Centralia grew in coastal Hernando County around one of Florida's largest lumber mills after the J.C. Turner Lumber Company financed the Tidewater Cypress Mill in 1910 to log more than 15,000 acres of Red Tidewater Cypress, cedar, and pine. Eighteen miles of narrow-gauge tram lines linked the swamp logging areas and mill to the Tampa Northern Railroad, while steam-powered skidders moved cut logs onto railroad cars and then to a pond near the sawmills. Electricity generated by four steam boilers powered large double-banded saws that could cut 100,000 board feet each day, and the finished wood dried in a 160-acre yard for up to four years before being turned into roof shingles, lath, and construction lumber. The lumber was sold locally or sent by rail to Brooksville, then to the port of Tampa, and shipped to the company's wholesale distribution yard on the Hudson River in New York. A few miles north of Weeki Wachee, the boom town of Centralia arose to support 1,200 mill workers and their families, with a post office, stores, a hotel, restaurant, bakery, doctor, dentist, schoolhouse, and church, though the mill's general manager, Edgar A. Roberts, forbade drinking. After the timber was exhausted by 1917, the mill soon closed, the town declined and was mostly abandoned by the 1920s, the land was reseeded with slash pines in the 1960s, and after its purchase in 1985 it became part of the Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge.