As the turpentine industry spread through southwest Florida, landowners leased turpentine rights to contractors who hired operators for camps that harvested gum from thousands of acres of pine woods. The Laurel Turpentine Company stood on the east side of the Seaboard Air Line Railway north and south of present-day Laurel Road, and its workers' quarters included a commissary, a cemetery, and a building that served Mount Zion Baptist Church on weekends and elementary school students and community groups during the week. North of the turpentine complex, the J. Ray Arnold Lumber Company established a sawmill in the mid-1920s for the Palmer family's Sarasota-Venice Company, using a web of rails extending into the pine woods to haul rough-sawn timber for finer cutting. The sawmill quarters had houses and a commissary for workers and their families, and to the west across the tracks the Blackburn quarters, built by Spencer Blackburn, offered rental houses for workers in the local turpentine, lumber, and agricultural industries.