Citrus White Gold: An Alternate History of Citrus County, Florida

The evening of April 9, 1891, the Citrus County Commission chambers in Mannfield, Florida were taken over by a partisan group from the nearby town of Inverness, declaring Inverness to be the new county seat. "Stolen" is what irate folks from Mannfield said. In fact, the County Clerk, still in his chair at his desk, writing, had been loaded into a mule-drawn wagon and hauled off, along with county furniture and records.By 1917, Mannfield was no longer on maps - it was a "ghost town" with naught but longleaf pine and turkey oak-covered woods. Nothing remained, not even foundations, just a lonely cemetery, a dried up pond and old sandy roads. Could things have been different?The history of Mannfield, Citrus County and even the United States of the late 1890s and early 1900s changed when Jim Harkins went on one of his nature-loving bicycle rides down the northern portion of the Withlacoochee State Trail in Citrus County in the early autumn of 2001. All caused by a wandering gopher tortoise crossing the trail.

John Charles Miller (floridamiller@verizon.net) is a groundwater geologist and writer of speculative fiction and other strange little stories. Residing in Tampa, Florida with his wife Mary, he has been a part-time resident of Citrus County, Florida since 1981, on Lake Tsala Apopka, near the town of Hernando. During his almost 40 years as a geologist he focused on groundwater supplies and contamination assessments, monitoring, and cleanup. He is a licensed Florida Professional Geologist. He is fluent in Spanish, having served in the US Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic from 1962-64 under John F. Kennedy’s presidency, and has 8 years professional experience in Latin America. His writing website is quarkspacetravel.com, where his short stories can be downloaded free as pdf documents for your reading pleasure. A number of his stories have been award winners in annual contests of the Tampa Writers Alliance. The Quark Space Travel website name was derived from his short story, Scammed, in which a random Google search comes across an obscure website: quarkspacetravel.com. The story took 1st Place in Science Fiction/Fantasy in the 2009 Tampa Writers Alliance annual writing contest, and is published in Wordsmith 2010. His short story You Can’t Pick Up Raindrops was published in the online magazine, LOST, as the lead November 2008 story. http: //www.lostmag.com/issue28/raindrops.php