Some mighty small places in Florida’s Big Bend, never big in Florida tourism, embed lessons for anyplace that wants to attract visitors conducive to climate action. For details, look for next Thursday’s posting.
For this week, let me take up any misapprehension that coastal Wakulla was left behind when it failed to worship the growth machine that Henry Flagler and Henry Plant built when they brought their railroads to Florida 140 years ago. That led to the plunder of natural Florida everywhere. Governors desperate for revenues in a state bankrupted by the Civil War showered the railroaders with land that they in turn sold to buyers at grand hotels they built, where wilderness became cosmeticized.
Seminoles wrestled alligators as attractions. Yachts conveyed genteel anglers to fishing grounds. One governor named Napoleon Bonaparte (Broward) gained office by promising to drain the Everglades.
Except not in coastal Wakulla where a nonfictional place looked after visitors by fitting them in.
Cypress Rudloe helped me understand.
Jack’s son now manages the Gulf Marine Specimen Lab in Panacea. I had asked Cypress what he thinks about running one of Florida’s remaining yet thriving roadside attractions.
He said, “I don’t think of us as a roadside attraction. We’re a science lab that delivers specimens to universities around America.” This, mind you, in an unincorporated vicinity of maybe 800 at a place that draws some 30,000 roadside visitors a year, where the general admission is $12, and where the lab’s touch tanks reveal different ways of life.
About those early Florida railroads
Different from mainline railroads, those in Wakulla prospered by hauling out longleaf pine and 50-lb. oak barrels of sturgeon caviar, Tupelo honey and salted mullet. They built no grand hotels. They nicknamed one of their railroads the Gopher, Frog and Alligator, a stand-in for the Georgia, Florida and Alabama, because it crossed three large swamps they never bothered to drain. Excursions promoted Midnight on the Gulf for passengers, who paid $1 round-trip that ads pointed out was “cheaper than walking.”
Instead, coastal Wakulla above the Ochlockonee outfall celebrated the labor of mullet seiners at season’s end with a party on the beach for all comers. They would later make a festival out of folks who “grunted up” earthworms for live bait. After Sopchoppy Depot shut down with the end of GF&A service, its reopening in 2010 as a history museum recalled all the livelihoods of this region where maybe 75 percent of the entire county, mainly in the south, remains protected from development.
Wakulla north from the county seat at Crawfordville is a bedroom community for government workers in Tallahassee.
Kim Pastor, who runs KP’s Moving On Sidewalk Café Wednesday through Saturday in front of the Civic Brewery on Municipal Avenue in Sopchoppy, has lived in Crawfordville for 23 years. It’s Kim who coined Sopchoppy’s location on the unbeaten path of the Forgotten Coast.
Chuck Hess, Ph.D., a wildlife biologist who before his retirement from the US. Forest Service in 2016 studied the red-cockaded woodpecker in the Apalachicola National Forest, is the only scientist and environmental activist on the Wakulla board of county commissioners. He decries recent comp plan changes that he says allow 700-to-800 new homes northeast of Crawfordville that the county has sewered for which developers only pay $4,000 per house that they pass on to buyers. He faults his board for comp plan changes that he says would allow gas tank installations where the aquifer lies close beneath surficial lands, and for its inattention to replacing fossil fuel energy with wind, solar and tidal, now as “we’re coming down to the wire.”
Again, Sopchoppy is different
When I ask Mayor Lara Edwards about her city now nearing 600 residents in its 1.2 square miles, she tells me that when her son was 7, which was 6 years ago, “He would get on his bike with my shopping list and ride 2 blocks to the IGA. Everybody knew him along the way. When everything was loaded in his basket, including a Coca Cola and a can of worms for himself, a cashier would call that Alex was on his way home.”
Lara says that people from 10 miles around tell you that they live in Sopchoppy.
“We’re growing in a moderate way, maybe 8 or 10 houses going up now. People come for the way we were, which is how we still are. Downtown is coming back thanks to the history museum in the depot, the Civic [Brewery], and the coffee house and bakery moving in next door.”
About the Civic, that opened in 2021 after two public hearings that each brought out some 40 voters. Meetings of the 5-member town council usually outnumber its audience. “It’s alcohol, don’t you know,” says Lara.
Lara tells me this as she’s about to walk to Andrea Cayson’s Sand and Soul Designs where she’s bringing a jar of pickles for Andrea, whose curated scatter of clothes, cottage foods and recycled sea and shore detritus as crafts seems as museum-like as the depot.
Andrea, who was born and raised in Sopchoppy, then lived for 20 years in Tallahassee as a housewife and nurse, moved back home to open her Municipal Avenue shop 6 years ago. Half her clientele are from the area. The others follow her on Facebook and Instagram, she says.
At the depot
Before the GF&A, a few families farmed across the river. Although the depot was built in 1891 by a predecessor railroad, the GF&A launched the town with its arrival 3 years later by donating land for churches. Town incorporated in 1905 formally adopting Sopchoppy for its name from the Creek word for wild and twisting river.
Nelson Martin is building a 5x6-foot diorama in the old waiting room that shows pigs made famous by finding summer shade under loading trains. One new display shows the mule-drawn wooden-wheeled tram that once carried health seekers to hotels at Panacea Mineral Springs.
Worm grunters sometimes demonstrate their craft. The volunteer group Discover Sopchoppy now runs Depot Days and the town’s other 2 events that celebrate worm grunting and oysters.
Civic Brewery and the Sopchoppy Bakehouse & Coffee Company
Civic has become a must-stop for visitors and townies. It’s the work of Elliot Seidler, Robert’s son, and his fiancée Jess from Mannheim, Germany — “she has a good respect for beer.” After assignments through the Far East as a Navy aviation rescue swimmer, Elliot completed a master brewer’s course at the University of California Davis and knew he wanted to open in the place where he grew up. Eliot welcomes newcomers moving to town from the American Midwest, Northwest and South, as well as visitors from around the world, “about half first-timers, travelers and snowbirds, maybe 500 to 600 a week.”
Elliot’s building, also on Municipal Avenue, takes you back 100 years with its original brick exterior and high cypress beams. He shares the building’s architecture and a wall with the bakery and coffee shop going in next door that native Joey Morgan and his wife Carolyn aka Lulu took on after Joey retired as project manager for a large electrical company. They came back to raise 3 kids. Look for their shop opening with a stage out back toward year’s end.
NOTES
For context, https://herbhiller.medium.com/a-couple-oldtimers-awhile-back-recalled-when-the-seineyards-were-a-resort-spot-of-sorts-and-not-9e471ff9451d; https://herbhiller.medium.com/robert-seidler-nelson-martin-and-a-few-neighbors-who-make-a-living-by-coaxing-earthworms-out-of-1ea0327ad707
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bend_(Florida)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Florida_and_Alabama_Railroad
https://www.facebook.com/SopchoppyFL/
https://www.facebook.com/KPsFoodTruck/about_contact_and_basic_info
https://arpc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=9badc2afd4ca493e9a721875e329bc1c
https://www.civicbrewingco.com/
http://www.floridabigbendscenicbyway.org/itineraries/byway-central-itinerary/sopchoppy-depot-museum
