The white

material is dug (sucked) from the ground of the lakes and piled nearby.

This could be  sand, maybe  Quarz-sand,But all that lakes, too much sand.

There is phosphate minig in central Florida. So the white substance

might be  some waste.

Georg

Here we are:

http://www.floridahistory.com/phosphate.html

At the turn of the Century (1900), pebble phosphate was discovered 25 feet beneath the surface in Polk County. Not as pure as rock phosphate, but it was much easier to mine and closer to Tampa. That business continues to this day. The overburden forms hills; the mines form lakes (pictured at top). Well over 130,000 acres of West Central Florida have been surface mined.

Reasonable, but apparently there also are quartz, sand, and limestone rock mining companies in that area. As Georg implies, it is hard to be sure whether the stuff is waste or product.  If you do a lot of looking, there is a lot of white showing through in that general area. The topography is intriguing too; circular ponds everywhere. Karst subsidences? Flooded quarries? Google Earth unfortunately does not give very good resolution. Frustrating!

Looking at the NE side of the lake to the north, they seem to be dumping a lot of white stuff into the water, so it might well be waste.

Hello Jon,

right, I wondered about the multitude of  that near circular "small" ponds.,too.

Maybe those were where they looked whether there is some phophate?

In German "Mutung", I did not find an English equivalent.

Georg

Hi Georg,

At a guess, most of those ponds look a bit big for pilot or exploratory or test diggings. Possibly they were just small deposits that soon got "worked out".

"Mutung" was interesting. It does not seem to me to have the sense of an exploratory digging. In English, if someone demands and receives the right to dig for particular mineral products at a certain spot, say gold or diamonds, we say that he has "staked a claim". (It does not imply that he will actually find anything!)  I suspect that "Mutung" might in this sense mean a "claim". It seems to me to be compatible with other uses of the word.

Am I on the right track, do you think?