Skip to main content

Florida Friday; Abandonment on the Brooksville Ridge

By
The Brooksville Ridge is a small plateau in Hernando and Pasco Counties which ranges approximately from Brooksville southeast to Dade City.  The Brooksville Ridge has several high points over 200 feet in elevation which are among the highest in peninsular Florida.  The Brooksville Ridge has various former State Road alignments and communities that have largely disappeared to time.



Ayers is located at the corner of US Route 41 and Hernando County Route 576/Ayers Road near Masaryktown.  The first reference to Ayers I could find is from a 1936 Hernando County Map where it appears as a siding of the Seaboard Air Line Railroad at the corner of US 19/41 and Ayers Road.

1936 Hernando County Road Map 

Given rail sidings have had a reduced purpose to exist since the rise of diesel locomotives suffice to say there is quite a bit of abandoned commercial/industrial structures to be found in Ayers.






Interestingly when Hernando County Route 576 original used Old Ayers Road. Comparing topographical maps on historic aerials it seems that Old Ayers Road was in use as a through route at least until 1988.





To the south at the intersection of Pasco County Routes 577 Lake Lola Road and Pasco County Route 578/St Joe Road is location of what was St. Joesph.  St. Joesph was plotted in the early 1890s and had a post office from 1893 to 1918.  According to aerial and topographical maps of the area it seems CR 578 used to traverse through St. Joseph via Old St. Joe Road until at least the mid-1950s.

'

Originally FL 41 which would become Pasco County Route 41 traversed through Jessamine in addition to Blanton.  Jessamine is located at the intersection of James Road and Blanton Road on the south shore of Jessamine Lake.  According to topographical maps on historicaerials.com FL 41/CR 41 was shifted north out of Jessamine onto Blanton Road sometime between 1988 to 2012.





According to Fivay.org Jessamine was settled in 1888 and was centered around Jessamine Gardens.  The last recorded reference to the community seems to have come from the Tampa Bay Tribune in 1919.

Fivay.org on Jessamine

East of Jessamine FL 41/CR 41 would have traversed through Blanton on what is now Spring Valley Road.  The last time I see the Spring Valley Road alignment of FL 41 is on a 1962 topographical map.

Blanton unlike many of the communities I listed above still appears much like a late 19th Florida community. 



Blanton was settled on the west side Blanton Lake in 1883.  Blanton was moved to the present site in 1887 when the Orange Belt Railroad was built in the area according to fivay.org.  The last recorded reference to Blanton I could find on Fivay.org was from 1932 when a store burned down.

Fivay.org on Blanton

Both Blanton and Jessamine appear along FL 41 on the 1956 State Highway Map below.

1956 Florida State Highway Map


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Paper Highways: The Unbuilt New Orleans Bypass (Proposed I-410)

By
  There are many examples around the United States of proposed freeway corridors in urban areas that never saw the light of day for one reason or another. They all fall somewhere in between the little-known and the infamous and from the mundane to the spectacular. One of the more obscure and interesting examples of such a project is the short-lived idea to construct a southern beltway for the New Orleans metropolitan area in the 1960s and 70s. Greater New Orleans and its surrounding area grew rapidly in the years after World War II, as suburban sprawl encroached on the historically rural downriver parishes around the city. In response to the development of the region’s Westbank and the emergence of communities in St. Charles and St. John the Baptist Parishes as viable suburban communities during this period, regional planners began to consider concepts for new infrastructure projects to serve this growing population.  The idea for a circular freeway around the southern perimeter of t
Post a Comment
Read more

Hernando de Soto Bridge (Memphis, TN)

By
The newest of the bridges that span the lower Mississippi River at Memphis, the Hernando de Soto Bridge was completed in 1973 and carries Interstate 40 between downtown Memphis and West Memphis, AR. The bridge’s signature M-shaped superstructure makes it an instantly recognizable landmark in the city and one of the most visually unique bridges on the Mississippi River. As early as 1953, Memphis city planners recommended the construction of a second highway bridge across the Mississippi River to connect the city with West Memphis, AR. The Memphis & Arkansas Bridge had been completed only four years earlier a couple miles downriver from downtown, however it was expected that long-term growth in the metro area would warrant the construction of an additional bridge, the fourth crossing of the Mississippi River to be built at Memphis, in the not-too-distant future. Unlike the previous three Mississippi River bridges to be built the city, the location chosen for this bridge was about two
1 comment
Read more

Memphis & Arkansas Bridge (Memphis, TN)

By
  Like the expansion of the railroads the previous century, the modernization of the country’s highway infrastructure in the early and mid 20th Century required the construction of new landmark bridges along the lower Mississippi River (and nation-wide for that matter) that would facilitate the expected growth in overall traffic demand in ensuing decades. While this new movement had been anticipated to some extent in the Memphis area with the design of the Harahan Bridge, neither it nor its neighbor the older Frisco Bridge were capable of accommodating the sharp rise in the popularity and demand of the automobile as a mode of cross-river transportation during the Great Depression. As was the case 30 years prior, the solution in the 1940s was to construct a new bridge in the same general location as its predecessors, only this time the bridge would be the first built exclusively for vehicle traffic. This bridge, the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge, was completed in 1949 and was the third
Post a Comment
Read more