Connections: The Long Way Home from Apalachicola

The long drive home from St. George Island and Apalachicola began along the stretch of coastal highway through Carrabelle, home to many dock-bound yachts and Lanark, with its tiny beach that seems smaller on each trip. This stretch is along the backwaters and bays that mostly lay behind the offshore islands, so sandy beaches are scarce. Between the highway and the pine-shaded shoreline are scattered vacation homes on stilts. Many are new, replacements for those destroyed by Hurricane Michael in 2018. Behind us, Cape San Blas and Mexico Beach, are being rebuilt. I could not bear to drive over to see. It would be painful to revisit the devastation at the old fishing village where I first experienced the Gulf Coast. Maybe next time.

We cranked up a Jimmy Buffett CD to cheer us through another rainy drive. Jimmy Buffett has an army of “Parrot Heads” who listen to his music and attend his concerts. Much of his music tells poignant stories of coastal romance, long- ago friendships, and sailing. Mostly celebrations of beach life, my favorites among his songs describe my own inner voyages to figure out “what is ailing, living in the land of the free,” and wishing we could simply “sail away from it all.” His music has gotten me unstuck from personal turmoil and monotonous work many times. A good dose of Buffett and a few days on the beach often can put everything right again.

Next stop: the Florida capital. We have a soft spot for Tallahassee. It was home to us decades ago. It is a city of lovely parks and gardens. In need of break, a we turn off the Thomasville Highway into the Betton Hills neighborhood to take a walk in McCord Park, a nature preserve with a spreading Live Oak canopy and huge pines. Sculptures of children and animals, sculpted by the wonderful artist Sandy Proctor, look back at us as we circle the park and pond, towed along by Emily as she strains to get at the water birds.

Driving the canopied Kate Ireland Parkway (US 319) toward Thomasville brings memories of the time I spent in the region once called “Plantation Trace” as first director of Pebble Hill Plantation, an elegant old “shooting preserve.” It is home to many families employed in taking care of its 3,000 acres and 30-plus buildings. Some of its residents are descendants of families that were here in the 19th century. The plantation showcasing the sporting art collections and incredible architecture collected and built by Kate Hanna Ireland and her daughter Elizabeth “Pansy” Ireland Poe, members of a prominent Cleveland, Ohio family. The house is open for tours and hosts special events, wedding and reunions. The place is a treasure and in my time a January stopover for many Iowa farm families on their way to Florida for a month away from the cold and wind at home. What a welcome contrast they brought to that setting -old south meets midwestern farmers.

Having seen it all many times, we only slow down enough to take in the beautiful gate house that marks Pebble Hill’s entrance. Picturesque Thomasville with its tree lined streets of Ante-Bellum and Victorian houses is ahead where we turn onto US 19, four-lane all the way to Albany. Leaving the Red Hills plantation country behind for the agricultural heartland of Georgia, we picnic at a roadside park in Pelham. Along the way, we see that hundreds-perhaps thousands-of pecan trees, twisted and downed by Hurricane Michael, have been replaced with thousands of new -if only small-trees.

There is much to see in the Albany area-including a fine art gallery, a civil rights museum, and a river center. We lived here for several years. Most memorably, we attended a reception in the 1990’s for British World War II pilots who had their initial flight training in Albany. Some had married Albany girls, or left sweethearts behind as they left to fight in the “Battle of Britain.”

It is in Albany that we must decide whether our return to the mountains will be through Atlanta or around it. Atlanta traffic at sundown in driving rain? NO. Let’s “take the long way home” as Jimmy Buffett instructs us..

The country north and west of Albany-“Jimmy Carter Country”- is dotted with many smaller towns that to a greater or lesser extent, have been declining since the 1920’s and the “Great Migration” of Georgia’s rural population off the farm and often out of the state. U.S. Highway 82 takes us toward Columbus. We pass through Parrott where the town was made up to look like a western scene for the filming of the classic western The Long Riders. The road bypasses many other small towns – contributing to the demise of their main streets. This is a long, pleasant drive through gently rolling hills. Cotton has made a comeback here in what was -in the late antebellum period- Georgia’s richest cotton country, land opened up in the 1820’s by the forced cession of Creek lands following Andrew Jackson’s defeat of the “Red Stick” Creeks.

As we head toward Columbus, I am reminded of an article by historian David Williams I read twenty five years ago. The journal was an obscure one, published by a small historical society in Albany, but it heralded the arrival on the academic scene of a remarkable writer and historian. Dr. Williams described in much detail how the Civil War was a “Rich Man’s War” that became very unpopular in this region where secession was never popular to begin with -except among the large slaveholding planters and their greedy political cronies. The planter’s persistence in trying to grow cotton instead of food caused food prices to soar, just as many small-farm families were suffering because the head of the household-and perhaps his sons as well-were gone to war. While many men volunteered at the beginning of what they thought would be a short war, a conscription law passed by the Confederate Congress was unpopular. How could a man leave his family to serve in a war that seemed it would never end?

In the last year or so of the war, bands of deserters and draft dodgers hid out along the river and in the piney woods, attempting at times to gain protection from Union naval officers blockading Apalachicola. Some even agreed to serve in the Union army as a condition of accepting Union protection. For those who served in the Confederate army and navy, the livelihood of their wives and children depended on these men’s safe return when the war was over. Many of course never came home. Others would pull up roots and move to Texas where it was said you could herd wild cattle along the Rio Grande, drive them to market and get rich. As so many novels and movies would portray, the cowboys of the west were often young men who had “Gone to Texas” because they could find no future in the post-war south.

“What a ride through history!” ,” I said to myself, “This is where a great struggle played out, though no great battles were fought here.” Ahead unfolded the backstory of the blockade of Apalachicola and its effect on the heartland. We were headed approaching Columbus on the Chattahoochee, where the National Civil War Naval Museum is located, to the city where iron-clad ships were built in hopes of breaking the Union blockade. The hulk of of one such warship was burned to the waterline to prevent its being seized by Union forces. It rests on display at the museum.

We complete the long trip home, bypassing Atlanta, crossing I-85 and I-20, passing through Villa Rica, site of some of the richest gold mining during the rush of the 1820’s. Then we drive over I-75 at Cartersville. This was the iron mining district in Georgia before and during the Civil War and towers of stone-built iron furnaces are still to be found -if you know where to look. We cross the path of Sherman’s army as it moved from Chattanooga to Atlanta. Soon we are back home in Tate Tate, thankfully missing Atlanta all together.

It has taken us a mere nine hours. almost exactly the time it took us going to Apalachicola through the fierce Atlanta traffic. It has taken eleven hours. I am already calculating how long it will be before we head for the “Forgotten Coast,” again, singing along with Jimmy Buffett, “there’s wind in our hair and there’s water in our shoes.” Thank you Jimmy.

( This post is a sequel to the story of our trip to Apalachicola which included a dive into the history of the Forgotten Coast into the history of the Forgotten Coast ( https://longleafjournal.com/connections-complex-history-along-floridas-forgotten-coast/).