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A History of Columbia County Florida (1996) Edward F. Keuchel 78/340

An Expanding County in a New State

of them had never seen a canal, a railroad, or a steamboat;
and all they knew of the North was that the Northerners
wanted to free all the slaves.38
As he crossed the Suwannee River on his way to Tallahassee,
Lanman’s coachman, a Mr. James, told him that he was lucky to
have “escaped” from eastern Florida, an area James described as
“the land of hog and hominy.” In contrast, the coachman called
Middle Florida “the land of sowins and chicken.” Upon stopping
for lunch, Lanman found “sowins” to be a local pronunciation of
“sourings,” a dish of corn meal made sour by baking it in the sun.
At Lanman’s lunch, however, his sowins were served with gopher
turtle steak rather than chicken. His view of the turtle steak was
that “nothing but India-rubber can be more tough and elastic.”39
A land of “hog and hominy” was not a suitable image for an
area served by a railroad and neither was a county seat called
Alligator. The village had earlier encountered name problems. The
name Alligator was taken from the Indian village of the same
name which had previously occupied the site. In 1836 the terri­
torial legislature designated Alligator as the county seat and then
changed its name to Lancaster after the military fort established
there during the Second Seminole War. Before the war ended the
name Alligator was restored. In 1848, the first legislative act
outlining the boundaries of Alligator was passed giving the com­
munity an area of one and a half square miles.40
In 1859 Alligator became Lake City. One tradition holds that
the legislative council changed the name at the insistence of Mrs.
William B. Ross who feared her daughter’s friends at the school
she was to attend would ridicule her if she was from a town called

Lanman, Adventures in the Wilds of the United States, p. 129.
39 Ibid., pp. 136-37.
40 Florida Territory Acts, 1836, pp. 4-5; Florida Acts, 1846, Ch. 80, sec. 1;
“Columbia County,” WPA File, Florida Collection, Florida State Library,
Tallahassee.

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