In Pasco Hamlet, Past Looms Large

CLAY SINK - This tiny community, dwarfed by the Withlacoochee State Forest that surrounds it, might have been run over by development by now, like many of Florida's rural outposts, except for a quirk of fate.

Frances Pritchett, 94,
Her parents came to live in
Clay Sink where she has
lived all her life.

The state Division of Forestry owns all the land in Pasco, Hernando and Sumter counties surrounding Clay Sink, including the 2 acres where the community's old schoolhouse, historic cemetery and Baptist church sit. That dynamic has rendered this remote hamlet in northeast Pasco County useless to developers - and given the local congregation the distinction of being one of the few functioning churches within Florida state forests.

Now, a handful of current and former residents are trying to preserve the community's history. With people such as 94-year-old Frances Pritchett aging, though, time is running short to capture the story of how her parents homesteaded, farmed and hunted here.

It's the current generation's responsibility, Clay Sink's amateur historians say, to document Vera Boyett's stories of young married life in the 1930s, when 100 or more people came to Clay Sink Baptist Church on Sundays to worship. They want to save the gravesites in the private cemetery, which dates back six generations.

Tom Suggs, Pastor,
Baptist Church -
part of sermon

Then there's the one-room schoolhouse, which the church uses as its fellowship hall. The place where generations went to school now hosts big Southern-style meals after church events.

The Clay Sink community, so named for a sinkhole, dates back to about 1862, when the Sumner and Slaughter families acquired land here for farming and ranching.

Those days seem to loom largest in the minds of the people here today. Ancestors who started farms worked through intense heat without modern tools. Florida ranching and cowboy culture literally started in the wild.

People who survived those times became role models to later generations who revere their perseverance and guts.

"In the pioneer days, the people who came to Florida came for the same reasons people originally came to the United States," said Robert Sumner, whose family dates back to the 1820s, before Pasco County was created. "People wanted to live in an area where they were free to do what they wanted to do without being fenced in, where they could develop their own church."

Vera Boyett - Oral History
in Cemetery

The Slaughters started the graveyard after an infant girl died in 1873. Her father buried her in the best spot he could find - a hill on his family's land. Eventually, the family gave 2 acres for a church and cemetery. Descendants of the founding families keep up the cemetery, and some of the same people make up the church congregation.

The school came in 1885 - again on land donated by the Slaughters.

The community fostered a complex economy by the 1930s, according to Jean Brinson Ward, the cemetery association's volunteer historian. In addition to farming and ranching, the expansion of the railroad in the 1920s spurred a timber harvesting industry and a turpentine business.

The Great Depression kept much of the community poor, though.

When the turpentine and timber industries retreated in the 1930s, many people left.

In the late 1930s, the federal government started buying forest lands, first from the timber companies and then from area families. Ranching declined as grazing lands went into public ownership. The state of Florida became official owner of the public forests in 1958.

Today, Clay Sink is simply a cluster of farmsteads, homes and trailers on private parcels grouped around Lacoochee Clay Sink Road. State land engulfs the community, which you don't stumble on by accident. The church, built of heart pine, offers weekly services and is the only remaining community institution.

Still, it's a place people call home - even some who have moved away. Twice a year, members of the cemetery association drive up and meet in the old schoolhouse. They come to talk about finances and maintenance issues, but they spend a lot of time catching up and looking at pictures.

At the most recent meeting, in October, members decided to get estimates for repairing some of the cemetery's oldest headstones, which are breaking and crumbling. Aside from showing respect for those buried there, the markers contain valuable genealogical information and need to be protected, said Henry Boyett, Vera's son.

They applauded a new historic marker from Pasco County, discussed new cemetery markers honoring two boys who died during Clay Sink's pioneer days, and talked about soliciting family histories to publish with the cemetery directory.

"We need to do it while we still have some of our older members living," said Ward, 71, a retired schoolteacher who now lives in Dade City.

Ward has been looking for photos and combing through old census reports, newspaper clippings and funeral home records. She has several binders full of material, though she's not sure what she'll do with it all.

That Ward and others have started gathering the history of this place, where she raised her family and still goes to church, pleases Boyett. She likes to say Clay Sink offers both heritage and salvation.

"You don't find this every place," she said.