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Abstract

The shades were drawn in the back office of the busy white frame country store. As was his habit, the little man with the greying hair and starched collar lay down to rest after dinner. Out front the hitching posts were being bound with leather as customers hurried into the general merchandise mart which also served as a postoffice. The store was humming and the man’s wife and his clerk-partner tended the people. After all, it was the largest supplier of its kind between Ocala and Dade City. Business was good but the man in the darkened back office was not content. As he lay down and closed his eyes, his mind wandered to the schemes which he loved to ponder and which transported him away from ledgerbook affairs. Though a busy trading community, Summerfield, Florida, was not a metropolis. A man with his visions and energy was hemmed in, but as a director of the Florida Development Board, he had some opportunity to transcend his own locale. He had sampled almost every enterprise in his little world-the store, farming, citrus, turpentine, lumber, naval stores, cotton gin and mill, banking, even politics and he prospered, too. He did suffer occasional setbacks such as the destruction of his cotton gin and mill business by the boll weevil and the ruin of the naval stores business by World War I. And he was restless. Carrying an alligator-skin satchel containing more starched collars and a pistol, he often rode horseback over his turpentine acreage to inspect the side camps and stills. Nathan Mayo was an ambitious man, a dreamer and a builder, and he had both the desire and the talent to be one of Florida’s great promoters.

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