Nature lovers can wander trails and glide on crystal streams as they wonder at what might have been lost if the Cross Florida Barge Canal had been built.
By DIANE ROBERTS
Published January 11, 2004
[Photo: Carlton Ward]
A wooden dock extends into the wide waters of the St. Johns River in Palatka. If the canal had been completed, large ships — rather than sailboats — might be passing in the distance. Go to photo gallery
There you are, heading up U.S. 19, past the nonstop strip mall that is the Gulf Coast from Sarasota to Weeki Wachee, north toward what the tourism promoters call the "Real Florida" of crystalline springs, creeks canopied with trees so thick you can barely see the sky, anhingas and gators, hamlets with names like Lebanon, Otter Creek and Shamrock. There you are, and then there it is, a broad highway of steel blue water, straight as a plank, perpendicular to the bridge you're crossing in a way no real river ever can be.
The Cross Florida Barge Canal was the dream of generations of venal politicos and businessmen, yet another scar on the state courtesy of the dredge-and-drain-happy U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, proof that fights over water in Florida are nothing new. It was one of the biggest boondoggles in the history of a boondoggling state. The canal was never finished. But its path, both real and virtual, reaches across some of Florida's most eccentric, most beautiful and, for now, blessedly empty places.
In the 1570s, Governor Pedro Menendez de Aviles thought a canal from the Gulf to the Atlantic would help Spain conquer this continent. In 1826, about five minutes after Florida had become American, Congress authorized a survey for a canal across the territory. Surveys and appropriations went on for the next hundred-odd years.
In September 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt sat in New York and pushed a telegraph key, setting off a charge of dynamite near Ocala. Ground officially was broken for the canal. Work stopped almost immediately - no money.
Then in the 1960s, ground was broken again. Work started again. State officials claimed Florida's canal would be bigger than the one in Panama or the one at Suez. It would be Florida's "highway of gold."
Yankeetown lies at the western end of the canal. There's no sign of a highway of gold there, or even a yellow brick road.
The original family of inhabitants came from Indiana in the early 1920s and tried to name their settlement Knotts, after themselves. The local mail carrier, still smarting over the Civil War, took a dim view and always referred to the place as "Yankeetown." The local sense of humor is such that a subdivision nearby is known as "Crackertown."
Elvis yes, Satan no
To get there you hang a left in Inglis (if Tampa is behind you) on State Road 40 or, as the sign says, Follow That Dream Parkway. In 1961, Elvis Presley spent two months in the area making the movie Follow That Dream. He played a mildly rebellious lip-curling dude who becomes "sheriff of the beach."
Inglis became famous again a couple of years ago when the mayor banned Satan from the city limits. The world press descended, wanting to know exactly how the prince of darkness had manifested himself in Levy County. And where would he hang out?
If you drive around a spell you notice that there seem to be more churches than houses and not a lot in the way of honky-tonks. You have to go to Bronson for that sort of thing.
If you follow the Follow That Dream Parkway, west and farther west, the silence and the trees, oak and cypress, get thicker. Then there's a sign that quite unnecessarily declares "Dead End." Before you is the Gulf of Mexico, gray in an autumn mist.
It's not that the place has been untouched by human hands: There's a boat ramp and one of those bleak little county parks with picnic tables. But stand on the shore (there is no beach) and you might have dropped out of time altogether. All you can see is silvery water and these tiny, mysterious islands, some the size of a living room rug, and pencil-thin palm trees intertwined at their bushy heads. Still farther out more islands, a bit bigger, appear in the fog, moving in and out of your vision like green spirits.
Back inland, the Levy County stretch of the Cross Florida Barge Canal thrusts like a spear into the side of the undulating Withlacoochee, where it disguises itself as a river for a while, then into the Ocklawaha.
In 1970, a canal booster, sneering at the tree-huggers who wanted to stop construction, declared, "The Ocklawaha in its present state is useless. Take a boat into all those snags and stumps and you're taking your life in your hands."
Tourists a 100 years earlier, though, didn't mind the dangerous curves. The Ocklawaha, with its baroque twists and moss-garlanded cypresses and palms, was one of the state's top draws.
The tourists would travel by steamboat from Jacksonville and St. Augustine, some to marvel at what one poetically inclined visitor called "the sweetest water-lane in the world," some to shoot alligators, herons, egrets, anything they could hit.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, who had bought a house up on the St. Johns, was an early champion of the Ocklawaha ecosystem, inveighing in print against killing birds and the "war of extermination waged on our forests."
"Florida's Big Ditch"
Eventually, the environmentalists beat the canal.
In 1971, President Richard Nixon halted construction. Again.
But the canal was harder to kill than Count Dracula in a double feature. It kept coming back again until finally, in 1990, the stake went through the heart. "Florida's Big Ditch," as an investigative series in this newspaper once derisively called it, died. In 1998 state officials declared the old canal route to be a recreational trail for hiking and biking, and named it for the woman who led the fight against digging the ditch. It became the Marjorie Harris Carr Cross Florida Greenway.
Walking a trail along the actual or almost canal, among river birch trees, magnolias and oaks, watching a zebra butterfly dance in front of you or catching a glimpse of a white-tailed deer or a heron, you can see why "Old Florida" is worth protecting from "New Florida."
But there are other delights a little off the path and a little off-center, too.
In 1878, an enterprising fellow called Hullam Jones stuck a glass viewing box on the bottom of a dugout canoe. Now the Ocklawaha tourists take a little detour down the Silver River and glide over Silver Springs, marveling at the clear waters.
And starting in the 1920s, Silver Springs added a guy who did a show milking rattlesnakes of their venom, plus a bunch of monkeys, a deer ranch (which inexplicably included a feature called "Santa's South Pole") and a trolley.
Most of these have passed into the great Roadside Attraction in the Sky, but you can still ride a glass-bottomed boat or take the "Jungle Cruise" at Silver Springs. Guides will tell you that Johnny Weissmuller made six Tarzan movies here.
And if that's not enough retro for you, there's Ravine Gardens in Palatka, a park built in the late 1930s as part of the Work Projects Administration. The Gardens are an almost Italianate 59 acres' worth of palm avenues, picturesque suspension bridges and huge azaleas that explode in Barbie pinks and purples every spring. There's even an obelisk.
Palatka itself is an old St. Johns river town, an outpost burned in 1836 during the Second Seminole War and rebuilt as both fort and port.
For a place with a population of just over 10,000, Palatka has a lot of titles. It's the "Gem City of the St. Johns," the "Bass Capital of the World" (the Rodman Dam is apparently a grade-A place to catch a mess of largemouth) and the "Official Mural City of North East Florida."
This last title refers to the fact that in downtown Palatka, you can feast your eyes on large wall paintings of a cattle drive to Paynes Prairie, the old Putnam County Courthouse, azaleas and the Rev. Billy Graham preaching up a storm.
Though the Cross Florida Barge Canal officially ran all the way up the St. Johns until it reached the Atlantic, Palatka was, for all intents and purposes, its eastern extremity.
At the Marjorie Harris Carr Visitor Center just off State Road 19, you can read about the fraught history of the canal and go out and look at the canal itself, here at its most cementy and industrial-looking.
Better to light out back west on one of the two-lane blacktops that goes through the woods and wetlands and lakes toward the Ocala National Forest and its arboreal quiet. If the barge canal had been allowed to be what its backers had wanted, who knows whether there would still be a tree for a woodpecker to peck around here. As it is, this part of the state seems as far as you can get from the light pollution and overbuilding and mallification of all three coasts.
At the junction of county roads 310 and 315 in Putnam County, where 6-foot-tall black-eyed susans tangle with kudzu and Queen Anne's lace, there are two signs nailed to fat pines that tell you just how far you are - spiritually, at least - from an interstate highway:
The first exhorts PLEASE read Your Bible and suggests Romans, Chapter 1 (in which Paul says in no uncertain terms that the wicked and the unrighteous are in for a very bad time). The second sign entices: Nichols Taxidermy. We Mount Your Deer. Fish. Elk. Bobcat.
Welcome to the hidden heart of Florida.
- Diane Roberts, a former Times editorial writer and a professor at the University of Alabama, traces her family's Florida roots to the 1830s.
If you go
FOR MORE INFORMATION: Contact the following agencies and companies:
Withlacoochee Gulf Area Chamber of Commerce, 167 Highway 40, Inglis 34449; (352) 447-3383.
Silver River Museum and Environmental Education Center, Silver River State Park, 1445 NE 58th Ave., Ocala; (352) 236-5401.
Silver Springs, State Road 40, (352) 236-2121. Open daily 10 a.m.-5 p.m. A one-day pass is $32.99 with reductions for children and senior citizens.
Ocklawaha Visitors Center, 3199 NE Highway 315, Silver Springs; (352) 236-0288.
Ravine Gardens State Park, 1600 Twigg St., Palatka, 386 329-3721. On the Web, go to www.floridastateparks.org and click on "Find a Florida State Park." Open daily 8 a.m. to sundown. Admission is $3.25 per vehicle. Palatka Visitors Information, Putnam County Chamber of Commerce, 1100 Reid St., Palatka, (386) 328-1503.
Marjorie Harris Carr Visitors Center, 200 Buckman Lock Road, Palatka, (386) 312-2273, or see floridagreenwaysandtrails.com for information on hiking trails, horseback riding and cycling.
FOR CANOE RENTALS: Nature Coast Canoe and Kayak Expedition, 12685 Highway 24, Cedar Key, (352) 543-6463.
