LIVING HISTORY
counties, reportedly for $17,000 $1.98 per acre, “to further
increase his already extensive pasturage.’’
Both purchases were made from the Consolidated Naval
Stores Company. Founded in 1902, the company harvested
gum from long leaf yellow pines to create turpentine, mostly
for ship maintenance. The latest acquisition brought Raulerson’s
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total acreage in the tract to “16,689 acres, all under
fence, extending in a 10-mile strip that varies from two to
four miles in width,” The Miami News reports.
The purchase of land at the swamp known as Cow Creek
was fortuitous, if not intentional, because it assured a water
supply for cattle even during the driest years. The creek, fed
from the seeping water of a sand ridge through a forest of
cypress, is actually more of an expanding and contracting
swamp that runs along about six miles from the far eastern
border of Okeechobee County east into St. Lucie County.
“That creek would get so big, you’d have to swim your
horse across it,’’ says Alfred Norman, who worked at Cow
Creek Ranch as a young man and whose father, John Norman,
was foreman from the 1930s through the early 1950s.
With its organic expansion and contraction, the creek also
had significance for the native Seminoles living on the ranch
through the 1930s. Descendants of Chief Chupco, who live
on a small reservation west of Fort Pierce, say their ancestors
lived at Cow Creek and there remains archaeological evidence
of Seminoles living on the property.
BUYING OTHER RANCHES
Raulerson eventually would buy enough land to create a
23,000-acre ranch at Cow Creek, large enough to be classified
as a township 6 miles long and 6 miles wide. The ranch
extended from Okeechobee Road to Orange Avenue. To give
an idea of how big the Cow Creek spread was, as visitors
GREGORY ENNS
This oak tree, called the “county line oak,’’ marks the line between Okeechobee
and St. Lucie counties on Cow Creek Ranch.
entered the main entrance on Okeechobee Road, they’d still
have to drive an additional 4 miles on the main ranch road to
reach the barn and cow pens.
Raulerson also makes similar purchases farther west in
Okeechobee County, buying the Dixie Ranch and the Taylor
Creek Ranch, both about 23,000 acres in size. He also would
purchase another ranch, Fellsmere Farms in Indian River
County, of about 6,000 acres, according to Norman.
Norman’s earliest memories are of Cow Creek Ranch, which
had sections with names like Dog Slough, Cypress Creek, Blue
Mountain, JB Pasture, Wagon Wheel, Joe Byers Strand and Son
Arnold Gulley. “I’ve been over every foot of it,’’ Norman says.
He says Raulerson used a “club brand’’ for his cattle. The brand
is elliptical and appears to be based on a four-leaf clover.
GREGORY ENNS
A cow pasture on Cow Creek Ranch today. Pastures with fences were created in the 1930s when the ranch was established.
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