Putnam Lodge, built in 1927-28 by the Putnam Lumber Company beside the old Dixie Highway, belonged to the company town of Shamrock and accommodated tourists, transients, and company executives and clients during a bygone era in Florida's forestry history. Its 36-room interior featured a lobby and dining room decorated exclusively with still-preserved, artfully stenciled pecky cypress, a lumber product now virtually extinct. The Putnam Lumber Company, founded by William O'Brien, a timber magnate of Irish descent, and associates including E. B. Putnam, employed hundreds at two state-of-the-art sawmills in Shamrock. Those mills annually produced and shipped worldwide millions of feet of deep swamp tidewater cypress and dense Florida longleaf yellow pine lumber, products now rare because the old-growth trees are gone. Shamrock provided residents and employees with comfortable homes, a commissary, a store comparable to any city department store, two schools, two hotels, the Shamrock Dairy Farm, and an ice plant producing 18 tons of ice daily. The lodge represents a period of local timber supremacy and economic prosperity.