Strange and Mysterious Waters:

The History of Wakulla County

Valarious Lafayette Roberts with team of oxen

Western Wakulla County

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