Bone Valley, the Graveyard Beneath Your Wheels
Near Lakeland, Florida
The ground you are driving over is full of ghosts, and not the metaphorical kind. Central Florida sits atop one of the richest phosphate deposits on earth, a belt the miners called Bone Valley, because mixed in with the ancient phosphate rock were the fossilized remains of Miocene-era creatures, mastodons, giant sharks, ground sloths, sea cows, all of it compressed into a stratum thirty to forty feet down. When the dredges bit into the earth, bones came up alongside the ore.
Phosphate was first shipped from here in eighteen eighty-eight. Within a few years, Florida had displaced South Carolina as America's leading producer, and Polk County was the heart of it all. A large share of all phosphate mined in the United States came from the district around Lakeland. The timing could not have been better for the region. The catastrophic freeze of eighteen ninety-four and ninety-five wiped out much of Florida's citrus belt, and the second freeze, in February, killed the trees. Land values crashed from a thousand dollars an acre to ten. But phosphate was underground and immune to frost. Companies rushed in to fill the economic vacuum the frozen groves left behind.
Mining companies assembled large tracts of ore-rich land. Railcars carrying phosphate to Port Tampa passed through the Lakeland rail yard continuously, feeding American fertilizer markets.
The legacy is complicated. The stripping process left a moonscape of clay ponds and pits across thousands of acres. Then something unexpected happened. Decades after the dredges left, those pit lakes filled with water and began producing bass and tilapia at remarkable rates. Residual phosphate fertilized the underwater food chain, growing game fish faster than almost anywhere else in Florida. Tenoroc Public Use Area, just northeast of the city, is now thousands of acres of reclaimed mining land with many lakes and dozens of species of freshwater fish. A pit that was once an economic wound became a fisherman's dream. The bones underfoot turned out to have a second life.
