Walter McKenzie managed the crafts complex at the Memorial for three years till that contract ran out. For a time, he promoted the downstream Spirit of the Suwannee that became an important campground and folk venue; later, the Camp Weed & Cerveny Conference Center in Live Oak for a year.
Then he and Merri made a major contribution when in 2004 they organized the White Springs Folk Society that for 14 years hosted monthly folk music programs at the Telford Hotel during a time when guest rooms mostly stayed closed, but the lobby was available again. It was the kind of animation and outreach that I had proposed to State Parks, to be sure with fewer moving parts, yet something that you knew would succeed best if home-grown, once a small town lets the world know it welcomes this kind of initiative.
Walter booked the talent. “Merri was a cornerstone. She was so welcoming,” Walter told me. “She was teaching cooking at the Vo-Tech Center where we paid the students to help out by making delicious refreshments, home-made from scratch, and décor. We built bridges, we wove things into the broader fabric of community. When Merri retired she did all the refreshments herself.” It was all a natural for funding, for re-opening guest rooms, for finding a particular kind of hotel operator. For a time a renter renewed the Telford lobby with antiques.
Then the renter quit, and at the end of 2018, Walter and Merri also did. Says Walter, “the amount of work exceeded the amount of love.” The last season was only a year before the Covid quarantine would have locked down the programs anyway. Most of the shops and food places that had opened closed.
Walter’s early volunteer contributions had made him well known
When Walter ran for the governing council in this town of some 800 he was elected in 1993 and constantly re-elected except for one two-year term during a peak of spiteful political tension when he chose not to run and took up construction material rentals again. Yet the town had also become more welcoming to newcomers, Walter reflects.
Helen Miller, who also came to stay only in 2007, was also elected mayor after only three years.. Her first visits came because her husband Ed was part of the United Auto Workers Union team that bought out a radio station in the Telford from libertarian Chuck Harder. So once again, people from out of town were shaking things up. Although Ed and Helen left when the UAW shut the station down, they returned to restore and live in the once grand Camp House just outside the park’s campground entrance.
Helen had a lot of progressive ideas, Walter tells me. Her appeal, even as a mayor from “away”, was that she knew about education grants and building political relationships. She was concerned about kids, same as town residents. When kids stole a car and drove it into the Suwannee, Helen asked the magistrate what’s there for kids to do? How can they be involved in better things?
She started after-school and summer programs to help juveniles avoid prison records. She worked with UF architecture and planning students on scale-model visioning that secured grants that are now renewing water and sewer systems. She had the Florida Trail rerouted through town along a section of the riverside Bridge to Bridge mountain bike trail installed by Suwannee Bicycle Association volunteers.
The Suwannee Hardware & Feed opened in the high-ceilinged, wood-floored Adams Country Store with shelves and standing displays of local art, crafts, and cottage foods. Monthly swap meets added old-to-new gadgets and gizmos. With Helen as mayor and Walter as #2 seemingly forever, you could “believe.” Some six families among the groups that kept showing up for SBA tours did. All bought area homes. Newcomer and SBA director Sharon Shea, who also founded the White Springs Historical Preservation Society, tells me that more cyclists want to relocate but find few desirable houses on the market.
Yet Helen’s outreach also built resistance to change. She was sued because of claims she was interfering with her town manager, then kicked off the Council, soon voted back in but discouraged.
“You do work like she was doing and don’t get support? It gets discouraging,” says Walter. “The mayor earns $150 month or so. One lawsuit wipes it all out.” After some four two-year terms in office, Helen resigned early in 2021, and in 2023 died in Texas while treated for cancer.
Walter went off council in 2020 at age 78. He and Merri bought e-bikes that he uses for pedal-assist only. He rides the 14 miles to Live Oak to make bank deposits. “I can ride as good as I ever did but I can’t fall as good as I used to.”
So, consider the 40-some years that I’ve been aware of White Springs and sometimes engaged there.
This town on the banks of America’s most famous folkloric river becomes a center of bicycle touring and a hub of paddle touring that in turn leads to a state-sponsored Suwannee River State Wilderness Trail with overnight options. Its folklore festival marks 72 years in 2024 and remains among the most popular such events in America. The town’s remaining historic hotel reopens for a time and becomes familiar at least by name to a million or more Americans devoted to the radio networks that broadcast from its lobby and also drew followers to spend the night.
Florida State Parks gets a plan, albeit unimplemented, to turn the Stephen Foster Center into an information and year-round folk entertainment hub invested in by every county in Florida. An active Folklore Society forms that programs monthly folk acts in the hotel. People come from around the Southeast and Canada. A first-rate kitchen opens that serves lunch and dinner on a screened porch that looks onto the Sophia Jane Adams House.
Peggy Bulger becomes the chief folklorist in America, which is to say, Director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, and remains best buds with Merri and Walter, retired in nearby Fernandina Beach.
Can’t any of this stick?
White Springs remains the bicycling hub. State Parks runs its Suwannee Wilderness Trail. Newcomers achieve Florida Trail Town designation for the town. I’d bet my quarter on today’s wave of newcomers driven inland by climate action. White Springs no longer stands alone.
