Robert Seidler, Nelson Martin and a few neighbors who make a living by coaxing earthworms out of the ground that they sell for live bait are turning Sopchoppy, pop. 500 in Florida’s Big Bend, into the South’s exemplary learning center for how leisure travel becomes climate action.
They’ve been shattering precedent for a half-century, this year opening Florida’s first multiuse rail-trail in a national wildlife refuge.
People, the same as Lumbricus terrestris, are pulling their heads out of the sand.
Re-launch of the Florida state bicycling movement
Robert and Nelson were already adult cyclists when in 1982 Robert helped launch the modern-day Florida state bicycling movement. A team had previously spent a week bicycling across northwest Florida by day. Evenings — one at a B&B inn in Sopchoppy — were spent preparing a far-reaching report on Florida bicycling for Gov. Bob Graham. We felt confident about our work that combined multimodal transportation, energy, environment, tourism, quality of life and more because Graham’s director of physical fitness, the Ph.D. laureate Linda Crider, was on the ride with us.
Graham appointed Dan Burden, the founder of what became the Adventure Cycling Association, as Florida’s first state bicycling coordinator. He installed Dan in the Florida Department of Transportation, where he would have to convince highway engineers to accept human-powered mobility to get anything done.
Robert wrote to me that he showed up at Dan’s office and said, “I am a serious cyclist and walker as well as a filmmaker and I am here to help…put me to work! And HE DID!” Robert became the cinematographer-in-chief among Dan’s inner circle as Dan became a national leader in bicycling and later also in walking and now at his career apex, in multimodal transportation and climate action.
You have to understand that Robert is the most intuitive person you may ever meet. He had first entered Sopchoppy in 1982 on a century [100-mile] ride from Tallahassee, where he was chief cinematographer for TV Channel 11 at Florida State University (FSU). He collapsed from hypothermia on a bitter cold day.
“I was freezing. The town was old-fashioned. It was cool. It still had an IGA, a few shops, and its old depot. But it was also fading since the Georgia, Florida and Alabama Railroad — the GF&A — ended its run in 1948. Sopchoppy was fresh for change again in a world where adventure travelers — cyclists, hikers, paddlers — forecast its future.”
Robert built a house there in 2006 on land he had bought in ’92 that he made a precursor Airbnb. Some 1,600 have stayed at his Buckhorn Creek Lodge, almost half from around the world. A few trickle back to help build Sopchoppy’s sustainable community.
Nelson’s love affair with trains
Robert teamed up with preservationist Nelson, already in Sopchoppy since the early ’70s. He had grown up in Baltimore where streetcars ran along his street. He hung out at the B&O (Baltimore & Ohio) Museum. He loved trains.
His father later moved the family to Tallahassee, where he taught sociology at FSU. Nelson homesteaded a house near Sopchoppy for $100 down and $10 a month. After he learned how to thatch roofs from a Seminole, Nelson and a younger brother Bill thatched houses across the Panhandle. They retired after rethatching Mission San Luis, a National Historic Landmark, on Tallahassee’s west side.
When Nelson built his own house in the early ’70s, he lived under his own thatched roof for 15 years before replacing thatch with tin. He gave up his dirt floor when he raised the house a year later.
Nelson pushed for building the GF&A Rail-Trail, known from its inception as the Gopher, Frog and Alligator because it crossed three swamps south of Tallahassee. He would restore the GF&A Depot as a trailhead to connect 52 miles largely through the Apalachicola National Forest between Tallahassee and Carrabelle in coastal Franklin County.
But even after Nelson secured a $2.4 million national DOT grant to build the first 2 miles under a congressional act that for the first time allowed highway-generated tax revenue to be spent for trails and other transportation “amenities” (for which Dan testified), dog hunters in 1993 led the Wakulla County Commission in opposition. The regionally powerful timbering St. Joe Company would not even allow planners onto its lands. Nelson and Robert faced death threats.
Oldtimers got Nelson interested in restoring the depot. He and Bill were the first young people to move in after years when young people mostly moved out. Oldsters passed on the “town slogan”: If you move to Sopchoppy you’ll have to borrow money to move away. No way to earn a living if you didn’t seine for mullet.
Restoring the depot
The pharmacy with its soda fountain was gone. In 1912 the Sopchoppy Bank was the only bank in Wakulla. Then the bank manager ran off with all the money. In 1972 when Nelson moved in, “There was no doctor, no dentist, no supermarket, no auto parts store, no gas station open after dark. I had to drive my car to Tallahassee to replace a headlight using mostly dirt roads.”
It was 1975 when the Wakulla State Bank opened in the county seat of Crawfordville, 11.6 miles north.
A beekeeper owned the depot. He built hives. ”It was the scariest electrical system in the world just lying exposed on the sawdust floor. It’s amazing the depot never burned down.” Nelson incorporated a GF&A nonprofit that sold shares.
“It was crazy to think we could do this. Everything depended on the trail coming through, and it wasn’t.” [For the depot turnaround, see next Thursday’s posting.]
The county had accepted when the state in 1980 acquired the historic rail corridor for a trail across Leon County (Tallahassee), on federal land, and through built-up east side Wakulla. The Tallahassee-St. Marks Historic Railroad State Trail became part of an envisioned 120-mile Capital City to the Sea Loop that would include the GF&A.
Also, the Ochlockonee Bay Trail that this year connected Sopchoppy to below Panacea. Its 13 miles run through the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge.
NOTES
https://www.floridastateparks.org/learn/historic-significance-tallahassee-st-marks-railroad
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Florida_and_Alabama_Railroad
https://www.naturalnorthflorida.com/things-to-do/floridas-ochlockonee-bay-bike-trail/
