Long time residents of the Basinger area will readily tell you about the problems in raising cattle, the major industry that has kept the economy of the area alive for 130 years.

Getting the cattle ready for a market seemed almost easy compared to the task of actually getting them there. All of the state of Florida was an open range. There was not a fenced pasture anywhere in the state. The rangeland wad was populated by wild cattle. The early cowboys would round them up over miles and miles of open plains, in the hammocks, and by the rivers and streams.

In Basinger, cattle roamed over thousands of acres of open rangeland along both sides of the Kissimmee River, and for many miles to the east and west of the serpentine waterway. The cattle were rounded up, penned, branded, and then came the trip to market.

In a 1988 interview, Myrtle Norman Lofton recalled her childhood in Basinger and the stories of some of those early drives.

They had the cattle drives. I’m not positive if each one drove his own cattle or whether they went together,. But, I remember the last cattle drive that my husband (Morris) went on. They moved the Wright’s herd from Basinger down to Punta Gorda.

I think a lot of the cattle from the local people went to Tampa and they drove them through. Morris did a lot working for the cow people. That’s what he did. When our children were little and during the depression, he worked for Raulerson Cattle Company, but the foreman was Mr. Teat Holmes. Morris did a lot of working for him, and possibly those cattle were shipped by boat out of Ft. Pierce. I’m not positive about that. At that time, the Raulersons owned a lot of this land in Okeechobee County and in St. Lucie County.

Her father-in-law, John M. Lofton, had been in the cattle business, and when he died on December 30, 1941, Myrtle and Morris found themselves thrust into the cattle business as owners for the first time. She said that they remained in the cattle business until 1978.

The Norman family came to Basinger in 1910 or 1911. Myrtle was on of their seven children. She said that Basinger was a thriving community at that time with three large stores. She said there were about 100 children in the Basinger school when she attended.

The school taught children from the first through the tenth grades. She said that if you wanted to graduate from high school, you had to go to Okeechobee for the last two years. Zetta Durance Hunt was the first graduate from Basinger.

Myrtle recalled that her first grade teacher was Ms. Clara Walker, a lady from Michigan who married Carl Walker and eventually moved to Okeechobee. Another teacher from those early years she remembers was Carl Williams. She said that of her classmates she and Zeb Durrance are the only two left who still live in the Basinger area.

During the years that she was growing up, Myrtle said the Aldermans, the Durrances, the Walkers and the Pearces on the Highlands County side of the Kissimmee River were the most prominent families in the cattle business.

The Aldermans, the Walkers and the Durrances all had what was known as scrub cattle. That was the main source of livelihood. That was the cattle business. A lot of people in those days made their living hunting. They hunted alligators. There was no law, and you could kill as many alligators as you could find in one night. And, some when coon hunting. Of course, today, there’s permits and you have to have a license to hunt all this stuff. But, them days there was no closed season on it and you could make a living from whatever sources you cold get to. In the winter, they would get the fur animals and in season, there was quite a bit of fishing on the Kissimmee River and alligator hunting.

She said a lot of people talk about the freeze in 1910 when all the citrus trees around Basinger were frozen out. She said many people re-planed small groves and there was soon citrus trees in the area once more. But winter that remains the most vivid in her mind occurred in 1951. This freeze devastated the family’s cattle herd.

In 1951, we had a freeze that killed 51 head of cattle for us. I don’t know how low it got, but the next morning, we had dead cows laying all over. Up to that time, I had never seen animals freeze to death in my life. Oh, we had dead cows, and out neighbors had dead cows. It only lasted on day and one night, It all started raining and freezing in the afternoon and all night that night. The next morning the cows had all frozen to death.