The route beneath Dunnellon Trail began as a railroad bed that in the late 1800s carried train cars loaded with phosphate rock after prospectors discovered the mineral here in 1889, launching an industry that changed the landscape. Nearby lies a partially completed section of the Cross Florida Barge Canal, and during renewed conflict in 1971 between canal supporters and environmentalists, Florida Secretary of State Dick Stone proposed a compromise: a railroad to bring barges from Ocala to Dunnellon. Dunnellon residents celebrate this past every April with the Boomtown Days festival, recalling a period when the town's population exceeded that of nearby Ocala and Gainesville.