At the state fair, get a glimpse of history from two men who still build palm-frond shelters, carry hogs on horseback and bake pokie biscuits. And you call yourself a Floridian.

[Photos: Carlton Ward]

By LANE DeGREGORY
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 15, 2002

Azell Nail, 49, is “Cooter.” He manages Ichetucknee Springs State Park near Gainesville. His family has been part of rural Florida for more than a century.

TAMPA -- When you're at the State Fair this week, get off the midway and away from the funnel cakes. Walk behind the Health Expo building, cross over the wooden bridge. Check out Cracker Country.

Hang out at Cow Camp.

Come chew the fat with Rooster and Cooter.

Rooster flushes herds of wild cows out of the woods, catches mean boars with meaner dogs, makes moonshine, fries chicken feet, whips up a sweet deer meat stew.

Cooter does, too. And that's not all.

These guys are both graybeards, both granddads, and they still carry hogs on horseback, riding miles through thick Florida swamps. Still spend weeks fishing uncharted streams, cooking over campfires. When they smell rain, they weave a waterproof shelter from palmetto leaves. On clear evenings, they spread wool blankets on the dirt and tell stories under the stars.

They know how to keep mosquitoes away with wax myrtle and dog fennel, how to boil sugar cane into thick syrup. They know how to sew. Once, when an angry hog ripped the flesh off Rooster's right thigh, Cooter stitched up the wound with the string from a feed bag.

"We only had a lick of moonshine left, you remember, Cooter? And you wanted to pour that precious liquid into my cut. What were you thinking?" Rooster asks. "I made you give me that bottle, drank it all down before you blinked. I told you, you remember? "It's best to cure a wound from the inside out."'

Tony Morrell, 57, the manager of Kissimmee State Park, is “Rooster.” Six generations of his family have lived off Florida’s lands.

They're a rare breed, these Florida Crackers. Almost extinct.

In this last generation, many have gotten soft, turned techno. They're learning how to e-mail and play SegaVision and program VCRs. They're forgetting how to dig water troughs, bake pokie biscuits, taste the wind. They're not teaching their children how to castrate calves anymore.

"Just because you're bred and born in Florida, that don't make you a Cracker," Rooster proclaims in his polished drawl. "You got to have the old ways of doing things, the old ways of thinking."

For folks who want to know, who want to learn, who want to remember, it's almost impossible to track down these old-timers, to witness the old ways.

That's why, 10 days a year, Rooster and Cooter leave the comfort of their wilderness preserves and brave the big city. They hitch up their horses, drive their trailer to Tampa.

They set up Cow Camp at the state fair.

They got here last Wednesday, before the fair opened. Settled their horses, Dixie and Cracker Jill. Hooked up their trailer outside Gate 2.

Then they walked past the corn crib barn to Cow Camp. They've been volunteering here for 24 years.

They talk to more than 150,000 people each year at the fair. Explain about burning cows out of the marshlands and the many uses of lard.

"It's not like we're putting on here," Rooster says, sitting back down to his stew. "This is pretty much what we do, what our families have always done, how we still live."

Azell Nail and Tony Morrell speak to visitors to Cracker Country at the Florida State Fair, where the two men have set up Cow Camp. They talk to more than 150,000 people each year at the fair.

Rooster is Tony Morrell. He's 57. He wears his tan felt hat tipped over his tanned forehead. Beneath the battered brim, golden-red highlights still brighten his hoary hair. He's the manager of Kissimmee State Park. He's loud and bawdy and knows how to speak Seminole. Six generations of his family have lived off Florida's lands.

"My grandmama was a Creek Indian. She raised seven boys and made moonshine to feed 'em. I was born in a one-room log cabin with a kitchen out back, near the Choctawatchee River, 32 miles to the closest small town. We were so poor, I didn't get shoes till I was 10. I walked the 21/2 miles to school backwards, just so's I could watch my footprints."

Cooter is Azell Nail. He's 49. Warm ice-blue eyes dance above his bushy beard. He's wearing a corduroy vest and a striped shirt made from mattress ticking, from the same material he sewed inside his saddle. He manages Ichetucknee Springs State Park near Gainesville. He's upbeat and quiet and was born on the St. John's River. His family has been part of rural Florida for more than a century.

"My daddy worked cows and hogs, plowed the fields, anything he had to. There were 17 kids in his family. All of 'em had to help out, and he knew how to do everything."

Rooster and Cooter met in the Park Service. They call themselves "the Cracker Boys." They built Cow Camp together in 1978.

On one end, in front of the steer's pen, a fire smokes inside a ring of stones. Behind that, Dixie and Jill are munching oats from black buckets. A speckled heifer and three blue-cheeked turkeys watch from pens nearby. In the center of Cow Camp is the hootie, Seminole for "house." It's a two-story structure, about the size of a one-car garage. It has a dirt floor and a roof made from palm fronds.

"Took us two days to get this one up right. Hardest part was finding those 1,200 fronds," Rooster remembers. They wove the leaves like shingles, overlapping them so only the hearts were exposed. When rain drowned the fairgrounds one afternoon, Rooster and Cooter stayed dry.

"Cracker cowboys would build these sorts of shelters all along their trails, 10 to 16 miles apart," Rooster says, chewing an unlit cigar. "That was about how far you could drive 1,000 cows in a day."

Give these guys five minutes and they'll give you 300 years of history. They'll fill you in on everything from Spanish exploration to early economic forces, explain development and how it's driving out the state's heritage. They'll make you understand that before the Mouse, speckled cows ruled Florida.

A bull whip, a water bucket and a powder horn are symbols of Florida’s Cracker past. The term Cracker comes from the sound made by the cotton cords on the end of a cowboy’s whip.

"In the 1600s, the Spaniards brought over cows. After they left, those cows went wild, living among the Indians, roaming the woods for more than 200 years," Rooster says. "Then, when the Civil War was over, a lot of Southerners didn't have much to eat. Some fled to Florida. They started catching those cows. They'd drive the cows north, to Georgia or Alabama, sell 'em for $6 a head. In the first 11 years after the Civil War, they drove a quarter-million cows into Georgia."

After Crackers learned how to catch and herd the cows, they started heading south, too, moving cattle to Tampa and Port Charlotte. There, steamboats picked up the cows and took them to Cuba. During the last decade of the 19th century, more than a million cows were shipped from Florida to Cuba.

"It would take 15 men and 30 dogs to get 1,000 head of cattle down the trail," Rooster says. They moved the cows by smacking them with whips. The whips had wooden handles, were made of deer hide and stretched up to 16 feet. The cowboys tied thick cotton cords on the ends. When they snapped their whips, these cords made a loud snap.

Rooster sets down his cigar to demonstrate, scales the fence, clears the crowd. He winds up, then . . .

Crack! The whip whacks the ground. Crack! Crack! Rooster looks up and smiles under his hat.

"That's why they call us Cracker cowboys."

Cracker is not a bad word -- the name shouldn't have a negative connotation. "We're here to show folks all Crackers aren't dumb," Cooter says. "Just 'cause we dress funny and talk funny and live like folks used to doesn't mean we're stupid. Heck, we know a lot more about survival than most folks."

They hope the fair helps, both to entertain and educate. They want everyone to understand how hard life was not that long ago. They want kids to know what came before Gameboys and Pop-Tarts.

"Y'all know what a pokie biscuit is?" Rooster asks two dozen people gathered around the railings. No one knows. "Reeeal crusty on the outside. And it's got to be gooey in the center. You bite a chunk, poke out that middle with your finger, dribble a bunch of maple syrup in there. It won't spill out 'cause you got that crust, see? Mmmmm, me. We all used to love 'em when we were young 'uns."

A man in the front row is swatting a skeeter. Cooter slides off his fence post, walks up, tips his hat. "You know how to keep those varmints off you?"

"No," the man admits. "Sure would like to."

"Well, you go boil yourself a bunch of dog fennel now, mix in some of those wax myrtle leaves, get it all good and gooey. Then you add in some lard, stir it up again, real good. And when it cools, you spread it all over yourself. Skeeters can't stand it." Cooter stops. Leans in toward the man and winks.

"Just don't smear none on your lady friend," he says. "Don't want her slipping out of your hands!"

The little girl in the front row doesn't get it. She wants to know if she can ride the pretty horses. Her name is Haley Smith. She has brown hair and brown bangs and faint freckles across her nose. She's 7. She's never ridden a horse.

Rooster says she can't ride these either. "But I'll show you his saddle. This is his saddle. It hooks under here."

"Well, what's this?" the girl asks, pointing across the camp.

"That's a cow trough. Cows drink from there."

"And what's this?"

"A saddle bag. You can carry lye soap in there. And beans."

"Yuck! Beans! . . . What about that? What's that?"

"That's a tin cup. That's what we eat out of."

The girl studies the cup, thinking. Five minutes before, she had been begging her mom to take her out of this living museum, over to the big swing ride. Now, well, she has some things she wants to find out. She glances across the Cow Camp, studying the salted ham hanging from the shingles, the oxen yolk draped over the back fence, the spurs and the skillets and the bull skull nailed to the roof.

Tony Morrell, left, and Azell Nail relax in their travel trailer at the Florida State Fair. The men are familiar with less modern accommodations: They can build a Seminole house, or “hootie,” weaving palm fronds to make a water-proof roof.

"So this stuff is really old, right?"

"Yeah. It's really, really old," says one of Florida's last Cracker cowboys.

"And this is your stuff, right? You use it?"

"All the time."

"For real?"

"For real."

"Wow!" the girl says. "I didn't know you were still alive!"

Come on down

Rooster and Cooter will be at the Florida State Fair through Sunday. Their Cow Camp is inside Cracker Country, near Gate 2. Hours are 9 a.m. until 7 p.m. Admission to the fair is $8 for adults, $4 for children ages 6 to 11, free for children 5 and younger. Parking is free. Admission to Cracker Country is free with fair admission.

The fairgrounds are off Interstate 4, exit 6. For more information, log on to www.floridastatefair.com.

© St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.