Yearling Trail

Take a trek back in time to Pat's Island on the Yearling Trail, a walk through a scrub eco system to an island of pine that the Long family once called home. This interpretive trail system leads you past a variety of historic structures, including an old cattle dip vat, a cistern, the remains of several homestead sites, and the Long family cemetery. In the center of it all is a giant sinkhole where the pre-1900 settlers collected drinking water.

Hiking: The Yearling Trail, with an outer loop of 5.5 miles, consists of four parts, creating two loops:

• A connector trail one mile from the trailhead to Pat's Island. The connector makes a beeline through the open, young scrub of the Big Scrub, where you may see Florida scrub-jays flitting between the small trees. There is no shade on this section.
• The outer loop signposted as "Jody's Trace" as you rise up onto Pat's Island beneath the longleaf pines. The traditional hike around the Yearling Trail is counterclockwise. Start here by taking a right to enter the forest.
• An inner cross-trail between Jody's Trace and the Long family cemetery, leading you south from the giant sinkhole. Use this if you want to shorten the overall hike to 3.5 miles by visiting only the sinkhole and cemetery, returning to the connector on the old carriage road.
• The outer cross-trail, the Florida Trail - a portion of the National Scenic Trail in Florida - blazed orange and connecting the end Jody's Trace to the beginning of the carriage trail. Look for the trail junction signposts with orange and yellow blazes.

The Yearling Trail

Pat's Island is an area was named after its first postmaster, Patrick Smith, who settled there in the 1840s.

Much of the land bounded by the St. Johns and Ocklawaha rivers consists of the largest concentration of sand pine scrub in the world. Within this vast area there are oases of fertile soils and moisture that support growth of longleaf pine, wiregrass, turkey oak and other trees and plants not found in the surrounding arid scrub. Pioneers who settled in these areas called them islands because a sea of scrub surrounded them.

The Reuben Long family came to the area around 1872 and individual family members applied for and were granted homestead acres that they worked and lived on for many years. Human habitation on the island peaked before the turn of the 20th century when about a dozen families sought to eke out a living on the 1400-acre island. A living was made from farming, running woods cattle and hogs, hunting, fishing, making moonshine whisky, and trading with boat travel on the St. Johns River.

There is an ecological uniqueness of this of a longleaf pine island surrounded by scrub pine, which creates a single community isolated from the mainstream of central Florida life. The imposed remoteness contributed to a community essentially untouched by outside forces. The community had its own church, school, post office and self-appointed lay ministers.

Life was hard on the island and after the big back-to-back freezes of 1894 and 1895 the population began to decline. Most of the settlers had sold or leased their homesteads before the Ocala National Forest was formed in 1908. Outside forces were slowly bringing life as it had been on the island to an end. In 1935 the island was abandoned by man and surrendered back to the elements after less than 100 years of human occupation.

At a Glance