Finding Florida : the Guide to the Southernmost State, Revised
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Finding Florida The Guide to the Southernmost State, Revisited by Cathy Salustri A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Liberal Arts College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Major Professor: Gary Mormino, Ph.D. Thomas Hallock Ph.D. Chris Meindl Ph.D. Date of Approval: March 23, 2012 Keywords Driving, Tours, Floridana, Travel, History Copyright © 2012 Cathy Salustri Table of Content Forward...................................................................................................................... iii Abstract ......................................................................................................................iv Prologue .....................................................................................................................vi Tour 1: Georgia State Line (Waycross) to Key West ..................................................1 Tour 2: Georgia State Line (Valdosta) to Punta Gorda .............................................23 Tour 3: Fernandina to Cedar Key .............................................................................46 Tour 4: Georgia State Line (Valdosta) to Naples ......................................................60 Section 4A: Jennings to Williston .................................................................60 Section B: Williston to Tampa ......................................................................64 Section C: Tampa to Fort Myers, Old US 41 ................................................65 Tour 4D: Between Ruskin and Palmetto .......................................................84 Tour 5: Naples to Miami ...........................................................................................86 Tour 6: Georgia State Line (Thomasville) to St. Petersburg ...................................105 Tour 7: Jacksonville to the Alabama State Line (Mobile) .......................................119 Tour 8: Daytona Beach to Lakeland ........................................................................130 Tour 9: Indian River City to Floral City .................................................................133 Tour 10: Melbourne to Kissimmee.......................................................................... 136 Tour 11: Vero Beach to Bartow............................................................................... 140 Tour 12: Fort Pierce to Bradenton........................................................................... 150 Tour 13: Punta Rassa to West Palm Beach and around Lake Okeechobee .............156 i Tour 14: Georgia State Line (Thomasville) to Pensacola .......................................174 Tour 15: Haines City to Moore Haven ....................................................................194 Tour 16: Pensacola to the Alabama State Line (Brewton) ......................................206 Tour 17: Alabama State Line (Dothan) to Panama City .........................................208 Tour 18: Port St. Joe to Marianna ...........................................................................212 Tour 19: Watertown to Bunnell ...............................................................................221 Tour 20: Haines City to Clearwater ........................................................................228 Tour 21: Orlando to High Springs........................................................................... 234 Tour 22: Waldo to Plant City ..................................................................................244 Epilogue ..................................................................................................................251 Works Cited............................................................................................................. 258 Books ..........................................................................................................258 Government Publications............................................................................ 259 Journal Articles ...........................................................................................259 Magazines ...................................................................................................259 Newspapers .................................................................................................259 Web Sites..................................................................................................... 260 Endnotes.................................................................................................................. 271 ii Forward Florida, the southernmost State, is frequently referred to as the last American frontier. Four centuries of varying culture under five flags may be noted as one is guided, through the pages of this book, from quaint old St.Augustine to metropolitan Miami, or from the exclusiveness of ante bellum Tallahassee to the exclusiveness of modern Palm Beach. For the many Floridians who may wish to read a comprehensive story of their land, as well as the million or more visitors who come to us each year, the Florida Guide will be a source of pleasurable information. -John J. Tigert, President University of Florida, 19391 Every tourist knows the way to Florida: when you hit the East coast, turn south. […] Just where does Florida belong? -Dr. Gary Mormino, 20052 iii Abstract In the 1930s the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers Project hired unemployed writers to create driving tours of each state. Florida chose Zora Neale Hurston and Stetson Kennedy. They crisscrossed the state separately – Jim Crow would not allow black Zora to travel with white Stetson – carving out the routes immortalized in the Guide to the Southernmost State. Over seventy years later, I decided I wanted to go, too. I broke out my shiny, red Florida Gazetteer and tried to reconstruct twenty-two tours, studying towns and researching old route numbers. Often I could only recreate the Depression-era routes by jumping from city to city, sort of a geographic connect-the-dots. Roads are living things, and for one to assume that she can look for a road where someone else put it down almost 80 years ago, well, sir, you would be foolish to think that road would stay where you left it. Especially in Florida, a land kept eternally young through constant change. The roads, it seem, breathe and grow and twist and turn and pulse with Florida’s fervor in much the same way her people and land does. They are malleable. Florida doesn’t have much that won’t bend and stretch – and sometimes break. Just as often, though, it yields, bending until it simply can no longer, and then it stretches and bends back and we are the ones who must yield or break. iv In September I climbed into a camper van with my better half, Barry, and my other better half, Calypso. We spent the month recreating those original tours, guided by a dog- eared, broken-spined, 1950s-era version of the Guide, a now-tattered, Florida Gazetteer, and (on Barry’s part) endless patience. We logged almost 5,000 miles in on my quest for Florida. I hoped to see the state through Stetson and Zora’s eyes. I looked for what they saw. I searched for scraps of Florida abandoned along her backroads. Out of those miles grew these tours: the ultimate Florida road trip. These tours share much with the Guide, but they differ, too. I followed Stetson and Zora, yes, seeking their voices in the burble of every spring and searching for visions of them in every blazing-hot, pink and amber sunset, but I also recreated, one more time, Florida’s story – and mine. This tour is the best thing I have ever done. v Prologue My grandfather’s sun-honed face twisted and paled as we turned off I-10 and entered the final leg of our southwest journey, down US 301. As we passed bleached wood, cracker houses and dingy brown cedar sheds, his tanned forehead furrowed, drawing his coarse eyebrows tighter and tighter until the bushy lines above his dark eyes seemed a thin ridge of curly dark hair. Up on stilts they sat, no shutters or covering save grime and webs. Underneath and along side, rusted tri-colored pickup trucks with dented fenders colored to match the decay of the vehicles. Jon boats shared weed patches with the trucks, the only difference their marginally better maintenance and the occasional trailer elevating the vessels. Washing machines, derelict farm equipment, and a mise-en-scene of auto parts awaited us anew as we passed each home. My grandfather sucked in air, his silence crowding our 1976 maroon Buick Regal. “This,” I can only imagine him thinking, “is worse than what I left in Italy. This is what I have worked my whole life to give my son? A slum in the South?” “This” referred to Florida, the interior parts of the state detailed along US 301, the parts of the Sunshine State not photographed by the Florida Tourism Board. “They” referred to my father (his son), my mother, and me, a seven-year-old whose greatest field trip in life, prior to the three-day journey to Florida from New York, was a dead heat vi between the Bronx Zoo (where a goat ate my coat) and seeing Peter Pan on Broadway (my mom and I rode the train into the city and I ate a pretzel from a street vendor). In a chain of events too complex for a young brain to comprehend, my parents decided to leave Westchester County, New York and move to Pinellas County, Florida. While they knew the drive’s end result – a small two bedroom just miles from then- pristine Clearwater Beach – my grandfather, who had come along to