The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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Fred Montsdeoca

Fred Montsdeoca was a cattleman from Lorida, in eastern Highlands County, who served as Florida Agricultural Extension agent for Glades and Okeechobee counties from 1930 to 1971 and as the federal cattle foreman who guided the Seminole cattle program at the Brighton Reservation from its beginning in the mid-1930s.[fahof-montsdeoca-2004][seminole-tribune-2018-montsdeoca] His working life is the closest documented link between Highlands County ranching and the rebuilding of the Seminole cattle industry across the Glades County line.

How the family came to be at Lorida

Evidence: single-source.

The family name appears in the older records as Monts De Oca, and the family’s Florida seat before the move south was Polk County. A cemetery memorial for John Monts De Oca gives his dates as 1848 to 1913 and his burial at Eden Cemetery in Polk County.[findagrave-john-monts-de-oca] Julian Montsdeoca, recorded as born in Polk County in 1880 and buried at Sebring in 1948, is the generation that moved into the Istokpoga country.[findagrave-julian-montsdeoca]

That country had no founder and no promoter. Settlement along the marshy northeastern shore of Lake Istokpoga began in the 1910s, when families crossed miles of wet muck by ox wagon to reach homesteads on the lake, in a settlement known first as Cow House, renamed Sunnyland in 1925 and finally Lorida in 1937.[fhb-lorida-origins] A photograph of local cowboys taken in 1919 is captioned with the names of Ackees McClellan, Rudy Ashton, Ben Guy, Lewis M. Whidden, Julian Montsdeoca and Fred Montsdeoca, which places the family in the Istokpoga cow country more than fifteen years before the Brighton work began.[fhb-lorida-origins] A cemetery memorial gives Fred Montsdeoca’s birth as 9 September 1906, which would make him twelve or thirteen in that photograph; whether the caption names him as a boy among the riders or names another man of the same name in the family is not settled by the sources in hand.[findagrave-fred-montsdeoca]

The Avon Park connection

The family’s presence in Highlands County before the Brighton assignment is fixed independently by a birth. Montsdeoca’s son, Fred Y. Montsdeoca, was born in Avon Park on 25 April 1928 — two years before the elder Montsdeoca took up the extension post and seven years before the federal cattle assignment.[fahof-montsdeoca-2004] The son, who was inducted into the Florida Agricultural Hall of Fame in 2004, later ran Montsdeoca Ranch, Inc. and Dixie Lime Products, Inc., and kept up his father’s relationship with the Tribe by supplying lime and fertilizer for the reservation’s pastures.[fahof-montsdeoca-2004]

Extension agent and cattle foreman

Montsdeoca was Florida Agricultural Extension agent in Glades and Okeechobee counties from 1930 to 1971, and in that role worked with the Seminole Tribe at Brighton to establish a cattle operation built on herd and pasture management.[fahof-montsdeoca-2004] The Seminole Tribune places the beginning of the separate federal assignment more precisely: he took on the government post as cattle foreman in 1935, first guiding the Seminoles of Glades County at Brighton and later those at Big Cypress.[seminole-tribune-2018-montsdeoca] The two spans describe different appointments — a forty-one-year extension career and a federal foreman’s assignment inside it — and the Tribune’s account of forty years of service to the Tribe runs from 1935 to about the same retirement.[seminole-tribune-2018-montsdeoca]

The herd he was given to work with was 500 head of Hereford cattle out of drought-stricken Arizona, a daunting starting point that became the foundation of the tribal cattle program.[seminole-tribune-2018-montsdeoca] Federal range conservationists writing in 1985 record the same shipment as 500 head of drought-relief Herefords sent from Arizona to the Seminole Indian Agency in 1936.[sievers-1985-seminole-ranching] The Tribe’s own historic preservation office names Montsdeoca as the United States agricultural agent with whom Frank Shore, Charlie Micco, Naha Tiger, Willie Gopher and Willie Tiger worked to learn modern ranching methods.[thpo-cowkeepers-legacy] The Tribune adds John Josh, John Henry Gopher, Morgan Smith, Junior Cypress and Josie Billie to the men credited with rearing the early reservation herds, and records that Montsdeoca taught livestock management, pasture rotation and maintenance, and brought boys into the work early by having them rope cattle and clean screwworm wounds.[seminole-tribune-2018-montsdeoca] A photograph in the same account shows him demonstrating to Jack Micco, Moses Jumper and George Storm how to salt a cow hide.[seminole-tribune-2018-montsdeoca]

Beyond the cattle program

Working alongside William and Edith Boehmer, Montsdeoca coordinated with Joe Peeples of the Glades County Board of Commissioners to set aside a section of the public Ortona cemetery for Seminole use.[seminole-tribune-2018-montsdeoca] In June 1958, through the combined efforts of Montsdeoca and William Boehmer, residents of the Brighton Reservation were registered to vote in local and general elections; the Tribune records that although most needed help to complete the process, everyone who registered turned out.[seminole-tribune-2018-montsdeoca]

Death

Evidence: single-source.

A cemetery memorial records that Fred Montsdeoca died at Lorida on 11 December 1974, aged 68, and was buried at Pinecrest Cemetery in Sebring; the same memorial marks him as a veteran with the inscription “SGT ARMY AIR FORCE”.[findagrave-fred-montsdeoca] He was therefore living at the Highlands County family place at the end of a career spent working the counties to the east and south.

References

Where this comes from

Evidence
single-source — One source. Treat as reported, not established.
Review
unverified — Drafted from sources but not yet checked by a volunteer.
Rights
society

Sources

  1. Florida Agricultural Hall of Fame, Fred Y. Montsdeoca, 2004 Inductee (2004) · official
  2. Millar, Siobhan, Fred Montsdeoca: So much more than an Agricultural Agent (2018) · newspaper
  3. Byrne, Jason, Lorida, Florida: Origins of a Cracker Town (2017) · secondary
  4. Find a Grave memorial 58163183, Fred Montsdeoca (1906–1974), Pinecrest Cemetery, Sebring (2010) · secondary
  5. Find a Grave memorial 55136810, Julian Montsdeoca (1880–1948), Pinecrest Cemetery, Sebring (2010) · secondary
  6. Find a Grave memorial 28746535, John Monts De Oca (1848–1913), Eden Cemetery, Polk County (2008) · secondary
  7. Seminole Tribe of Florida, Tribal Historic Preservation Office, Cowkeeper's Legacy - A Seminole Story (2023) · official
  8. Sievers, Ed; Tepper, Craig; Tanner, George W., Seminole Indian Ranching in Florida (1985) · secondary

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