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The latest go-to place on the Florida Panhandle is Scenic Highway 30-A, a stretch of used-to-be-quiet beach communities between Destin and Panama City Beach. Right in the middle of what the Tourist Development folks have branded "The Emerald Coast," resorts along this stretch of road attract thousands of visitors each year. Many come from the upscale suburbs of Birmingham and Atlanta, while others venture down from the counties and communities in between. It was there, on that road, that the Redneck Riviera died.
Those folks helped kill it.
This is how it happened.
In December 1956, word reached Panhandle property owners in south Walton County, Fla., that a "beach route" would be built to link the coastal enclaves of Seagrove Beach, Grayton Beach and Blue Mountain to each other and to Destin to the west and Panama City Beach to the east.
It would be called 30-A.
Not everyone liked the idea.
The vice president of the First National Bank in Birmingham, who owned a cottage in Seagrove, wrote the head of the Florida Highway Department that he had invested in the region "because of the quiet seclusion." He did not want that to change.
The Florida Highway Department ignored him.
C. H. McGee, who developed Seagrove Beach, offered the state some land away from the coast if it would route the road around his village.
The state turned him down.
McGee was one of Florida real estate’s unsung pioneers. After World War II, when places like Panama City Beach were actively creating "amusements" to attract visitors from the lower South, McGee took a different tack.
Hoping to impress people like the Birmingham banker, McGee laid out a tightly regulated community with a covenant that promised "no trailer, tent, shack, outhouse, or other temporary structure will be allowed." Lots were plotted for single-family dwellings and only "approved and accepted" building material could be used.
Then, to seal the deal, McGee guaranteed that "no noxious activities, offensive noises or odors, nor any nuisance" would be allowed to intrude on the quiet and seclusion.
Those who wanted "amusements" could go to Panama City Beach, where what would come to be known as the Redneck Riviera was rapidly rising.
To keep these folks at bay, McGee priced them out of his market, asking so much for a parcel of his land that his son "really wondered if we would ever sell the first."
In effect, McGee created a gateless gated community. Three miles off U.S. Highway 98, without a road to connect it to its nearest neighbor, Seagrove sat in splendid isolation. There was a little store for staples. Later, a small motel with a café was added, but that was it.
This new beach route called 30-A promised change, promised not only to bring traffic and noise, but to open the coast to the element that Seagrove homeowners wished to avoid: rednecks.
Homeowners were not happy.
The road was built in phases and was completed by the early 1970s. Few used it at first. Though a pretty drive, most folks traveling between Panama City and Destin were in a hurry, so they stayed inland on U.S. 98.
There was so little traffic, in fact, that late in the 1970s a nude/gay beach began unofficial operation at a secluded spot off the road.
In the early 1980s, things began to change.
At a curve where 30-A veered away from the beach, someone opened a restaurant and bar that quickly turned into a honky tonk, where construction workers (whose numbers were increasing), shrimpers and oystermen from back on the bay and an occasional local mingled.
It gave the road a taste of redneckery.
Seagrove homeowners were not happy.
Not that anyone else cared.
Then as now, Walton County was run by upcountry agricultural and timber interests. The coast did not even have a county commissioner. So when developers sought permission to build two high-rise condominiums on the beach side of 30-A, just east of Seagrove, the county commissioners, dreaming of more tax revenue to spend, gave the go-ahead.
Seagrove homeowners were not happy.
Before long, county commissioners were not happy either.
Almost from the start, the condo developers ran into problems with water pressure and sewage disposal, matters that past commissioners had ignored.
Unhappy developers demanded that the problems be solved.
Commissioners began to wonder if condos were not more trouble than they were worth.
As the controversy swirled, a delegation from Seagrove showed up at the commission meeting. The exchange went something like this:
"We don’t want any more high rises."
"What do you want?"
"Height limits."
"How high?"
There was a pause. Not thinking they would get this far, the delegation had not come with a consensus on height.
Then someone spoke up. "Fifty feet."
"Done."
So it came to pass that 30-A would not have the "wall of condos" and the multi-storied motels that were rising at Panama City Beach and Destin.
Nor would it have the "amusements" and bars that attracted the sort of people who rented those condos and motels: no Goofy Golf, no carnival rides, no Trashy White Bands singing "I’ll be glad when you’re dead you sumbitch you."
Instead, 30-A would attract affluent and accomplished baby boomers looking for a place to relax and young urban professionals — "yuppies" — whose attitudes and affectations were anything but redneck.
These folks found exactly what they wanted in the master-planned community of Seaside.
In 1982, the "founder" of Seaside, Robert Davis, set out to create a "real town," yet one more carefully designed and controlled than anything C. H. McGee ever envisioned.
In Davis’ vision of Seaside, people would live, work and interact with their neighbors — even if the interaction was only sitting on the mandated front porch and talking with folks on the other side of the required picket fence.
It started as a collection of cute, brightly painted cracker cottages around a village grocery, hardware store and Shrimp Shack café, but quickly evolved into an architectural fantasy world, a laboratory for New Urbanist ideas, an investment opportunity, an upscale resort and a tourist attraction, complete with concerts and wine tastings.
Seaside has been called many things, but never redneck.
Seaside set out to become the cultural capital of Walton County, a title for which there was little competition.
When its rental program got going, the community became a destination for the well-bred and affluent who enjoyed recreational eating, recreational shopping and entertainment that did not include all-the-beer-you-can-drink for $5, wet T-shirt contests or singers praising recreational sex.
The honky tonk in the curve soon closed.
Other planned communities followed — WaterColor, WaterSound, Alys Beach, Rosemary Beach — spreading sophistication as they swallowed up acres of sand and scrub.
No more seclusion for the nude and the gay.
No place for the redneck to play.
Florida Travel and Life magazine announced that 30-A was the "Pearl of the Panhandle," a place where visitors would find "Southern hospitality in a trendy setting."
When the magazine described what it called the "ethos of 30-A," it focused on the "anyone can do it" doings that characterize life along the route.
Well, "anyone can" if they want to "do it" in a setting that is more structured, better organized, more expensive and, some would argue, more self-absorbed than you find on stretches of the coast where redneckery still survives.
Along 30-A, people who can pay the price can enjoy what a redneckless Riviera has to offer.
C. H. McGee would be proud.
Unfortunately, today there is trouble in paradise.
30-A has become so popular that, during the tourist season, traffic around some of the resorts is so bad that solving it has been declared the county’s top priority — which is remarkable because until now 30-A’s needs have not been high on the county commission’s list.
This perceived neglect is aggravated by the fact that the southern end of the county, and especially the 30-A corridor, pays more than three-quarters of the taxes that fill the county coffers — some put the figure closer to 90 percent — yet currently South Walton has only one seat on the commission.
As a result, residents below the bay are pushing for a vote on incorporation that would give them more control of their own destiny.
Into an uncharted future they are prepared to go.
Whatever that future might be, it is safe to say that it will look upscale suburban instead of rural redneck.
Down there, the Redneck Riviera is dead.
They buried it on 30-A.
Harvey H. Jackson III is Professor Emeritus of History at Jacksonville State University and a columnist and occasional op/ed writer for The Star. His latest (and likely last) book is "The Rise and Decline of the Redneck Riviera: An Insider’s History of the Florida-Alabama Coast" (Georgia Press, 2012). He can be reached at hjackson@jsu.edu.
