Basinger is literally the seat of civilization since it was the first part of present-day Okeechobee County where white settlement is recorded. The first settlers moved to the area shortly after the Civil War, and by the turn of the century, it was a thriving bustling community, While the majority of the settlers were cattleman, noT all of the residents were law abiding and upstanding citizens. Just as a lawless element chose to seek refuge on the shores of Lake Okeechobee in those early days, there was another type of out-law, just as lawless but a bit more polished.

In 1988, the late Ossie Raulerson gave an interview describing the early days of Okeechobee County, before and right after it officially became a county. In this recollections, he related the following story about how land scams were occurring even in those days.

Basinger was big enough to support two hotels then. In the 1890s, they would come and my daddy told me there was a fellow name Hunter and he bought all that old prairie land north of Basinger. There were miles and miles of it. He built a little house up there and called it Hunter’s Camp. The people from the north have always wanted a piece of land in Florida. So, they’d come by steamboat and they had a horse and wagon and they’d meet them at the landing and bring them to the hotels in Basinger, about two or three miles from the river. They’d stay there and the next day, they’d carry them out to this camp. It was three, four or five miles, I guess, on the old Peavine. One day, this fellow Hunter, he would know when there was going to be a bunch coming down and he’d bury big potatoes in there.

Then, he’d go out there with the potato rake and dig them up and show the folks what fine big potatoes the land would grown there. Those people were so vulnerable, they didn’t know there was supposed to be a stem or vine or anything to go with the potato.

He got some barren fruit trees and he’d put them in and keep them alive long enough while they were there. He sold acres and acres of that old land out there. You couldn’t grow anything on it. But, there was lots of people who bought five, ten and 20-acre plots.

A fellow named Ferguson at Seven-Mile Gully, built himself a two-story house out there and stayed for a while. I never did see him, but I’ve been up there quail hunting many a times, and we’d sleep on the porch of that house when it would be raining or something. We were afraid to go in the house, afraid it would fall down. Of all that land out there, only two houses were ever built out there. Those people would pay the taxes on that land for a while and they would just give it up.

The old Peavine was a road that came into northern Okeechobee County from the town of Kissimmee and through Kenansville and down past the Ferguson place at Seven-Mile Gully to about a mile south of it. The railroad built a roundhouse there, but nothing ever went any further than that.