The History of Florida (79 page)

current is too mild to carry much sediment and sand, and in fair weather

the water laps against the shore. These conditions were right for the expanse

proof

of tidal marsh, and the gentle surf combined with the sunlight-penetrated

shal ows encouraged the growth of sea grasses, primarily turtle and manatee

grass. They sprawled into a 1,200-square-mile underwater prairie. Seventy

percent of Florida’s Gulf recreational fish spend part of their lives there, and

scallops, shrimp, crabs, seahorses, and sea stars hide out there from preda-

tors. In the warmer months, manatees, nicknamed sea cows, migrate north

to graze on the grass.

Cedar Key’s past is a triangular relationship between water, land, and

place. The estuarine environment set the rhythm of human life. This prime

marine habitat, which includes grouper, red fish, mul et, green turtles,

stone and blue crabs, oysters, and much more, has fed people back to the

indigenous inhabitants. Like the Calusa, they built mounds to elevate their

settlement above surging water and to capture cooling, mosquito-blowing

breezes. They also hunted terrestrial game. In the loblol y and longleaf pine

forests reaching deep into the mainland, deer, bear, and gopher tortoise

were abundant. But then, in the narrative common to all of North America,

European weapons, enslavement, and diseases wiped out nearly all of the

aborigines of Florida by the early eighteenth century. The next occupants

378 · Jack E. Davis

of the Cedar Keys were once again Indians, this time Seminoles. The U.S.

military detained captives at Seahorse Key during the Second Seminole War

in preparation for removal to a trans-Mississippi reservation.

After the war, whites began settling the keys and the reedy coast, where

mul et jumped in profusion. The fish and forests were the main draw to

settlers and businessmen. David Levy Yulee completed his cross-Florida

railroad in 1861, connecting the port of Fernandina with Way Key, the main

island in the Cedar Key cluster. The Gulf port handled naval stores, lum-

ber, cotton, salt, and more. The Civil War disrupted rail service but peace

restored the commercial momentum, enough to make Cedar Key the busi-

est port on the peninsula’s Gulf coast. Sea turtles, its meat a sweet deli-

cacy around the world, were part of that revival. The hundreds that came

out of Cedar Key each year—600 to 800 pounds each—were among the

15,000 green turtles Florida and the Caribbean were exporting annual y to

England by 1878. Fishing, sponging, and salt manufacturing were integral

to the local economy, too, and for many years, a cottage industry formed

around the horseshoe crab, which on every full moon stormed the beach

like Eisenhower’s Normandy invaders. They were caught and ground up

for animal feed and fertilizer, and the medical industry later extracted their

blood to test for bacterial contamination in medical equipment and com-

proof

mercial drugs). When Daniel Andrews retired to Cedar Key from the Mid-

west around 1909, he patented a whisk broom (trademarked Donax-whisk)

and began manufacturing it and brushes from palm fiber, consuming up

to 3,000 sabal palm saplings a month. The factory employed roughly 100

people and operated until competition from synthetic fibers and a hurri-

cane, one of those agents of history, shut it down in 1950.

A glance northward from Cedar Key, mil ions of board feet of cypress

and pine once spil ed from the Suwannee River, floated down by timber

crews from interior forests to be milled at Cedar Key or shipped to ports

elsewhere. The most important wood for the people of Cedar Key came

from their namesake tree. There were a number of lumber mil s in the area,

employing more than 100 people, including John Muir for a few days dur-

ing his three-month stay. The mill of perhaps greatest importance was that

of Eberhard Faber on Atsena Otie (Muskogee Creek words for cedar is-

land). A Bavarian immigrant, Faber bought large tracts of wooded land in

Levy County for 50 cents an acre to supply the raw material for his New

York pencil factory, the first mass-production pencil manufacturing in the

United States. On Atsena Otie, he milled red cedar into pencil blanks and

penholders shipped to New York and European pencil factories. In 1890, the

Florida by Nature: A Survey of Extrahuman Historical Agency · 379

Florida
Times-Union
estimated that Cedar Key’s three pencil factories were

consuming 100,000 cedar logs a year and producing enough pencil blanks

to circle the globe nearly five times.

Muir saw all of this and more. In 1867, twenty-nine years old and auburn

bearded, he had months before he left Indiana on a pivotal 1,000-mile walk

to the Gulf. He entered Florida at Fernandina and walked Yulee’s railroad

tracks across the peninsula to Cedar Key. En route, in the vine-tangled, wa-

ter-soaked wilderness landscape he was struck by the wisdom that secured

his future as the father of American conservation. It happened with a mos-

quito bite that infected him with malaria, which to fellow humans reflected

the dark side of Florida paradise. Muir developed a different view, however.

While convalescing at Cedar Key, he took the opportunity to get to know

the area’s natural characteristics and began to reassess the human place on

earth, that is, the stratification of culture over nature. His encounter with

“venomous beasts” and “thorny plants,” most especial y Florida’s Spanish

bayonet, combined with his fever convinced him that “certain parts of the

earth prove that the whole world was not made for” humans. Nature is the

“one great unit of creation,” he concluded. It makes human existence pos-

sible, yet nature’s purpose is not solely for humans. Its purpose is for al .24

Nature’s richness had its limits. Few in young Muir’s day understood this.

proof

Lessons often came the hard way. The pencil factories shut down in the

1890s. Locals liked to attribute the demise of the mill economy to an 1896

hurricane that leveled houses and manufacturing on Atsena Otie. It is true

that the hurricane marked a shift in the local economy to a near complete

dependence on commercial fishing. But it made little sense for the mil s to

rebuild, even if they had so chosen. Prior to the hurricane, they had logged

out the area’s cedar stands.

Their activities were a growing trend. Along the coastline south of Cedar

Key and on the other side of the state in the Mosquito Lagoon area north of

Merritt Island, loggers cut out miles upon miles of red mangroves for tan-

nin, used in the treatment of leather, and for fine-grained wood, coveted by

furniture makers. The result was the widespread elimination of avian and

marine habitat, key to the Gulf’s natural bounty. Pine and cypress were the

fish of inland Florida, exploited for a living and profit but to a near end.

Pines, like mullet, were ubiquitous and easily harvested. Extracting cypress

from its wetland habitat was more complicated but the payoff was usual y

higher for the owner of the timber rights.

Cypresses were Florida’s sequoias of the swamp, ancient and beautiful and

inspiring. Captain George McCal , writing a letter from the Withlacoochee

380 · Jack E. Davis

River in 1828 in the vein of the naturalist rather than military officer, noted

that he had found “enough to excite his wonder, if not his admiration” in

the “enormous shafts of the cypress trees, which support their broad, flat

umbrel a-shaped tops at the distance of a hundred and twenty feet above

the earth.” Yet the forest pantheon stirred different sensibilities in different

people. The romanticist and the businessman might be equal y awed by the

trees and note the handiwork of God, but as one would contemplate spiri-

tual enrichment the other would calculate monetary enrichment. “The cy-

press timber to-day was magnificent,” McCal wrote in another passage, “the

largest I have ever seen, towering to a height I am afraid to estimate.”
Timber

is the key word here, one the utilitarian, not the spiritualist, used when ref-

erencing a product rather than the living aesthetic, when estimating dol ars

in board feet rather than pondering peaceful solitude. Cypress was insect-

and rot-resistant, making it an excellent marketable wood for shingles and

fencing. Once soldiers like McCal reduced the Seminoles to harmless num-

bers, timber concerns swarmed to Florida’s trees. On the land side of the Big

Bend, two of nature’s commercial attractions were the Tide Swamp, ranging

inland from the coast, and the Mal ory Swamp–San Pedro Bay wetland area,

the watershed for the Econfina, Fenholloway, and Steinhatchee Rivers. Both

were home to mature cypress trees. A sawmil worker recal ed the sylvan

proof

landscape in 1919, not long after the harvesting had begun: “There were

miles and miles of trees never touched by an ax. . . . I can still remember

the wind in the trees, with sunlight filtering through the branches. . . . And

the woods were full of game.” Nearby in Perry, the Burton-Swartz Cypress

Company operated the largest cypress mill in the country, which served a

nationwide demand the local stock could not satiate.25

The mills turned to the Big Cypress Swamp. Trains traveled 318 miles

from the Big Cypress to the Big Bend to deliver forty carloads each of cut

timber. Some of the toppled giants were more than a thousand years old;

some were twelve feet in diameter.26 The timber trains repeated the journey

915 times between 1943 and 1957, until loggers finished clearing 150,000

acres of old-growth forest. At the same time, more than 400,000 acres of cy-

press, cedar, and pine fell in the Big Bend region. Burton-Swartz shut down

in 1942. There were no more trees to cut. Wildlife of the cypress ecology

also disappeared, including another titan of the forest, the now possibly ex-

tinct ivory-billed woodpecker. The cypress industry, too, ecologist Howard

Odum pointed out, “effectively went extinct”—but only temporarily. Odum

was writing in the 1980s, when a second growth of cypress was “coming

Florida by Nature: A Survey of Extrahuman Historical Agency · 381

back” and the industry was “reforming,” this time to turn the young trees

into landscaping mulch. The “cycle,” Odum wrote, “continues.”27

Nature’s attraction as commodity had few sylvan rivals to the pine tree. In

the commonwealth of the species, the longleaf was the monarch. It ranged

across 92 million acres from southern Virginia down to Lake Okeechobee

and across to Texas. A traveler in the old Southeast could not avoid the

statuesque tree, straight and spare of branches to its crown. Bartram talked

of Athe solemn symphony of the steady Western breezes . . . playing inces-

santly, rising and fal ing through the thick and wavy foliage.” Muir liked

the spare density of the longleaf forest, the “sunny spaces between ful of

beautiful abounding grasses,” where he “sauntered in delightful freedom.”

When the protagonist in Zora Neale Hurston’s “The Gilded Six-bits” wishes

for the well-fed physique of rich white men, to pretend the look of wealth

for himself, his wife assures him, “God took pattern after a pine tree and

built you noble.” The milled wood of the longleaf, dense and clear and tight-

grained, ideal for sturdy ship- and home building, prized for its natural

resistance to termites, created real wealth for a relative few. The market and

fire (exacerbated by timbering) had taken 17 million acres of Florida pine

by 1918. By the end of the twentieth century, barely 3 percent of the great

longleaf ecosystem of the Southeast had survived. The loss exceeds that of

proof

hardwood in the Amazon rain forest, the old-growth Douglas firs of the

Pacific Northwest, and the tallgrass prairies of the North American interior.

Florida made over allowed no room for the woodland homes of cypresses

and pines.28

Some longleafs escaped the saw, though not from exploitation and even-

tual extraction. The highly resinous trees were tapped for gum (oleoresin) to

be distilled into spirits of turpentine, which had multiple purposes—from

paint and varnish thinners to disinfectant to medicinal ointment—and into

rosin, which had seemingly infinite uses—as a compound in soap, electri-

cal insulation, leather dressing, fly paper, lipstick, hair spray, and more.

The Spanish were the first to take advantage of this resource, and during

their time in the Floridas the British developed a robust industry in naval

stores traded across the Atlantic world. As many New South historians have

pointed out, cotton was not the only king in the ante- and postbel um eras;

so too were timber and turpentine, which on the eve of the Civil War were

the South’s number two and three export commodities. By the early twenti-

eth century, 70 percent of the world supply of naval stores was drawn from

the sap of the longleaf region, with Florida at the center.

382 · Jack E. Davis

Like cotton, timber exploited labor as it exploited the environment. Most