FIND OLD FLORIDA IN CEDAR KEY
Cedar Key’s population
is just under 1,000. Its boom period was in the 1800s, when the town’s activity
was out on what now is an unpopulated barrier island in deep water just off the
mainland. Steamships plied the waters between New Orleans, Havana, and Cedar
Key.
The Suwannee, the famed wild blackwater river that begins in southern
Georgia and rambles through the Okefenokee Swamp and hundreds of miles of
Florida, empties into the Gulf just to the north of Cedar Key.
The town, based in the
mainland for more than a century, gets its name from the cedar trees that used
to cover it.
Starting in the 1860s, the trees were harvested and processed into
cedar slats for shipment to pencil factories in the north.
A railroad line was
built out to the tiny key to accommodate such commerce.
Even in the modern 21st
century, there is only one way into Cedar Key: across narrow bridges that glide
on top of bayous and backwaters where farm-raised clams are grown.
The long drive ends and
the little town presents itself with an inland row of stagecoach stop-looking
wood buildings – some vacant, others with artists’ shops on the ground floor – and
a cropping of taverns, restaurants and shops built on docks over top of the
warm Gulf of Mexico waters.
STORY CONTINUES TOMORROW -- APRIL4
No comments:
Post a Comment