The History of Florida (78 page)

as a waterfall or mountain. Spring bathing, not beach bathing, was the rage,

although preferences were changing.

After railroad builders Henry Flagler and Henry Plant located their first

resorts to give easy access to inland fishing and hunting, they realized profit

making was moving beachside. They subsequently built resorts to take ad-

vantage of the new interest in what the
Halifax
Journal
in 1886 called “surf

bathing, a perfectly safe gigantic bathing trough provided by nature.” The

activity had been in ful swing for years in the Northeast—Coney Island,

Newport, and the Jersey Shore, in particular—providing a reprieve from the

stale confines of the city. By the 1880s, beaches on the Florida panhandle’s

Florida by Nature: A Survey of Extrahuman Historical Agency · 373

Santa Rosa and St. George Islands and at Jacksonville had begun accommo-

dating leisure seekers (with restrictions to whites only). In 1898, a
New
York

Times
travel correspondent recommended the Italian Riviera as a wintering

spot for Americans, though with one qualification: Its beaches could not be

“mentioned in the same breath with our Florida beaches.” For a time, when

the automobile was stil a novelty, the national media was more interested in

the beach at Ormond and Daytona as a place to set land speed records (pro-

duced on the hard-packed interbedded sands and coquina from the Anas-

tasia Formation) than as one for surf bathers. Ormond nicknamed itself the

Birthplace of Speed, although by the 1910s, the sport had migrated to Utah’s

Bonneville Salt Flats. Heightened interest in Florida’s beaches followed the

democratization of vacationing. New roads were directed to coastal retreats.

Bridges were built across the water from mainland to barrier islands, most

of which before had been left to the wildlife, the odd beach hermit, or a

handful of fishing families.

Early beachgoing was a return to nature. Recreators went into the surf, a

tidal lagoon, or an inlet to hunt and gather. They built a beach fire to cook

their spoil—frying fish, smoking mul et, boiling crabs, roasting oysters—

mimicking the indigenous peoples of forgotten times. Sunset hues, salt air,

drumming surf, and refreshing breezes enlivened their senses. Swimwear

proof

covered less and less through the years until beachgoers were wearing little

more than what the Calusa had worn, doing so to duplicate the complex-

ion of aboriginal peoples. No place was more suitable than Florida for the

modern-day sun worshipper. St. Petersburg captured a spot in
The
Guinness

Book
of
World
Records
with a run of 768 sun-fil ed days, from February

9, 1967, to March 17, 1969. Before concerns of atmospheric ozone deple-

tion and ultraviolet-light radiation, white Americans associated bronze skin

with health and natural beauty. Sun lotions appeared on the consumer mar-

ket in the 1940s, not to block damaging sun rays but to deepen skin color.20

In 1967, a Volusia County high-school chemistry teacher named Ron Rice

mixed a batch of oils in a twenty-gal on garbage can, and two years later

founded Hawaiian Tropic tanning products. Unlike his chief competitor,

Coppertone, Rice used only natural oils in his product. When Platex Prod-

ucts, Inc. bought him out in 2007, his Daytona Beach company was posting

$200 million in annual sales. By that time, the sun had turned into a menace

in the minds of many, the source of deadly skin cancer, and suntan-lotion

manufacturers started calling their products sunscreens. Beaches neverthe-

less preserved their luster. Even after Walt Disney World opened in 1971,

374 · Jack E. Davis

they remained the state’s primary draw. In the middle of the twentieth cen-

tury, 2.6 more Floridians lived in coastal counties than landlocked ones. By

2000, the coast absorbed 12 mil ion residents and 20 mil ion annual tourists.

Fewer than 4 million Floridians lived in the counties of the mostly ignored

interior.

Not surprisingly, Florida officials worried incessantly about the condi-

tion of the sandy coast. In the 1990s, scientists concluded that six to ten feet

of beachfront annual y were washing away, and that most areas depended

on routine replenishments of sand. Beaches natural y shift and change, ex-

pand and recede, and it seemed as if nature was taking away one of Florida’s

most prized assets. But after looking closely, researchers discovered that

dredging operations, jetty building, and, most significantly, inlet construc-

tion contributed to as much as 85 percent of the erosion. (This is to say noth-

ing of what sea-level rise, induced by climate change, holds for the future

of Florida’s beaches.) Florida adopted aggressive measures to preserve the

tourist economy. In four decades fol owing the 1970s, the state and local

governments relocated 1.8 bil ion cubic feet of sand, at a cost of $10 per cubic

foot, to restore beaches. By the 1990s, Florida was spending $30 to $50 mil-

lion a year on beach renourishment.

Florida’s coast has not been about leisure alone. The score or more fish-

proof

ing vil ages that formed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries repre-

sented a work-ethic inverse to fun-in-the-sun Florida. Historical y, the Gulf

of Mexico has been home to Florida’s most productive working waterfronts.

“You can do a lot of things in the Gulf that you can’t do in the Atlantic,” said

Mike Davis, whose family had fished in Cedar Key for more than a century.

“The East Coast you got beaches. Over here we got marsh and estuarine

areas, and there’s a living to be made in those areas.” “It was all there,” au-

thor Ben Green writes of the Gulf’s bounty, “within easy reach of young

men and women with strong backs and determination to work hard.” By

the second half of the twentieth century, the Gulf’s marine reserves were

yielding more than the combined fisheries of the U.S. East Coast. In 2009,

the Gulf accommodated four of the seven most productive fishing ports in

the United States. Eighty-three percent of the nation’s commercial shrimp

and 56 percent of its oysters were culled from its waters. Both were major

contributors to the state’s $6-billion commercial- and sportfishing industry,

which employed 60,000 people.

Fish are the oldest-known commodity of inter-mainland trade in Flor-

ida. Using dugout canoes that held up to thirty people, pre-Spanish coastal

Florida by Nature: A Survey of Extrahuman Historical Agency · 375

Indians maintained a fish-trade network that reached to Cuba. The earliest

European explorers had no interest in this particular commodity exchange.

For them, the consumption of seafood was more often than not a desper-

ate act in time of crisis and starvation. Once whites settled the Gulf, ma-

rine life became an important article in local commerce. During the second

Spanish occupation, the bays from Tampa to Port Charlotte supported fish

ranchos. As with coastal Indians, seafood filled the diet of fishing vil agers.

Ben Green’s mother, who grew up in the Gulf town of Cortez, remembered,

“We’d eat fish during the week and then try to have chicken or roast for Sun-

day dinner, except during the Depression, and then we ate it every night.”

The people of Cortez may have been “money-poor,” said Green, but they

were “food rich.” Locals called their bay “the kitchen.” “There was no way

to starve to death,” said Davis of the people of Cedar Key. “And they found

it was pretty easy to make a living.” As the fruits of the sea put food on the

table, they put money in pockets.21

Mul et was the main commercial and food fish of Gulf Coasters, as

meaningful to their culture as hogs were to southern rural life. Like the

southern barbecue, the mul et fry became west coast Florida’s ubiquitous

fund-raiser. “You know how many churches and band uniforms [were paid

for] with mullet?” asked Mike Davis. In the mid-nineteenth century, sea-

proof

sonal, palm-thatched shanties cropped up on barrier islands, at the end of

bights, and along inlets close to fish runs. A vegetarian that habituated sea

grass beds, mullet were easily taken with a cast net thrown from the stern

of a flat-bottomed skiff or a gill net struck from the same. Once known as

the poor man’s dinner, mullet became a popular restaurant and fish-store

selection in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and the roe of the red

mullet a high-end commodity worldwide, particularly in Japan. Leo Lovel,

a longtime Big Bend commercial fisherman and restaurateur, cal s mullet

“Mother Nature’s finest,” the “basis of the food chain in the sea.”

Poor ole mullet. Everybody and everything in the sea, air and on land

love ’em. . . .

By far the porpoise’s food. . . .

Pelicans dive on ’em when the mullet are trying to run up the river.

Eagles and osprey snatch at every one that gets close to the surface.

All your fish in the ocean eat mullet. From trout feeding on the fin-

ger mullet in the estuaries to the marlin eating three-pound mullet

offshore.

376 · Jack E. Davis

Cormorants chase ’em underwater.

Seagul s pick up the small fry in the grass.

Gators eat ’em.22

Mul et leaping in the Anclote River, not far up the Gulf coast from Tampa

Bay, gave the town of Tarpon Springs its name. Newcomers to the area mis-

took the near-shore fish for the bigger, broad-mouthed tarpon. As it hap-

pened, neither fish had much to do with the town’s importance. Its identity

became wrapped up with a sedentary aquatic animal, the sponge. For de-

cades, Gulf Coast dwellers pulled sponges from the shallows for personal

use before realizing, in the 1840s, their commercial value. Key West initial y

dominated the sponge trade and did so until the end of the century. By

then, the industry had begun a permanent migration up the coast, where

yellow, grass, wire, glove, and sheepswool sponges grew. Hospitals used the

grass species as surgical sponges, and everyday consumers used sheepswool

sponges for bathing and washing carriages and, later, automobiles. Before

the turn of the century, Apalachicola emerged as an important port for these

sponges. This was before the panhandle town cornered the market with its

own brand of oysters. They were harvested from its bay where Gulf saltwater

mingled with the freshwater of the town’s namesake river, producing plump,

proof

sweet-tasting oysters.

Ultimately, Tarpon Springs was better situated to the Gulf’s 9,000-square-

mile sponge habitat. In 1890, Gulf sponge beds delivered to one local firm $1

million in sales. Such success encouraged Tarpon residents John E. Cheney

and John Cocoris, a Greek immigrant, to recruit skilled sponge divers from

the Dodecanese Islands. Tarpon Springs evolved into a true Greek Ameri-

can city. In the 1940s, the Anclote River harbored 150 sponge boats, each

designed from an original thirty-foot imported Mediterranean model with

high-curving bow and stern. They rode the water, said a writer for the Work

Progress Administration, “like a crescent moon.” Before the fleet got under

way for two- to four-week trips, the priest of St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox

Cathedral blessed each boat. Tarpon Springs was the world’s most produc-

tive sponge port. Its natural product washed America. But not even the

sacraments of the priest could prevent the first red tide from striking the

Gulf coast. The result of nutrient overloading from human activity, the 1947

algae bloom obliterated the industry. Sponging never returned to the same

level.23

Cedar Key was another Gulf Coast community that owed its existence to

Florida by Nature: A Survey of Extrahuman Historical Agency · 377

nature. “The Gulf is what made this place what it is,” said Mike Davis. That

place is a cluster of barrier islands in a region once called the lonesome leg,

later renamed the Nature Coast in the wake of development and artificial-

ity rampaging across Florida. Like the state’s other barrier islands—more

than 4,500 of ten or more acres—Cedar Key’s fourteen date to the retreat of

glaciers thousands of years ago when ocean levels rose. They may have been

attached to the mainland or to each other at one time, or they may have ma-

terialized on their own from the buildup of sediment washing down rivers

that emptied into the Gulf. John Muir, who traveled to the area in 1867, de-

scribed the islands as “looking like a clump of palms, arranged like a tasteful

bouquet, and placed in the sea to be kept fresh.” The surrounding water is

shallow above a continental shelf that rises gently up to grassy—cordgrass

and needlerush—intertidal salt marshes from Tarpon Springs north and

around west to Ochlockonee Bay, a 200-mile coastal region known as the Big

Bend. There is no breaking surf or sand-dune beaches to lure the surfers and

beachgoers who frequent the panhandle from Panama City to Pensacola.

The Big Bend has historical y accommodated quiet recreational and com-

mercial fishing and crabbing. Scientists call it a low-energy coastline. The