Historic SoWal trivia

[ShallowsNole]

Emerald Drifter you are too kind. I know a lot about Point Washington as I am descended from a branch of the Wesley family. And then there is the small detail of how my parents met . A blog or book is on my list of things to do in my retirement, if I ever get there. Meanwhile, my late aunt Peggy Bailer did write a book titled "Sandpiper Journal." She is deceased now and I do not know if my cousin still has copies, but I believe the Coastal Branch Library has a copy. That has a LOT of information and is really the only reason I remember a lot of it.

Garrett Horn, I remember that 1944 used to be stamped on the small "relief" bridge. The bay fill ("causeway" for newbies) was built around 1939-1940. So we can narrow it down to sometime between 1940 and 1944. I don't know the exact year.

 

[ShallowsNole]

A frickin tragedy how Tucker Bayou was butchered and the entire Choctawhatchee Bay ecosystem was forever altered/ruined.

Blame the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for wanting an inland shipping channel. Choctawhatchee Bay had already changed from freshwater to partial saltwater-brackish by the breaking of the original East Pass in Destin .
Meanwhile, it is great to remember that Bunker and Point Washington were not always separated.

 

[m1a1mg]

This map is 16.7 MB if you fetch it from here:

Dropbox - Point-Washington-1939.jpg

You can really, really zoom in with amazing resolution. Every one of those black square dots represents some family's story.

I get an error when I try to open it. I'd really appreciate anything you can do to fix it.

 

[Garrett Horn]

Dropbox - Point-Washington-1939.jpg

 

[Sun Chaser]

Continuing here.....

30A:

• When was it paved with asphalt? Was it gravel or dirt before paved?
• When was the first (flashing) traffic light installed?
  
• What were the first and subsequent North/South feeder roads?

Any other trivia about historical 30A would be great. I did not discover 30A until 1995. My girlfriend at the time and I stayed at Seagrove Villas Motel, in one of the motor court cabanas. What a delight that was. And going across the street to eat at the Wheelhouse where the owner chatted with us. I fell deeply in love with 30A. (It had already happened with the girl). My places visited had always been PCB starting in 1972 and during the 80s while I was in college it was FWB.

 

[Lake View Too]

My recollection is spotty. I don’t think it was ever a dirt road. Seems like it was 1965 or 1968 when it was completed. It was a crushed packed gravel at first. And remained so until some time after Hurricane Eloise(1975) because I have photos of it as gravel then.

 

[ShallowsNole]

I remember crushed packed gravel 30A as well. The main thing is that, heading eastbound, 30A stopped at Grayton Beach State Park. Heading westbound, 30A stopped just before Western Lake. It's hard to see now, but the little sidestreet in Watercolor where Fish Out of Water and the Watercolor Inn was part of "Old" 30A and used to just veer off into the dunes after the two sides were connected.

I can expound on what often went on in those dunes, but I will decline. Just say this old lady was young once upon a time.

 

[ShallowsNole]

A memory I can share is that once upon a time, 30A washed out at Camp Creek. The bridge was fine, but the approaches on either side were gone. I don't remember if there was a Road Closed sign to alert people to this. Somehow a motorist managed to jump the washed-out approach, land on the bridge, and stop before going off the other side. Car sitting squarely on top of the bridge with no way off. I do not recall how the car was moved, or if they just had to wait until construction was completed. I have a picture of this, somewhere. Want to say early to mid 1970's.

Late 1970's - Mid 1980's - yes, 30A had been completed along Western Lake. But, as now, it is not a stretch of road you want to take at a high rate of speed and/or during or after drinking. A local fisherman standing on the bridge found a vehicle in the water, and a body in the vehicle. A young man whose family stayed here during the summer had a grand time at the Grayton Store and did not make it back to Seagrove alive. Personally, if not for the guardrail, I would have wound up in the lake myself when I was 16. I wasn't speeding (in fact, I wasn't driving) but nobody had taught the unlicensed driver I was dating at the time how not to overcorrect if you run off the road. And being as there was huge dent/scratch down the side of my car and an equal-sized swath of blue paint on the guardrail, there was no way I could keep my daddy, all of South Walton, and everyone at Freeport High School from knowing about it. We didn't dare file a crash report.

 

[Garrett Horn]

You jogged my memory about that road spur that dead-ended about where Fish Out of Water is now. We had the same situation at Eastern Lake. A spur that stopped right into the dunes. I don't think anybody bothered to put a road close sign, so hurried tourists and local drinking folk occasionally found themselves hub deep in sugar white in the middle of nowhere.

The way these spurs dead-ended makes me think that somebody, with a whole lot more wisdom than me, realized it was a far, far better idea to move the road inland at those places, rather than some misguided earlier plan, and truly saved the great beauty of those magnificent lakes. Job well done.

 

[Garrett Horn]

Sunchaser, or anybody else interested in the folk history of this area may want to read my book "Postcards of Seagrove". It's just my recollections along with a few other anecdotes about growing up in the sixties and seventies (OMG, I'm rambling now). It is available at Sundog Books, Original 30-A, and at Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Postcards-Seagrove-Garrett-Horn/dp/0692691413/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1489066105&sr=8-1&keywords=Postcards+of+Seagrove