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Rarest of beauties feels the strain

People hungry for a taste of Old Florida love Bayport Park. But how to strike a delicate balance between pleasing them and not ruining everything they come for?

BAYPORT - Rick and Mary-Lou Morin, who came to Bayport Park to watch the sun set Wednesday, sometimes launch their boat from the park.

On weekends, they said, that means fighting for a parking space and waiting in line for a boat ramp.

"I think the extra parking would be great," Morin said.

Jai Shanker, who like the Morins is from Spring Hill, sat with his friends at a neighboring picnic table and enjoyed the same view of the sunlight slanting through marsh grass and cabbage palms. Unlike the Morins, he doesn't want the surroundings to change.

"Keep it the same. It's called the Nature Coast. Why would you want to make it like New Jersey? We don't want to make this place the no-Nature Coast."

Bayport - where the county plans to expand the park, replace the two old boat ramps with four new ones and double the parking space for boat trailers - is just one of many battlegrounds between the forces of preservation and development. But here, both sides say, the stakes are especially high.

The county, which recently was forced to abandon plans for a park in the Weekiwachee Preserve, is desperately short of recreation facilities and public access to the Gulf of Mexico, says Pat Fagan, the county's director of parks and recreation.

"If you go out there on the weekends during fishing season, you aren't even going to be able to get to Bayport," Fagan said. "People park anywhere and everywhere."

Maybe so, residents say. But they also say it is foolish to build picnic tables and a playground on a spot that has remained mostly unchanged from the times it was inhabited by Seminole Indians, Confederate soldiers and Prohibition-era rum runners.

"You don't take one of the last pristine coastal areas in the county and use it by default," said Bayport resident J. Adrian Kilby.

The park at Bayport has a lot in common with the stalled plan to build the park in the Weekiwachee Preserve, including its source of money.

When the Southwest Florida Water Management District bought most of Bayport island and the land surrounding it from the Whitehurst family in 2000, the county had already set aside $1.4-million for the same purpose. Swiftmud said it would buy the land if the county would use its money to make improvements there and at the Weekiwachee Preserve, which the district also owns.

Like plans for the park in the preserve, Fagan's proposals to develop a park site at Bayport have yielded nothing but frustration.

"It's been a very tough process," he said.

Last year, the County Commission indefinitely postoned building the park in the preserve after Hernando Beach residents complained that the entrance off Shoal Line Boulevard would create a traffic hazard.

That caused Fagan to focus on drawing up plans for Bayport, the first of which he presented at a meeting of residents in March 2003.

The plans included 178 parking spaces near the boat ramp, new picnic areas, a playground and a 500-foot-long boardwalk that wrapped around Bayport's western tip. It covered about 11 acres of the 26-acre island.

The opposition was unanimous, Kilby said.

"Forty people stood up as one and basically said, "Are you insane?' " he said.

Fagan responded by cutting the number of spaces roughly in half. In February, he presented the revised plan to the county's Environmentally Sensitive Lands Committee, which is involved because the $1.4-million in county money was originally raised to preserve natural areas.

The reaction was only slightly less negative, said George Foster, a committee member who lives near Bayport.

"It was ridiculously overdeveloped. Too much asphalt. Too many trees cut down," Foster said. "They just don't need all that there."

Fagan, after meeting with Kilby and Fritz Musselmann, Swiftmud's land resources director, recently completed what Kilby calls "Plan C."

It calls 48 spaces for trailers and 37 more exclusively for cars. The length of the boardwalk has been reduced to 150 feet. The picnic pavilions and the playground have been placed to disturb as few trees as possible. For example, the second plan would have removed more than 100 trees for the additional trailer parking; the current plan calls for felling 59.

The plan needs the approval of the sensitive lands committee, the County Commission and Swiftmud, but Fagan expects resistance to be minimal this time, especially from Swiftmud.

"Fritz (Musselmann) said he's 100 percent behind it," Fagan said.

That is not quite true, said Musselmann, who has not seen the latest plan.

"We've said we're going to review it. But we want to have a better notion of how many trees need to be removed for that plan and how it would impact the view-scape that you now see on the property," he said.

Kilby, who saw a copy of the plan last week, said, "It's certainly a huge improvement over the original concept. It looks like we're headed in a better direction."

But he and Foster continue to think there must be a better place for picnic pavilions and playgrounds.

"If you want to build a park, put it out in a pasture," Foster said. Constructing such facilities at Bayport, he and Kilby said, risks destroying its remarkable resources.

Some of these, such as the canopy of tree branches over County Road 550, are obvious.

Visitors say they come to Bayport because it is mostly undeveloped, with only a handful of old cabins among the palms, bay trees and pines. They come for views, from the fishing pier, of the open gulf to the west and the estuary of the Mud and Weeki Wachee rivers to the south.

Partly because the rivers carved a deep channel, Bayport has a rich history that is mostly hidden.

American Indians, both Seminoles and earlier tribes, made their home here, said Kilby, a member of the Coogler family, which has owned land in Bayport since 1852. He knows the history because, as a child visiting Bayport from Gainesville, he picked up arrowheads left exposed by heavy rains.

The state Bureau of Archaeological Research, after surveying the land in 2001, identified evidence of prehistoric and historic settlements.

Further investigations would be needed, it stated, "prior to any ground-disturbing activities."

Fagan said his plans require little digging, and the parking areas will be a porous surface that will not cover any archaeological sites, which, in any case, he has taken pains to avoid.

The state, in a letter to Tampa Bay Engineering, the designer Fagan hired, mostly agreed, though it said it will not grant approval until it sees the final plans.

The first white residents of Bayport were among the first in the county. The Bayport Hotel was built on the island in 1842, the same year as passage of the Armed Occupation Act, which opened Central Florida to settlement.

Traffic at the port was especially vigorous during the Civil War, when large quantities of cotton produced in Central Florida were exported, said Virginia Jackson of the Hernando Historical Museum Association.

"Other Southern states were not producing goods because their fields had been destroyed, and Florida became a premier cotton-producing state," Jackson said.

The port was protected by three cannons that shot grapefruit-sized balls from what residents still call "the battery" - the western edge of Bayport, where Fagan plans to build the boardwalk. The cannons, however, failed to prevent the escape of Union soldiers who met their ship at Bayport after burning barns and killing livestock during the Brooksville Raid in July 1864.

Frances Goethe was the dominant figure in Bayport in the years after the Civil War, when Bayport was a popular resort - in the winter for Northerners and in the summer for families from Brooksville.

Goethe, who moved to Bayport in the 1870s, took over management of the hotel after the death of her husband, George, in 1909, said Glenna Goethe, 82, her granddaughter-in-law.

"She probably wasn't 5 feet tall, but she was independent," Glenna Goethe said.

"You didn't pull any wool over her eyes. ... You walked a straight line around Fanny."

She was the central figure in an obscure chapter of Hernando history when in 1897 she gave birth to stillborn quintuplets. And she was at least an observer during the notorious Prohibition years, when Bayport was a major destination for liquor imported from Cuba.

Richard Cofer, a Hernando High School history teacher and a descendent of Frances Goethe, said his grandfather once told him that rum rummers "stacked bottles of liquor as high as a small house" near the Bayport Cemetery.

It was shipped to Brooksville in peanut trucks and then sent north on freight cars with forged manifests identifying the cargo as Irish potatoes. Soon after a local trapper was suspected of telling federal agents of the smuggling, a mysterious Cuban man checked into the hotel, Cofer said.

"They brought in this Cuban assassin, and he killed (the trapper) and then left in a rum boat."

The hotel burned down in 1942, Glenna Goethe said, in a spectacular blaze that could be seen from downtown Brooksville.

That Bayport didn't change much in the aftermath may have been, as Kilby said, because the Whitehurst family scared off potential buyers by insisting that all of its 2,100 acres, including marshland, be purchased as a package.

Or maybe it was because the land "was never marketed that aggressively," said family member George Whitehurst of Brooksville.

Either way, the changes to Bayport have been gradual and modest, Kilby said, a pattern he hopes will continue with the park project.

In that way, he said, it is like the cabin, built in 1875, that Kilby inherited several years ago after the death of his uncle, Theo Coogler.

Kilby said he will never change some things, such as the planks of cypress and resin-rich heart pine that have helped it survive so long.

"The termites take a nibble and keel over and die because of the turpentine," Kilby said.

But he does plan to paint the cabin, and "I've already made certain concessions. Like, I have electricity now," he said.

"I believe there can be change and evolution without losing the real beauty of the place as it has always been."

Dan DeWitt can be reached at 352 754-6116 or dewitt@sptimes.com