The Cow Creek Chronicles - A series

This is the fourth in a series of stories about the lives of a pioneering cattle family and the vast ranch they established.

‘Time to leave’

After the sale of the 17,000-acre Cow Creeek Ranch in 1976, TL and Jo Ann Sloan held onto a section along Orange Avenue Extension that contained a successful grove operation. The section also had its own cow pens. GREGORY ENNS

Financial problems persist for TL and Jo Ann Sloan even after they sell their beloved Cow Creek Ranch

Frank Raulerson founded Cow Creek Ranch about 1923, first buying a small section of land to set up a base to run cattle during the days of the open range.

When T.L. “Tommy’’ and Jo Ann Sloan in 1976 sold 17,000 acres that compromised the heart of Cow Creek Ranch, they were facing mortgages totaling $4.5 million.

Poor business decisions and the free-spending habits of TL had put them in the position of having to sell the ranch, which was begun by Jo Ann’s grandfather, Frank Raulerson, in 1923.

The purchase of a small section of land that year enabled Raulerson to establish a base of operations in the days of the open range, where cattle roamed freely and the state’s interior land, either swamp or hard scrub, was seen as having little value. A member of the state’s livestock board and a former state senator, Raulerson knew the days of the open range were drawing to a close — Florida’s Fence Act was implemented in 1949 — and began purchasing other sections of property around the headquarters to eventually assemble a 23,000-acre ranch on the St. Lucie-Okeechobee county line that became known as Cow Creek. He also purchased two other ranches, Dixie Ranch and Taylor Creek, but later sold them.

At Cow Creek, which he considered his home ranch, he builds a barn, home, bunkhouse and various houses for his ranch hands. The ranch was called Cow Creek after the ever-expanding and contracting swamp that bisects the ranch from east to west, a waterway sacred to the Seminoles who lived along it.

When Raulerson dies in 1954, he leaves his entire estate to Jo Ann. Her father, Alfred Raulerson, had died in 1938 in a drowning accident when Jo Ann was 8. Her grandfather and grandmother, Annie Louise, had wrested custody of Jo Ann from her mother. Mother Lou and Granddad, as she calls them, raise her, with Mother Lou tutoring her in the Victorian principles of being a lady while Granddad teaches her the ways of cattle ranching and the Florida backwoods.

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