By Amy Green
Carroll McAllister frets over the prospect of a hyperscale data center opening next to the grassy expanse where she grew up, in a shack her father built.
Now 87, McAllister is a tiny but sturdy woman with a bob of blonde hair. She fondly recalls running wild on the land in her youth with her three siblings, fishing and picking berries among the stands of oak and pine trees and cabbage palms. Her father raised watermelons, cantaloupes, strawberries, peas and beans and nurtured an orange grove. With no running water in the shack, the family members used an outhouse and drew their drinking water from an outdoor pump.
“Much of that land he actually cleared by hand. He didn’t have bulldozers,” said McAllister, gazing across the grassland where cattle now graze.
The old water pump is all that remains of her childhood home. “My life, my heritage. I have so much feeling in my heart. I’ve cried at night thinking about my parents and the sacrifices that they went through to accumulate what they did under such dire circumstances.”
For much of its existence, Indiantown has derived its identity from the land. The tiny community between Lake Okeechobee and Palm Beach is part of Florida’s heartland, a bountiful agricultural region encircling the state’s largest lake. Here, ranchers and farmers raise cattle, rice, sod, vegetables such as lettuce, celery, corn and, most notably, sugarcane. The region has remained relatively untouched by the explosive growth and development that has enveloped much of modern Florida.
Now, Indiantown is bracing for a new potential crop: hyperscale data centers.
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