Just came back from a Florida vacation and had an interesting road experience. While driving through the vast tracts of pines that are Tate’s Hell State Forest on Hwy 65 we encountered a sign marking the boundary of a city(?)/unincorporated area. My wife and I look at each other because there is nothing as far as the eye can see except one tiny dirt road that seems to meander into the pine forest. Less than a mile down the road I see a sign on the other other side of the road and checking my rear view mirror it is the other boundary of this city, Central City.
When we got home I did some Googling and can see there is a tiny cluster of homes around some sort of building complex off in the woods on that tiny dirt road.
Map
My curiosity is dialed up to 11. Anybody know anything about the area? I can’t find anything on Google. The only demographics I can find are for the whole county. And what is that building complex, Air Force? Prison?
Central City is listed as a populated place in the Geographic Names Information Service, but going to the listed coördinates on a USGS topo map doesn’t show a placename on the map. Chances are good that it was a “paper town” laid out in the 19th or early 20th century, had a few residents at one time (may still), but never was an incorporated municipality. The name survives mostly as a historic placename. There are lots of these around the country; once they’re shown on county maps compiled by the state DOT, signs often get posted whether the name is actually in use locally or not.
A whole lot of GA and FL small towns exist only for the purpose of a speed trap.
Jimmy Carter (GA Governor) was famous for parking house trailers on State-owned land near the town’s City Hall and staffing them with lawyers to bust the tickets.
The southern speed trap dated back to the Depression as FL became a popular place for snowbirds.
Between speed traps and chain-gangs, the south had a bad reputation.
It may have been a logging camp or some other location that was important in the past but dried up a blew away. I say logging because Tate’s Hell was or possibly still is a timber production area.
There is a railroad running alongside 65 all the way through there. My initial thought was perhaps an old railroad landmark of some point…perhaps related to the logging of that area. Just a couple of miles up the road from Central City was a crosswalk painted on the pavement. A very odd sight out in the middle of this vast tract of pines.
OK, I finally found it on the topo. The earliest USGS topo of the area is 1946, which shows it exactly as now, merely a name along the railroad. I would guess it’s a “railroad place,” someplace where there once was a siding for loading pine logs coming out of the surrounding forest or a bunkhouse for the logging hands. It’s possible some 19th century landowner envisioned urbanity; it’s just as possible it was a railroad worker or lumberjack’s little joke when he nailed a sign to a tree.
