Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Lacoochee, FL

Lacoochee is an unincorporated census-designated place in northeastern Pasco County near the Withlacoochee River, and the Census Bureau classifies 100% of its residents as rural.

Lacoochee got its post office on May 22, 1888, when it was a small farming settlement raising citrus and strawberries along the river.

The Great Freeze of 1895 wiped out the area's citrus groves and farms, and Lacoochee dwindled to just a handful of residents before its lumber-boom rebirth.

In 1922 the Cummer Sons Cypress Company of Jacksonville built a sawmill complex at Lacoochee - the state's first modern, completely electrified sawmill and box factory, and the largest of its kind in the South.

At its height the Cummer operation employed nearly 1,000 men and women, giving little Lacoochee the largest payroll in all of Pasco County.

Cummer built an entire company town around the mill, including a two-story 30-room hotel, a commissary with a doctor's office, four churches, two train depots and company houses that rented for 50 cents per room per week, water and garbage service included.

Former residents remember the mill decades as 'The Lacoochee Experience', and when Cummer finally closed and left in 1960, it was recorded as the 'last great mill to close' in Florida.

Lacoochee had a population of 1,124 at the 2020 census, down from 1,714 in 2010, with 405 households - a shadow of its 1920s mill-town peak of about 1,500 people in a far more built-up town.

Lacoochee is the hometown of Mudcat Grant, the Major League Baseball pitcher who became a star with the Minnesota Twins in the 1960s.