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Associated Press – MULBERRY, Fla. (AP) – Piece by piece, remnants of Florida’s phosphate mining roots are collapsing into rubble.
Last month, a wrecking ball began crushing a century-old Polk County building that used to store phosphate until the newly mined rock dried out. The massive structure of steel-reinforced concrete, built near Mulberry in 1909, was among the few vestiges of phosphate’s rise as a Polk County economic powerhouse.
Now, the old Prairie Pebble Phosphate Co. building is little more than 28,000 tons of concrete debris, and the sight of its crumbling walls tugged at Richard Fifer’s heart.
“I hate to see these old buildings come down,” said the Mulberry historian. “They represent an era we’re never going to get back. Sure, we still have some remnants of the 1950s and the ‘60s, but there’s really nothing left from the early days in the 1910s and 1920s.”
The 40,000-square-foot Prairie building, called a dry bin, had been shut down since 1964, when newer technology rendered it obsolete.
Scavengers had stripped away most of its steel, leaving it precariously unsafe, said John Simon, president of Tampa-based JVS Contracting, which bought the building and surrounding 17 acres in May.
“It was in dangerous condition,” he said. “All the steel was gone and probably sold for scrap. There were huge steel column supports that had been taken out, and nobody realized the danger that was putting people in.”
Discarded mattresses suggested vagrants had been camping inside, said Simon, who plans to establish a concrete-crushing business on the site at 1211 Prairie Mine Road.
“The only thing left in there was concrete and trash,” he said.
Lloyd Harris, a Bartow historian and longtime member of the Polk County Historical Commission, said preserving structures like these can be challenging.
“There’s not been a big push to preserve any of these old mines and pieces of them because it’s so expensive,” he said. “Those places are so huge and, in many cases, so remote.”
Another example sits a few miles south of the Prairie building in the ghost town of Brewster.
“The Brewster smokestack might very well be the last remnant of anything that’s pre-World War II, except what’s in memoirs and photographs,” Harris said.
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