TASMANIA -- Midway between Venus and Bermont, near Rainey Slough and Fisheating Creek, is the forgotten settlement of Tasmania.

There are no stores, schools, railroads or even the paved streets usually seen in settlements. The area is 10 miles west of Palmdale, four miles south of Highlands County in northwestern Glades County.

The Tasmania site is nearly surrounded by Lykes Bros. ranch lands.

Some say Tasmania was named by an early settler thought to have been a sea captain who had been to the island of the same name south of Australia. Settlers wanted a unique name, and they found it.

Tasmania is still home for several pioneer families who can trace their heritage back to the 1880s, back to the pioneers who hacked out an early existence in a land known before only by Indians. The settlers came to farm, ranch and live off the land.

Long gone are the children and parents of Tasmania and its Lucky Island one-room schoolhouse. But, they left their reminders.

An unpaved road, dusty in winter and soggy in summer, slices through prairie lands south of the Highlands Ridge, through cypress swamps and marshy sloughs.

Wooden bridges span creeks. Not far from Venus, Hicoris, Hall City and Delverde -- all ghost towns now -- and the famed Arcadia / Fisheating Creek Trail, are the remains of a once-hopeful town.

There are few people left to talk about the times when Tasmania's future was promising. Even pioneer Morgan Ingraham has passed on. His father, the late Dr. J. B. Ingraham, homesteaded 160 acres in the pine and palmetto woods 20 miles west of Lake Okeechobee, near the Tasmania site, in 1888.

According to U. S. postal record, the area officially became Tasmania on Oct. 6, 1916, when the community's post office had its name changed from Fisheating Creek. That office had been established Sept. 25, 1913.

Gene Harn is a native of Tasmania. He was one of 14 children born to William W. and Willie H. Harn early this century. Today, Harn is in the heavy-equipment business and lives outside LaBelle.

He remembers the Tasmania and Luck Island area well.

"We had two schools in the early 1900s -- the Adrian School on the north side of Rainey Slough, and Luck Island, built on the south side in 1914," Harn said. "In 1918, the Cook family moved to Tasmania. He was a salesman and traveled a lot. She opened a trading post and sold a few groceries, clothes, hardware and even war bonds."

Turpentining, cattle and farming were the main income sources. "Plus," he remembered, "between 1924 and 1933, there was a moon-shine still in almost every bay head.

"By 1926, there were 94 registered voters in the area and we had a good school, store and post office," Harn said.

But the Depression brought change to Tasmania. By the late 1930s, both the post office and the school had closed and many families had moved away," Harn said. "It would never be the same."

Arcadia businessman Earl Hendry, a native of Lake Placid and member of a pioneer southwest Florida family, revisited the community recently.

"I was a boy when we used to go out there and visit relatives," he recalled. "This was in the '40s and '50s, and the area did not have telephones or electricity. But nobody seemed to mind. I guess you don't miss what you don't have."

Hendry said, "It was probably the 1930s before a decent road was built to the community, and it was in the 1950s before electricity arrived. Only in the last few years was telephone service extended."

Tasmania died quietly after the railroad and U.S. 27 were built 10 miles to the east, bringing boom times to Venus, Palm Dale and Moore Haven. In 1921, DeSoto County was divided into four new counties. Glades County became remote Tasmania's new home.

The abandoned Lucky Island schoolhouse now is used as a storage barn in the middle of a cow pasture. Its rusty roof, sagging floor boards, missing window panes and open door tell of its neglect.

No cemetery, historical marker or much written history records the coming and going of the community.

A rattlesnake winds its way across the dusty road as does a rabbit several hundred feet away. There's a lonely and ageless beauty about this country of oak and hardwood hammocks, prairie and marshes. Except for the road and an occasional fence, house, roadside power line or mailbox, it could be 200 years ago.