Muscogee, Ghost Town of the Pine Barons
Near Pensacola, Florida
Twenty miles northwest of Pensacola, Muscogee was once a thriving industrial town of over a thousand workers. It was founded in eighteen fifty-seven by Georgia lumbermen who named it after the Muscogee Lumber Company and came to harvest the vast longleaf pine forests along the Perdido River. In eighteen eighty-nine, the Southern States Land and Lumber Company bought the operation and expanded it dramatically, running fifty miles of logging railroad, five locomotives, and four mills at peak capacity.
The company built a complete company town: housing, stores, a school, all owned by the employer. By nineteen twenty-five the forests were stripped and the company began selling off its assets. In nineteen twenty-eight it sold the entire town and twenty-three hundred surrounding acres.
The workers dispersed, the buildings came down, and Muscogee faded from most maps. Today it is listed as a former populated place, a ghost of the Florida Panhandle's lumber era.
