with. Many of the roads I rode in the south of England don't even exist anymore - they are buried under motorways - most of the people I rode with are probably buried too! 

What we had back then in the 1960's were paper maps to plan rides and a Lucas Cyclometer. The cyclometer was an analog distance computer bolted on the front axle with a pin attached to one of the spokes which clicked on a star wheel, sort of like the wheel magnet used today but with a mechanical read out. You just had to live with the tick-tick-tick while riding. If you were really into planning rides you could buy a map wheel which gave you an approximate distance when you rolled it along the route on your map. I only know about this because someone in the club had one. 

A Lucas Cyclometer and a map Wheel

Nowadays my Garmin, Strava and Ridewith GPS take care of all this stuff for me - and then some. It's hard to believe the first Garmin Edge and Strava were only launched 13 years ago. Now I can create a route anywhere in the world, follow it on my Garmin while riding and afterward see the result on Strava - wow!

I especially like Strava because I have a log of my rides in which I can see the routes and even illustrate them if I wish. I can also see who I have been riding with and keep in touch with with friends I have made riding at home and in Europe. It is the only social network I belong to! As for the rest of the features it's nice to see the mileage and elevation I have completed in a year. Oops! - I forgot, Strava won't tell you that but a handy Chrome extension for Strava called Elevate will!

Allan Broadribb

The Parson Brown Orange

John Carney, you'll remember from the last club snoozeletter, bought the Carney Island property in 1875 which he gambled would be good to grow oranges as he had already seen some sour citrus growing there. He first cleared the heavy lumber and floated it across the lake to be sold for construction. Then all he had to do was find some good citrus cuttings. This turned out to be a problem as there was nowhere to buy any, no nursery, no Home Depot.

Carney learned the Reverend N.L. Brown near Webster had five different mature orange trees. One of these turned out to be sweet, prolific and produced early fruit. Carney purchased it for $80 and as he wasn't taking it with him, just buying the propagation rights, paid Mrs Brown, the reverends wife, $10 a year to make sure nobody would take cuttings or steal fruit for the seed.

Parson Brown Oranges

Carney cut back his sour trees and for several years grafted his new cuttings onto them, a process that would produce fruit more quickly than planting seed. Eventually he had twenty five acres of Parson Brown oranges, as he named them, and they became the most popular orange in Florida. The biggest trees could produce thousands of large sweet oranges to be harvested as early as October putting them in the groceries in time for Christmas.

A case of Lake Weirs famous Parson Brown oranges
packaged by the Carney Investment Co.

You can see Parson Brown trees on the north side of Sunset Harbor Road by Lake Weir. The fruit is big and sweet but it's seediness led to a loss of popularity in the 1920s when further genetic modification led to seedless varieties on smaller trees making them easier to harvest.

A prequel to this story: around 1860 a young family, their names long forgotten, decided to relocate from New Orleans to Florida with the idea of growing oranges. They brought with them Chinese citrus saplings which they had bought off a ship in New Orleans. On their journey they stayed one night with Rev Brown who refused payment but the travelers gave him a gift of five of their saplings which became the trees that Carney went to see.

By the way, Parson Brown used the $80 to buy sheep.

Whining About Carney Island

Oh no - not Carney Island again! I just left home and rode 8 miles south to the ride start and now we're going back north past my home to Carney Island before we head south again back past my home to the start following which I'll ride north back home. Deja vu over and over and over again.

So what do we know about Carney Island. For a start it isn't a real island, it's a peninsula separating Lake Weir from Little Lake Weir. For a long time it was known as Orange and Lemon Islands but that changed after 1875 when Captain John L. Carney & his brother purchased the property and it became known as Carney Island. The brothers logged out the area and developed a 25-acre orange grove and were responsible for propagating several new varieties of citrus, including the Parson Brown orange.

Parson Brown Oranges

The Carney groves expanded and flourished and they even had their own packinghouse on the east side of the property on Lake Weir. From there a steam boat was used to carry the citrus across Lake Weir to the railroad and also tow timber across to the Stanton Saw Mill.

In 1960 Carney Island was bought by the Coca-Cola company who produced juices under the name Minute Maid. In 1990 Marion County was able to buy the 750 acre property under favorable terms to develop the park which we now enjoy. It includes sandhill islands, causeways, wetland systems, beaches, and new boat ramps and facilities.

And, several orange groves still survive on the east side of the island.

For route information click here.

Le Col du Tourmalet

It's September 2022 and we are staying in Bagneres de Luchon for two weeks in the center of the Pyrenees. Because of its location Luchon has been a host town for the Tour de France on more than thirty occasions and there are many famous TDF climbs in the area. This year the big one will be the Hors Catégorie climb the Col de Tourmalet, with my nephew Jacques. The Tourmalet has been climbed in the Tour no less than 87 times so we will be riding in the tracks of the greatest riders of all time.

Our plan was to do some easier climbs first to find our climbing legs but after the first climb, the Col de Portillon, the weather did not look good for the following week so we decided to attack the Col de Tourmalet two days later.

We are doing the east to west route starting at Bagneres de Bigorre and ride up to Sainte Marie de Campan, the official start of the Col de Tourmalet, where we stop for coffee. From here to the summit is about 11.5 miles with 4160' of climbing at 7.4% average and 12% max grade.

Enough with the statistics, it is a beautifully clear but hot day. I put the bike in the 34/32 gear and grind away at the climb. I usually climb at about 1500 feet per hour (it used to be more!) and take a short break after each 1000 feet vertical. Three and a half hours of climbing requires a lot of patience. I watch my heart monitor. I can maintain 85% but 90% is not sustainable so then I have to back off. It is not a good day for me, I can still feel the the Col de Portillon climb we made a couple of days before - remember I live in the flat land called Florida. It's tough knowing you should be riding better but we grind it out with a couple of breaks before reaching the the ski resort of La Mongie.

Taking a break with the Pic Du Midi in the background

There we stop and sitting at an outside table have a beer in the sun. The chairs have cushions which is not insignificant! It is now just 2.5 miles at 8% to the summit. Up we go, I feel better, probably a combination of knowing we have it beat and the beer. A quick stop for a picture at the 1k to go sign, where we are encouraged by some cows, then finally the summit and there are our wives Jocelyne and Marie-Claude to cheer us on - a special day.

The Summit with Jacques

We do the photo stuff and descend to Luz St Sauveur where we have a nice lunch together. Then Jacques and I will make a big loop back to Bagneres de Bigorre. No way we're going back over the Tourmalet!

A Little History of Le Col du Tourmalet

In 1910 the Pyrenees were included in the Tour de France for the first time at the insistence of Alphonse Steinès who investigated the climb. 

Steinès started at Sainte-Marie-de-Campan with sausage, ham and cheese from the inn opposite the church and arranged to hire a driver from Bagnères-de-Bigorre. They made it up the first 16 km when the car broke down. Steinès carried on on foot despite a warning about bears. Later he mistook voices in the darkness for thieves but they turned out to be shepherds guarding their sheep. He paid one of the them to guide him to the top but the shepherd turned around when they encountered snow.  

Steinès continued on but things looked bleak. He had slipped and fallen into an icy stream and realized he could freeze to death in the night. Fortunately search parties had been sent out and he was finally found stumbling in the snow around 3 a.m. and taken to Barèges where he sent the following telegram to Tour de France organizer Henri Desgrange.

 "Crossed Tourmalet stop. Very good road stop. Perfectly feasible".

In 1910 Octave Lapize was the first rider in the Tour de France to crest the Tourmalet. He called TDF organizer, Henri Desgrange, "the assassin".

 

For route and ride information click here: