Strange and Mysterious Waters:
The History of Wakulla County
 |
Valarious Lafayette Roberts with team of oxen
|
After the end of the Second
Seminole War, in 1842, Wakulla experienced an influx of new settlers,
especially in the western portion of present-day Wakulla County. Although there
were already a few scattered home sites in the area, the 1840’s saw the
establishment of several new towns along the Sopchoppy and Ochlocknee Rivers, such
as Smith Creek, Sanborn, and Curtis Mills on the Ochlocknee, West Sopchoppy and
Greenough on the western side of the Sopchoppy River, and Ashmore on the
eastern side of the Sopchoppy River.
When Florida changed hands from Spain to the United States, many
families, primarily from South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia,
moved to present-day Wakulla County, settling along rivers, streams, and
coastal areas. In the early days of American settlement in what would become
Wakulla County, there were barely any roads. Most were old Indians paths that
were nearly impassible with wagons. They were winding and twisting, covering
many more miles than a person actually needed to travel to get where they were
going. This was because the road builders who cut the trail only would cut
smaller trees, so the road winded around large ones. There were no bridges, so the roads
had to curve around wetlands, and people had to cross rivers and streams at their
shallowest places. A person would have to have a high wheeled cart to use the
roads, because the road cutters often did not cut the trees low enough, and
wagons would hit them, sending the occupants flying forward onto the ground.
The roads were usually only wide enough to accommodate a wagon going one way,
so when two wagons were coming towards each other, one of the had to go up into
the woods to let the other pass, which could be difficult depending on where
they were. During long times of heavy rain, many of the roads were made
impassible. The bad road situation lasted for a long time, as Freeman Ashmore
reminisced, “I can recall, when I was growing up on Dad’s turpentine still at
Smith Creek, that there were times when we could not travel to Sopchoppy,
Tallahassee, Quincy, or any other place for two or three months at a time.”
Because of the transportation
situation overland, most people settled near rivers and streams. One such river
was the Sopchoppy River. In a local Native American language, the word sokhe meant convulsing, or twisting, and the word chapke meant long, so from the native Sokhe Chapke, we get the English pronunciation of “Sopchoppy.” The
land along the Sopchoppy River, as well as most of the land in Wakulla, was
part of the Forbes Purchase and was owned by the Apalachicola Land Company. The
land was cheap, and was sold at auction in both Apalachicola and Tallahassee. Many
of the men who began to settle the area were farmers. As well as their
families, these men brought with them their wagons, tools, livestock, and some
of the wealthier settlers owned slaves. When these Wakulla County pioneers
arrived in the present-day Sopchoppy area, they found the land basically
untouched by human hands. They planned on planting cotton and tobacco, as well
as other crops, and pitched tents up to live in while they cleared their newly
acquired land and built their houses out of trees they felled. It was not an
easy life. Homes were made of logs and had no screens in the windows or doors.
People kept mosquitoes out of their houses by using smoke from outside
campfires. The kitchen was separate from the main house, usually behind it, in
those days, so as to prevent the entire home from burning in case a fire
occurred while cooking. These were the days before fencing, and people’s
cattle, goats, hogs, and chickens roamed freely.
One family that settled on the
Sopchoppy River in the early 1840’s was the Adams’. John Wesley Adams, who was
a medical doctor, born in April of 1815, and his wife, Caroline Powell Adams,
settled on property located along the shores of the Sopchoppy River, located
one mile west of old Ashmore Station, which they called “Sopchoppy Place.” Sopchoppy’s
first post office opened in 1847 located at Sopchoppy Place, and Caroline Adams
served as its postmistress. The Adams’s, being devout Methodists, built a
church at Sopchoppy Place as well, with John Wesley Adams serving as its
pastor, and during the 1847 Annual Conference of the Methodist Church, Dr.
Adams was appointed the pastor for the Wakulla County area, in which he
conducted services from Sopchoppy to Newport, ministering to all. John Wesley Adams
was also a farmer who owned a large number of slaves. It is said that he
constructed his own cotton gin, and processed his and his neighbor’s crops.
John Wesley Adams also owned a schooner named the John Wesley, which was used to transport the cotton to the port at St. Marks.
Greenough was one of the earliest settlements
to spring up along the Sopchoppy River, and was a busy town in the 1840s. It
was about three miles above present-day Sopchoppy, but on the western shore of
the Sopchoppy River. Freeman Ashmore remembered “it was a beautiful spot along the river where it flowed
through high bluffs which were lined with huge, towering trees on both sides.” Greenough consisted of a group of farms, and the epicenter was
a gristmill, which the local farmers would gather around to grind their corn
talk to one another. Also because long distance travel was difficult overland, many
small communities sprang up in relative close distance to one another.
Greenough was kind of special because all the roads in the area passed through
the small town. One road traveled westward from Greenough to West Sopchoppy and
on to Curtis Mills. Another road traveled north from Greenough to Sanborn, and
then Smith Creek. Traveling east across the Sopchoppy River, another road took
people to Ashmore, and then curved south towards the present-day Sopchoppy, which
before 1894, was just a few scattered homes. Before the train track was built,
in order to gain access to large quantities of goods needed to live, people had
to travel by water to the St. Marks River, then upriver to Newport to
visit Daniel Ladd’s general store. People could also use a very long, narrow,
and winding road to Newport from the Sopchoppy River, but the trip took days to
complete, much like a trip to Tallahassee. People in the western portion of
Wakulla also traveled by water to Apalachicola for supplies needed.
Along the Ochlocknee River, the community
of Smith Creek was established. Land along the Ochlocknee River was known as
“the Promised land.” Some of the earliest families to settle in what would
become Smith Creek were the Smiths, the Grants, the Lawhons, the Hodges, and
the Kerseys. Some of these families eventually moved to Greenough and West
Sopchoppy, where the land was more suitable for growing tobacco and cotton.
Edwin Bunyan Smith was one of the first people, along with his brother, to
settle what would be known as Smith Creek. He built his home site near a
beautiful creek, and eventually his place became known as “the Smith place near
the creek.” Eventually the creek was known as Smith Creek. In
the late 1840s through the 1850s, more families arrived, such as the Langstons,
the Bosticks, and the Stricklands. The Mt. Elon church was built in 1854, with
George Washington Bostick serving as its first preacher. By the time the Civil
War erupted in 1861, the little community was growing and thriving. After the
war ended in 1865, the town was one of Wakulla County’s most important
community. The need for a formal name for the community came up when the
citizens requested a post office. They chose to call the community Smith Creek
and in 1872, the post office was open for business, with Jonathan “Jack”
Langston as its first postmaster. After the war, Smith Creek kept growing,
hosting a post office, two churches, two grist mills, a turpentine still,
several bee keepers, logging businesses, several sawmills, sizeable farms, with
around eighty-five families.
On the lower Ochlocknee River,
there lived a man named Curtis Roberts who, together with Nels Revell, owned an
important sawmill located about six miles from the mouth of the river. Curtis
Roberts was the partner who actually ran the mill, so the community became
known as Mr. Curtis’s Mill, then eventually shortened to Curtis Mills.
[Ashmore, p.586] In the 1880s, Curtis Mills was a prosperous lumber and sawmill
town. Most people lived in log shanties scattered along a long and winding road
between the Sopchoppy and Ochlocknee Rivers. There was a long cabin that served
the community as both a schoolhouse for the children and a church, which some
people had to walk miles to get to. There was also a boarding house at Curtis
Mills called “the Corner.” Mostly people doing business with the sawmill stayed
there, and it was known to be a rough place, where fights and shootings
occurred often.
Besides the towns located along the
Sopchoppy and the Ochlocknee Rivers, there was a community nearer the center of
Wakulla, close to Shell Point (present-day Crawfordville), known as Lost Creek.
Like much of the communities in Wakulla, Lost Creek was settled by farmers from
Georgia, Alabama, the Carolinas, as well as some from Europe. Some of these
families were; the Taffs, the Vauses, the Harveys, the Nazworths, the
Gwaltneys, the Harrels, the Tuckers, the Lawsons, the Councils, the Basses, the
Trices, the Pelts, the Griggs, the Grays, the Johnsons, the Radfords, the
Stricklands, the Vickers, the Greiners, and the Edwards. Lost Creek was a quiet
and peaceful tiny community.
 |
| Sopchoppy. c1909 |
Where present-day Sopchoppy sits
today, in 1885 there was not much there but a few houses and a small store ran
by a black man named Brice Allen. The original town of West Sopchoppy was on
the western side of the Sopchoppy River near where the West Sopchoppy Cemetery
is today. The Sopchoppy that we know and love today did not really begin until
the Georgia, Florida, & Alabama Railroad was constructed on the eastern
side of the Sopchoppy River. Born in 1855 along the Ochlocknee River at Smith
Creek, John Calhoun Hodge worked for the railroad company who was planning on
constructing a line from Carrabelle to Georgia. Hodge is known today as the
founder of Sopchoppy because he envisioned people taking advantage of the train
tracks by establishing several communities near them. Hodge wanted to take
advantage himself, so, being the only surveyor in the area, he surveyed and
purchased the land of what would become the new Sopchoppy. He laid out the new
town and even named the streets. He moved his family across the river from
Greenough, and settled in a house he built on Rose Street, the first one built
in present-day Sopchoppy. [Majesty Becton Strickland – Heritage of Wakulla
County, p. 155] People from West Sopchoppy, and other places west of the
Sopchoppy River, followed Hodge and settled in the new Sopchoppy as well to
take full advantage of the railroad.
The town grew, and Andrew Roberts
from Greenough, moved his large general store from there to the new Sopchoppy,
as others built houses there as well. Hodge donated land to the Methodist and
Baptist church for them to build on. Farmers, and others, began to buy lots
near the railroad, and merchants built businesses in the main city block around
the newly constructed train depot. None of the houses had indoor bathrooms, so
the community built public facilities. Farming began to give way to logging and
turpentine operations, and more people moved to the east side of the river to
take advantage of the railroad as well. At Curtis Mills, a spur was built to
connect to the railroad, and loggers began to float their logs down the
Ochlocknee River to be cut at Curtis Mills, then loaded onto the train and
shipped out. The new railroad tracks also provided the children a better
walking route to school. The tracks also created problems for some families who
lived close to them, because they often worried about their children’s safety
when the train came through. Also, vagrants walking the railroad’s right-of
–way posed a threat to their safety as well.
 |
| John Calhoun Hodge |
The railroad passed through
Sopchoppy, where there was a depot. Another depot was built at the quite
community of Lost Creek. After the railroad and depot was constructed there,
the community became known as Arran. We are not completely sure why Arran was
chosen as the name, but there are a few theories. The most accepted theory is
that one of the railroad officials who selected Lost Creek as the site for a
depot, named the place Arran after his daughter, Arrana. Arrana Harvey was the
first child born in the newly named Arran, and was named after the community.
The coming of the railroad turned the community from the quite Lost Creek to
the busy and prosperous Arran. In addition to farming, the town became home to
new industries, including logging, turpentine operations, making crossties, and
trapping animals. Some of these operations were already in business, but the
train increased their opportunities, by opening up more markets. The timber and
logging industry thrived in Arran, because a spur-line of the railroad was
constructed from there, heading west over the Sopchoppy River, down pass Big
Blackjack and Little Blackjack, then, following present-day Forest Road 13,
down the west side of Bradwell Bay. Trees were cut there, and the timber was
shipped by rail back to Arran, and from there to Carrabelle.
On July 31, 1899, the sky turned
dark, and the wind picked up as rain began to fall. It was supper time, and
many families were most likely sitting down to eat. After supper people began
to lay down for the night to get some sleep. As night fell, and as July 31
became August 1, the wind and rain picked up tremendously as debris began to
fly through the air. The hurricane lasted for hours, and when the sun rose in the
morning, people could see the devastation the storm had caused. Many families,
such as the Langstons in Sopchoppy, had their homes destroyed. Roofs were torn
off houses, outhouses and sheds were destroyed. One man’s house was lifted from
its foundation and put down, mostly intact, about thirty yards away.
Source used:
Looking Back - By Freeman Ashmore
Heritage of Wakulla County
Looking back
