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A Columbia County Boy's Recollections and Memories of Columbia County Florida (2012) Lenvil H. Dicks

UNEXPECTED DESIRE FULLFILLED

It must have been around 1970, or within a year or two of that time, that I rode with Kermit Horne out to
a man’s farm near Wellborn, whom Kermit needed to talk with about some matter or other. 1 just went
along for the ride. The man’s name was McQuaters.

We rode up to the man’s house, and the lady of the house came out to see who we were and what we
wanted, and Kermit told her that he needed to talk to Mr. McQuaters. She said, “Well he is down at the
lake, if you will go down there you’ll find him and 1 don’t know if he’s fishing or just rambling around”.
Then she pointed to a little jeep trail type road that ran off behind the house and went down to a lake
about the size of Lake Montgomery in Lake City, and was the most beautiful natural lake that I have
ever seen. The water was crystal clear, and there was not a blade of grass nor a lily pad or bonnet in the
entire lake. Another thing about that particular lake, which as it turned out was named, McClellan Lake,
but years later it dawned on me that it was the only lake I have ever seen in Florida where there was not
a single Cypress tree to be found anywhere. That has no significance to me, but I thought it was odd to
have any lake in this part of the State that had no Cypress trees around it.

I was absolutely hypnotized by the beauty of that lake, and 1 am sure that I violated one ofthe Ten
Commandments that morning, as 1 could not help but covet that lake.

Of course, Mr. McQuaters did not want to sell the lake, nor any of his other land, but during the next
couple of years, or so I found out later, he passed away. He did not leave that tract ofland and the lake
to his children. He had other plans for it.

It must have been somewhere close to 1980, or a couple years before, that I heard through the grapevine
that there was a tract ofland with a nice lake on it for sale over in Suwannee County, and from the
information I got I thought it was Blue Pond, which is a lake in central Suwannee County west of
Highway 49. It turned out that Blue Pond was a part of the old Hawkins Estate, which is now owned by
Floyd Messer.

My information on this tract ofland was that it was being offered for sale by the First National Bank in
Leesburg, and I made arrangements to go down and talk to the Trust Department at the First National
Bank in Leesburg. When I got there, I told the receptionist what I wanted, and she told me that I would
need to talk to the President of the bank, a Mr. Colson.

I was in for a couple of surprises in the next few minutes, because when I was ushered into the
President’s office, the President of the bank turned out to be Wendell Colson, whom I had gone to
school with at Columbia High, and he was a couple of years behind me in school, being in the same
class that Pat Summerall, Jack Rountree, Hill Brannon, and Sam Oosterhoudt were in. Furthermore,
Wendell Colson’s older sister was my sister-in-law, being married to my oldest brother, Tribble.

After we exchanged greetings and surprise at seeing each other, we got down to the business of talking
about the land that was for sale by the Trust Department of the bank, and I could not believe my ears

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