Page 141 - a-columbia-county-boys-recollections-and-memories-of-columbia-county-florida-(2012)-lenvil-h-dicks

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

when Wendell Colson described the location of the property to me. It turned out to be exactly the same
tract of land that Kermit and I had gone to see several years before, and prior to his death Mr.
McQuaters had put it in his Will that the property was to be placed with the Leesburg National Bank
Trust Department, and that they would sell it at market value and divide the money among his children.
1 have an idea that the reason that he did not try to divide the land among his children was that the lake
part was obviously so much more valuable than the rest of the farm that it would have been difficult to
equally divide it.

I walked out of the bank with an option to buy the place at a certain time, and at a price which was to be
determined by an appraisal by an MAI Appraiser that the bank would employ to set a value on it.

They sent an appraiser up from Orlando to determine the price of the land, and apparently that appraiser
knew nothing about the value of pine timber. There was about 300 acres in the total tract, including the
lake, and there was one particular 60 acres of the tract that had tremendous mature pine timber ail over
it.

Some of that limber was so tall and so big around, that they could only haul about 4 logs on a log truck
and each tree had to be sawed in half in order to be legal length to be transported down the highway.
Those pine trees had apparently been there since the State of Florida was still owned by the Indians or
the King of Spain, and I ended up cutting enough timber off of that 60 acres to pay for the entire tract.

Of course I did not cut the timber until 1 had closed the transaction and had owned the property for a few
months, but Georgia Pacific Timber Company paid me enough for that pine timber that I ended up not
having a dime of my own money in that entire tract.

That farm, like topsy, just kept on growing. It was not long after I had closed my purchase of the
McQuaters tract that 1 had an opportunity to buy a tract of somewhat over 900 acres owned by Jeff
McKeithen. It adjoined the McQuater tract all along the western boundary of the McQuaters farm.

Later I bought another adjoining 40 acres from a man named Glenn Carter, and the 10 acre strip of land
which sort of stuck up into part of the property, and I was able to buy that 10 acre strip from Everett
Poarch. I needed that 10 acres because it would have been more expensive to fence it out, then to just
include it in when 1 fenced all the rest of the land.

There was another 270 acre tract of land that had belonged to two old bachelor men, who had farmed it
most of their lives, and who both died within a very short time of each other, leaving it to their nephew,
Gelon Harrison, who sold it to me.

Then there was another 45 acre tract at the north end of the McKeithen and McQuaters tracts, which
included a sizable portion of Lowe Lake, and I purchased it from a man named William Deese, who had
inherited it from his father.

1 ended up with 1330 total acres, and I owned that tract of land and used it, and tremendously enjoyed it,
for the better part of 30 years. I sold the entire ranch, as I called it, in 2009.

Inasmuch as I had acquired all of this tract way back when land prices were a lot lower, 1 managed to
almost quadruple my money on the sale of that tract, especially since 1 owned the McQuaters tract which
I had no cost basis in at all due to my sale of timber off of it.

This 1330 acre ranch was a gorgeous piece of property, and most of it was in natural and unimproved
land, with really, really beautiful woods over almost all of it. After 1 purchased it I would go out there
sometimes with a role of flagging tape, and if 1 wanted to be able to drive through a certain part of the

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