U.S. 90 meanders through Panhandle towns where Old Florida still lives.

[Photo: Carlton Ward]

Yes, Florida does have a waterfall — of sorts — in the Falling Waters State Recreation Area, a few miles southeast of Chipley.

The 85 miles of rivers, hills and little towns on Highway 90 between the pecan grove we lived in and the broad fields where my Grandfather Gilbert's Herefords grazed were as familiar as books of the Bible: Quincy, Gretna, Oak Grove, Chattahoochee, the Apalachicola, Sneads, Grand Ridge, the Chipola, Marianna, Cottondale.

For most travelers, these names are now just exit signs on I-10, something to call the cluster of BP stations, Motel 6s and McDonald'ses that leech onto the side of the interstate. But for me, this road, these places, are a secret path into the past: the other Florida, the old Florida.

In Tallahassee, Highway 90 is called Tennessee Street, an unlovely thoroughfare of frat-boy bars, Chinese restaurants and strip malls giving way westward to car dealerships and mobile home lots. But when the last of those fall away, and you cross the Ochlockonee River into Gadsden County, it's like passing into a place where the clocks have stopped and even the light is burnished with ancient calm.

Of course, West Florida is part of the modern world -- people have cell phones and vinyl siding and Prozac and laptops. And with the influx of Mexican fruit pickers, West Florida also has good arroz con pollo and Spanish-language video stores.

It cherishes eccentricity, too: Just before the bridge over the Little River, in the front yard of a 1950s-looking ranch house, sits a sleigh hitched to a dinosaur. A large, holly green, Sinclair brontosaurus, to be exact.

History is nearer the surface here than in most of our paved-over state, visible in 200-year-old oaks, churchyards full of the Confederate dead, still other churchyards in hidden corners where slaves from the cotton plantations were buried. It is in the foundations of a Spanish mission high above the Apalachicola, and it is in antebellum mansions that, like princesses fallen on hard times, retain their dignity despite peeling paint and sagging porches.

Rich among the poor

Driving west on a sharp January morning, the sky opalescent blue, the mix of red sweet gums and green pines still looking like Christmas, the road is nearly empty until I get to the outskirts of Quincy.

Gadsden is one of the poorest counties in Florida, but Quincy is one of the richest towns, at least for a select group of white folks. Before the Civil War, the money came from cotton; then it was shade tobacco.

After that came Coca-Cola.

In the 1920s, a local banker urged his friends to buy stock in this strange brown drink (rumored to contain actual cocaine). And, since the stock only cost two cents a share, these folks did buy. An original investment of $1,000 was worth $2.5-million by 1994.

I walk around the pretty courthouse square, its shops and offices tidy and thriving. But Quincy's real treasures lie in the streets just behind. There you can find a banquet of houses: columned, cupolaed and verandahed.

Some are right out of Old South central casting, with gold-leafed Corinthian capitals and oak trees festooned with Spanish moss. Others look like the Addams Family pile after a Martha Stewart makeover, gothic turrets gleaming, gables tastefully re-roofed.

The White House -- not called that out of hubris but named after a prominent local family -- is an austerely beautiful example of the Greek Revival style, built in the 1840s and enlarged in the 1850s. It is now the manse of the Centenary Methodist Church and has stained glass windows by Louis Comfort Tiffany.

In Gretna, a few miles and a few million dollars away, there are no Taras. The most prosperous-looking building is the Bethel Missionary Baptist Church.

Venture a little way off Highway 90 and you'll see tarpaper shacks, rusted-out trucks and skinny chickens pecking futilely in the dirt. The New South, and all that Coca-Cola money, didn't make it this far down the road.

But even the saddest-looking places have dainty narcissus and ruffled pink camellias blooming in their yards.

Gentle hills, green as England in summer, rise and fall like waves all the way to Chipley and beyond.

[Photo: Carlton Ward]

North of Sneads and Highway 90, the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers and Spring Creek converge in a lovely wilderness now called the Three Rivers State Recreation Area.

At Chattahoochee, cottages built in the 1930s, their backyard gardens full of turnips and collard greens, cling to a high bluff. The town occupies a spectacular site at the confluence of the Flint and Chattahoochee Rivers, near where the Spanish established a mission in the late 17th century.

Still, it has always seemed a melancholy place. Maybe because the chief employers are a prison (Florida's most reliable industry) and the state mental hospital -- which looks eerily like a fine old resort hotel amid its oaks and palms and greenhouses.

When I threw a temper tantrum as a small child, my Sunday School teacher used to threaten me with a stay in one or the other of these institutions.

But no matter the depressive air of Chattahoochee (and despite the disappearance of the wonderful Chatta-Burger, where the beef tasted of sweet woodsmoke), the river is still magical.

Blue water and red hills

My grandfather used to get me up at 3 a.m. to go fishing on some of the hidden creeks and pools on the Florida side of the Jim Woodruff Dam. We'd put in the long, low boat he'd built, with its white hull and polished-cypress bait boxes, and spend the morning holding cane poles and eating ham sandwiches and slices of pound cake wrapped in wax paper.

As we floated, I'd try to pick the purple-pink lilies carpeting water that was as blue as lapis lazuli. Sometimes a hawk flew overhead. The quiet was thick as honey.

Jackson County's soil ranges from pale carnelian to deepest garnet. From Madison westward, this part of Florida is known as the Red Hills, after the fecund land that made the area the political and economic center of Florida until the end of the Civil War.

There were great plantations north and south of Highway 90, worked by thousands of slaves and owned by a few hundred gentry who became the state's early governors, judges and legislators.

A few even became intellectuals. Hardy Croom, whose family had estates in Gadsden County and Tallahassee, translated Voltaire and "discovered" the Torreya taxifolia, a rare tree that supposedly grew in the Garden of Eden.

The writer Caroline Lee Hentz, whose career was mostly dedicated to refuting the picture of slavery presented in Uncle Tom's Cabin, based her 1852 novel Marcus Warland on the Bellamy family of Jackson County. The remains of their Chipola River plantation lie off the Caverns Highway, near the famous limestone caves.

The plantations are mostly gone now, the big houses burned or rotted, returned to the earth that sustained them.

Peanuts and watermelon vines will cover a lot of land come summer. But cotton is back, too, covering hundred-acre fields, blowing across the highway to catch on the grass, making it look like there's been a frost.

Marianna bears witness to the wealth cotton brought to West Florida. Established in 1823, it rivals Quincy in grand old mansions, some right on Highway 90, some a few canopied streets back.

[Photo: Carlton Ward]

The ancient Russ House, left for years gray as a dead tree, has been restored to be Marianna’s Chamber of Commerce.

The huge, bow-fronted Russ House was for years a paintless wreck, gray as a dead tree. Every time we drove past on the way to the farm, we feared it would have been torn down to make way for a Taco Bell.

Somehow, the old house lived through the brutalist 1960s and 1970s and has been almost unnervingly restored as the Chamber of Commerce, with bright white paint and perfect landscaping.

Death, war, death again

Russ is one of the names (along with Dekle, Roulhac and Milton) carved over and over again on the marble angels, lambs and crosses of St. Luke's churchyard.

A historical marker, facing 90, boasts that the cemetery contains "the wife of John Gorrie, inventor of artificial ice," as well as "victims of the federal raid on Marianna in the War Between the States."

The nine Confederate soldiers who died at the Battle of Marianna could have been buried where they fell: The clash happened right here, as the plaque declares, "at high noon on September 27, 1864." It wasn't exactly a fair fight: There were a reported 900 Union troops under Brig. Gen. Alexander Asboth and only 95 Johnny Rebs, mostly old men and boys.

St Luke's Episcopalian Church was burned to the ground; its Bible was saved when some brave soul ran through the flames and grabbed it.

Marianna's tragic experience in the war was compounded when, unable to bear the destruction of the Confederacy, Gov. John Milton rode home to his Marianna plantation and killed himself with a shotgun. It was April 1, 1865: eight days before Appomattox.

There's something Faulknerian about Marianna that lends itself to drama. Later, one of the Russ family climbed up to the fine cupola crowning his house and shot himself to death, too.

Back on 90, I go slow through Cottondale, a village bisected by U.S. 231, which is the quickest way to get to Panama City and the "Redneck Riviera." Stands selling Indian River oranges, cheap T-shirts and, for some reason, bonsai trees crowd the road.

West of Cottondale, the country gets even emptier and wilder. I encounter a few dead armadillos, shell up, alongside the road. In a red clay field, a hand-stencilled sign advertises a "Christian Edification Conference.'

In West Florida terms, Chipley is not that old. Once a settlement known as Orange, it got going in the 1880s when William Chipley brought the Pensacola and Atlantic Railroad through. The county seat moved from Vernon (where a hundred years later they're still mad about it) to the new town.

Chipley's partner, Fred de Funiak, also got a county seat named for him: DeFuniak Springs, farther west across the Choctawhatchee River in Walton County.

Memories survive

Chipley is not an architectural jewel like Quincy. Where other little towns would have a central square, Chipley has tracks. But there are some fine 19th century houses, a few rather tattered, some grandly restored.

And there's a real, old-fashioned Piggly Wiggly downtown, its windows plastered with screaming notices of pork sausage and RC on special. And there are lots of antique shops in the old storefronts.

Chipley's weaker aesthetics don't matter to me: The place is part of me.

Sometimes the Chipley I see clearly -- my grandfather's peach orchards, the little paint-peeling store that had a loose screen door and an ancient, red chest freezer that held Eskimo Pies -- is gone.

But even more is nearly unchanged.

The Presbyterian Church, a wonderfully dour Victorian confection of dark auburn brick where my parents were married and where I was christened, still glowers from its anchorage in the "historic" neighborhood.

The house on Sixth Street that my great-grandfather built so his children could come off the farm and go to school is still there.

My Aunt Rilla, who had been a flapper with a taste for expensive French hats, settled down and opened a flower shop in the house. It is still a florist's, owned by someone I don't know, who has put out a sign saying "Since 1946."

I drive past the house my mother was born in, pleased to see that though the front yard is not as immaculate as it was in Grandmama's day -- planted in spikey firs, bottlebrush trees, holly and pyracantha -- the bamboo hedge by the road is as tall and unruly as ever.

The house, a sort of overgrown bungalow, had leather window seats and graceful French doors with cut-glass knobs I used to think were diamonds.

The real home of the Gilberts is not even in Chipley, but a few miles off Highway 90 in a much older place. There, in the bud-green hills that looked to many 19th century settlers like the border country of Scotland, the first Gilberts established a mill, then a farm. This was 30 years before the Civil War.

[Photo: Carlton Ward] In the morning mist, horses roam in a pasture near tiny Gilberts Mill.

The little community is still on the map as Gilbert's Mill. My kin rest under broad live oaks in a burying ground not far from the original mill stream.

In this Florida, still empty and silent, punctuated by cypress ponds and poplar trees, the Florida of concrete and noise, malls and "progress," falls away as if only a dream.

Here, the old roads tell their own story.

If you go

Click map for larger version. [Times art]

STAYING THERE: The Allison House Inn, 215 N Madison, Quincy, FL 32351; call (850) 875- 2511. This is a bed and breakfast in an antebellum house built by an early Florida governor. Rates start at $60.

The McFarlin House, 305 E King St., Quincy, FL 32351; (850) 875-2526. A Victorian B&B with big porches and stained glass. $75 and up.

The Hinson House Bed and Breakfast, 4338 Lafayette, Marianna, FL 32446; (850) 526-1500. Inn in Marianna's historic district, always decorated for Christmas. $55.95 and up.

EATING THERE: Take a cane pole, buy some crickets and shiners and catch your own food. Otherwise, try the Red Canyon Grill in Marianna, 3297 Caverns Road, (850) 482-4256. This is a Southwestern bistro, open Tuesday-Saturday for dinner.

For traditionalists, there's Tony's at 4133 Lafayette St. (US 90) in Marianna; (850) 482-2232. It's been around since before I was a young 'un, serving Southernized Italian food.

For great big hunks of beef, there's the Chuck Wagon House on Highway 77 S in Chipley, (850) 638-8363. Serving lunch and dinner.

LOOKING AROUND: Quincy and Marianna have self-guided tours around their historic districts. The Gadsden Arts Center, on the Courthouse Square in Quincy, has exhibits of contemporary, often local, art. (850) 875-4866. Admission, $1.

Three Rivers State Park in Sneads is just one of the spectacular parks throughout West Florida. (850) 482-9006. Admission $2 per vehicle.

Even better is the Florida Caverns State Park on State Road 166 just north of Marianna. (850) 482-9598. Admission to park, $3.25 per vehicle; cave tours $5 for adults and $2.50 for children.

The Russ House in Marianna can also be visited; call the Chamber of Commerce at (850) 482-8061.

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