The WPA Guide to Florida: The Sunshine State

PART I

Florida’s Background

Contemporary Scene

ACROSS the wide strip of its upper area, from the Atlantic to within a short distance of the Mississippi border, Florida is at once a continuation of the Deep South and the beginning of a new realm in which the system of two-party politics reasserts itself. Narrowing abruptly to a peninsula, it drops through five degrees of latitude and a constantly accentuated tropical setting, until the tip of its long Roman nose pokes very nearly into the confines and atmosphere of Latin America. Equatorial waters move up from the south along its coasts, to temper its climate and confuse its seasons; every winter a tidal wave of tourists moves down from the north, to affect its culture, its economy, its physical appearance. Throughout more than four centuries, from Ponce de Leon in his caravels to the latest Pennsylvanian in his Buick, Florida has been invaded by seekers of gold or of sunshine; yet it has retained an identity and a character distinctive to itself. The result of all this is a material and immaterial pattern of infinite variety, replete with contrasts, paradoxes, confusions, and inconsistencies.

Politically and socially, Florida has its own North and South, but its northern area is strictly southern and its southern area definitely northern. In summer the State is predominantly southern by birth and adoptions, and in winter it is northern by invasion. At all seasons it is divided into Old and New Florida, separated by the Suwannee River. The political thought that controls it originates in a united minority above the Suwannee and reaches down into the more populous peninsula to impose the diminishing theory that Florida should be preserved for Floridians rather than exploited for visitors.

Religious intolerance marked the conquest and early settlement of Florida, but the State has long since embraced practically all cults and religions, and licenses the occult and the supernatural. Yet its melting pot is a brew of conflicting ideas, which enables the native to dictate State policies and politics. And so the Florida Cracker runs the courthouse and assesses, collects, and spends the tax money.

The background traditions of Florida are of the Old South; and though the Republican Party regularly appears on the ballot, only once since Reconstruction days has the State switched from its Democratic allegiance. In 1928, when prohibition and religion confused the issues, the electorate supported Herbert Hoover.

To the visitor, Florida is at once a pageant of extravagance and a land of pastoral simplicity, a flood-lighted stage of frivolity and a behind-the-scenes struggle for existence. For the person with a house car it is a succession of trailer camps and a vagabond social life. For the Palm Beach patron it is a wintertime Newport made up of the same society, servants, and pastimes. For migratory agricultural labor it means several months of winter employment in the open under pleasant skies; and for the Negro turpentine worker, an unvarying job in the pine woods.

The derivation of the name Florida has not been overlooked in publicity literature, the rhetoric of which has lent itself to a major misconception. Nature, though lavish, has not been flamboyant enough to make the great variety of native flowers and plants notably obvious except to naturalists, scientists, and botanists. Spectacular settings have been devised by man, but since Florida remains primitive in many respects these splashes of color are comparatively isolated and, in some cases, hidden. Swamps and jungles have been enclosed and converted into Japanese, cypress, Oriental, and many other kinds of gardens, to which an admission fee is charged. Here have been assembled extensive collections of native and exotic plants.

On the other hand, florid rhetoric has not exaggerated the State’s much publicized scent—the perfume from a half-million-acre bouquet of citrus groves. A border region of localized smells, however, suggests that all is not fragrance in the land of flowers. From sponge and shrimp fleets, menhaden fertilizer factories, and the stacks of paper mills drift malodorous fumes that lade the sea breezes with unsung vapors. A neutralizing incense, the aromatic smoke from burning pine woods, has steadily lessened with the expansion of forest-fire control, but occasionally there is a pall as well as a moon over Miami from Everglades muck fires.

Attempts to romanticize Florida’s playground features have resulted in an elaborate painting of the lily. Coast resorts have been strung into a be-jeweled necklace that sparkles on the bosom of a voluptuous sea; all is glamour and superficiality. This superimposed glitter diverts attention from Florida’s more characteristic native life.

The pioneer settler came from the same stock as the Appalachian mountain dweller, and long existence in the flat pine woods tended to perpetuate his original pattern of thought. He knew little of life beyond his own small clearing and saw only a few infrequent visitors, until a network of highways left him exposed to many persons in motorcars. This traffic affected his economy and aroused his instinct to profit. He set up a roadside vegetable display, then installed gasoline pumps and a barbecue stand, and finally with the addition of overnight cabins he was in the tourist business.

The highways even mechanized his mountain music. To attract patronage, he installed a ‘jook organ’ that would dispense Bronx-composed records of hillbilly laments at the drop of a nickel. Real hillbilly bands, that regularly come to Florida, scorn the rural areas and become street minstrels in the larger towns or play in bars and night clubs for collections. To their music is added a sidewalk overtone from guitars, zithers, accordions, and harmonicas played by mendicants who follow the tourist crowds.

Ten thousand miles of roads that crisscross the State have streaked it with what might be described as roadside culture and commerce, with each section revealing a characteristic quality. In the staid plantation territory of northern Florida, placards on gate posts chastely admit, ‘Guests Accepted,’ and tourist camps offer ‘Cabins for Travelers Only.’ Everywhere are ‘dine and dance’ places, which, as the highways extend southward into the established tourist belt, more and more resemble midways. Vegetable stands add citrus fruit, and then about everything likely to catch the motorist’s eye: carved coconuts, polished conch shells, marine birds made of wood or plaster, cypress ‘knees,’ pottery, bouquets made from tinted seashells or dyed sea oats, and an endless assortment of other native and imported handicraft. Agrarian preoccupations turn from corn, cotton, and tobacco to alligator and lion farms, reptile ranches, botanical gardens, and Indian villages. Here and there are the ‘pitches’ of palm readers and astrologers; but, to maintain the contrast, long stretches of uninhabited pine woods intervene with warning signs, ‘Open Range—Beware of Cows and Hogs.’

In one notable instance, where the United States Army and a hundred years of persuasion failed, a highway has succeeded. The Seminole Indians surrendered to the Tamiami Trail. From the Everglades the remnants of this race emerged, soon after the trail was built, to set up their palm-thatched villages along the road and to hoist tribal flags as a lure to passing motorists. Like their white brethren, they sell articles of handicraft and for a nominal fee will pose for photographs.

This concentration of the Seminole, however, by no means represents the extent of their influence. Seminole names are more numerous and widespread in Florida than are the living members of the race. Such names were even more plentiful before the railroads interceded in behalf of train callers—as one example among many, the ‘jawbreaker’ Ichepuckesassa was changed to Plant City. The Indians themselves have made the most of one profitable name. Since they discovered that the story of Osceola is popular among tourists, that fiery war chief has acquired many descendants, and most of the present-day Osceolas display their names along the Tamiami Trail.

Although signboards ruin many beautiful stretches of country, they are, in fact, a significant part of the Florida scene. In rural upper Florida one sees crude notices of patent medicines or of ‘Mules for Sale.’ In the vicinity of St. Augustine a great deal of early history is presented on roadside signs, and farther south the flora and fauna are similarly publicized for commercial purposes. Nearly everywhere gastronomy and distance are combined in directional markers that announce ‘11 miles to Guava Paste’ or ‘13 miles to Tupelo Honey.’ The name of a popular brand of malaria medicine appears on tin signs attached to thousands of trees, but the manufacturer complains that business has been ‘terrible’ since mosquito control became effective.

The signboard plays an important role in that it introduces the Yankee to the Cracker and quickly establishes the fact that the two have much in common although their customs differ. The native Floridian may offer specious replies to what he considers oversimple questions, but he is likely to be puzzled at the abysmal ignorance that causes the Yankee to refer to orange groves as ‘orchards,’ sandspurs as ‘sandburs,’ and sandflies as ‘sandfleas.’ Neither does he see any reason to exclaim over a bullfrog chorus in February or the call of the whippoorwill at twilight in early March. In his own behalf he is fluently persuasive on the virtues of his particular locality; but the Yankee in Florida has become a roving visitor determined to see the entire State regardless of regional blandishments.

The first-time visitor is primarily a sightseer. He is the principal customer for the admission places along the road. He learns very soon how far Florida is supposed to project from the Old South by the discovery that a turpentine still with its Negro quarters has been turned into a tourist attraction and advertised as a survival of bygone plantation days.

Clockwise and counterclockwise the sightseeing newcomer makes the circuit of the State, filling the highways with a stream of two-way traffic. If traveling southward by the Gulf coast route, he stops to partake of a Spanish dinner in the Latin quarter of Tampa, to sit on the green benches of St. Petersburg, to view the Ringling Circus animals and art museum at Sarasota, to admire the royal palms at Fort Myers. Thence he follows the Tamiami Trail through the ghostly scrub cypress and primitive silence of the Everglades, to encounter at last the theatrical sophistication of Miami. As a side trip from the latter city, he may proceed down the long overseas highway to Key West, once the State’s most populous city and an important defense base, but since its recent rehabilitation by the Federal Government something of a public curiosity, a place favored by artists and writers, and noted for its green-turtle steaks.

On his return up the Atlantic coast, the traveler may concede that publicity word-pictures of the resorts from Miami Beach northward have not been greatly exaggerated, but he is impressed by the long intervening stretches of woodland, suggesting that Florida is still very largely an empty State. From Palm Beach, which has long been the earthly Valhalla of financial achievement, he may detour inland to discover the hidden winter-vegetable kingdom on the muck lands along the southern shore of Lake Okeechobee, where Negro workers harvest thousands of carloads of beans and other fresh food supplies; or farther north he may swing inland by way of Orlando, through the great citrus groves of the hilly lake region and the thriving strawberry country around Plant City; then up to Ocala, where he can look through the glass bottoms of boats at water life in the depths of crystal-clear springs. Returning to the east coast, he inspects the far-famed natural speedway at Daytona Beach and the old Spanish fort at St. Augustine before he reaches the northern terminal city of Jacksonville. Frequently at the end of the tour, the visitor announces that he is never coming back.

His second excursion into Florida is somewhat different. On his first trip, unconsciously or deliberately, he had selected a spot where he thought later on he might want to live and play, and when he comes again he usually returns to that chosen place for a season. Ultimately, in many cases, he buys or builds a home there and becomes by slow degrees a citizen and a critic.

The evolution of a tourist into a permanent resident consists of a struggle to harmonize misconceptions and preconceptions of Florida with reality. An initial diversion is to mail northward snapshots of himself reclining under a coconut palm or a beach umbrella, with the hope that they will be delivered in the midst of a blizzard. At the same time, the tourist checks weather reports from the North, and if his home community is having a mild winter he feels that his Florida trip has been in part a swindle. Nothing short of ten-foot snowdrifts and burst waterpipes at home can make his stay in the southland happy and complete. On the other hand, he is firmly convinced that with his departure in the spring the State folds up and the inhabitants sizzle under a pitiless sun until he gets back, official weather reports and chamber-of-commerce protests to the contrary. Eventually he takes a chance on a Florida summer and makes the discovery that the average summer temperature in Florida is lower than in the North; he tries to tell about it at home, and for his pains receives a round of Bronx cheers. He is now in the agonies of transition, suspected by friends and shunned by strangers. His visits to Florida thereafter shift to visits back home, and these latter become less frequent; but ‘back home’ has left an indelible imprint, which he proposes to stamp on Florida.

An expansive mood is one of the most familiar and sometimes costly first responses to a Florida winter sun. The person noted for taciturnity in his home community often becomes loquacious, determined that those about him shall know that he is a man of substance. This frequently makes him an easy prey to ancient confidence games; sometimes leads to unpremeditated matrimony; and almost inevitably results in the acquisition of superfluous building lots.

Already something of a solipsist, he becomes an incurable nonconformist, vigorously defending his adopted State and indignantly decrying it by turns. He refutes the tradition that life in the South is a lackadaisical existence adapted to an enervating climate. He comes here to play and to relax but at the slightest provocation he resumes his business or profession, if for no other reason than to demonstrate that the sound economic practices of his home State will pull Florida out of the doldrums he perceives it to be in. If he opens a shop, the back-home instinct is likely to reassert itself in choosing a name, so that Florida abounds in Michigan groceries, Maryland restaurants, Ohio dry-cleaners, Indiana laundries, and New York shoe shops.

Along with business and professional theories, the Northerner brings to Florida a great deal of his local architectural tradition. This assures a structural variant to the repetitious designs of filling stations at the four corners of all the crossroad villages and of chain stores along the main streets in the larger towns.

While Florida’s tourist population is drawn to the State largely by the prospect of play and recreation in a beneficent climate, the distribution of its population is influenced to a great extent by personal inclination. The newcomer usually gravitates to the locality where his individual preferences can best be realized, and in so doing he helps to identify these preferences with his adopted community. This tends to emphasize the strikingly diverse characteristics of Florida’s cities. For example, there is the commercial metropolis of Jacksonville, with its converging railroads and northern bustle; and, close by, antique St. Augustine, with its historical background and buildings and its horse-drawn sightseeing conveyances; St. Petersburg with its clublike foregathering of elderly folk, where fire and police lines are sometimes needed to handle the throngs of Sunday morning worshipers; and Miami, where employees in public establishments are fingerprinted as a police precaution to safeguard the crowds that fill its hotels, race tracks, and night clubs.

Regardless of individual circumstance and preference, one desire seems to be common to all—the desire to improve Florida. But man’s subduing efforts seldom extend much beyond the cities or penetrate very far from the highways; and if those efforts were relaxed for a generation, much of Florida would become primeval territory again. In combating nature and in trying to reconcile divergent ideas, the citizen performs a public service, and if the climate, as advertised, adds ten years to his life, the dispensation is utilized to the advantage of the State.

Natural Setting and Conservation

FLORIDA is bounded on the north by Georgia and Alabama, and on all other sides by the salt waters of the Atlantic Ocean, the Straits of Florida, and the Gulf of Mexico, except for about 50 miles on the west where the Perdido River forms a boundary between this State and lower Alabama. The State’s tidal shore line—including the Ten Thousand Islands off the west coast, and all bays, estuaries, and other tidal reaches—extends 3,751 statute miles from the northern boundary on the Atlantic to the western boundary on the Gulf. Florida’s area of 58,666 square miles, of which 3,805 are water surface, is more than large enough to contain Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Jacksonville, in northeast Florida, is in the same latitude as Cairo, Egypt, and Shanghai, China, and the entire peninsula lies hundreds of miles nearer than Rome to the equator.

Viewed from the air, with its broken coast line and its innumerable lakes, canals, and rivers, Florida looks like a frayed and perforated green mat spread upon a blue sea. Inland the mat develops a ridge composed of round-shouldered limestone hills, that tapers off from the north into the prairie region above Lake Okeechobee. Below the lake appear the Everglades, a half-submerged waste of sawgrass studded with cypress hammocks and oasislike palm islands. In profile, as seen from offshore, the land of Florida becomes a soft pastel line separating sky and water.

The Atlantic coast sweeps in an even curve to the end of the peninsula, where it breaks into segments; from there the Florida Keys extend like coral steppingstones into southern waters. The Gulf coast, deeply marked with bays and bordered with rank growths of hardwood, makes a great arching swing southward, and finally crumbles into the Ten Thousand Islands, a labyrinth of uncharted waterways.

Geographically, the State can be divided into four sections: the east-coast strip, bordering the Atlantic from Fernandina to Key West; the lake or central-ridge district; the west-coast area, of which Tampa is the hub; and the panhandle of west Florida, which includes the rolling country along the north shore of the Gulf.

The east coast is protected from the open sea by a ribbon of sand bars and islands, on which have been built many leading tourist towns, notably Ormond, Daytona Beach, Palm Beach, and Miami Beach. Although the business districts are often on the mainland, the resort sections lie beyond salt-water lagoons on barrier beaches. Inland from the coast, a wedge-shaped area of pine and palmetto flatwoods reaches from the Georgia border on the north to a point between the Everglades and the Atlantic on the southern tip of the peninsula.

The Everglades—until 1842 an unexplored, mysterious region known only to the Seminole who found sanctuary there from invading whites—form a vast area, much of which is under water throughout the year, and nearly all during the rainy summer season.

Big Cypress Swamp, that portion of the Everglades nearest the west coast, has considerably less surface water than the eastern half of the region. Its northern section, known as Okaloacoochee Slough, has been used as pasture for open-range cattle since the War between the States. The Tamiami Trail, running east and west, bisects the Everglades and skirts the southern part of the Big Cypress Swamp.

Fringing the lower Gulf coast are the Ten Thousand Islands, a group of mangrove-covered islets divided, and often submerged, by swift-running tidal channels. No railways or highways link these keys, and because of their inaccessibility they have been the refuge of many picaresque characters since the late 1880’s. North of the Ten Thousand Islands the coast is blanketed with pine forests and hardwood hammocks. Several drowned river valleys and the absence of reefs, except along its upper reaches, indicate that this section is probably older than the east coast.

The topography of much of northwest Florida has little to differentiate it from the red clay hills of Georgia and Alabama across the border, but along the Gulf coast great swamps cut deep into the land, and tourist resorts of this section are built on bay fronts or islands overlooking the Gulf.

The lake or central-ridge section is rolling land pitted with lakes and springs. Le Heup Hill, 4 miles south of Dade City, with an elevation of 330 feet, is one of the highest measured points in the State. The estimated 30,000 lakes scattered throughout Florida range in depth from 2 to 27 feet, and in size from ponds of a few acres’ extent to Lake Okeechobee, with an area of 717 square miles, the second-largest body of fresh water lying wholly within the United States. Free-running artesian wells are found chiefly along the coast and in central Florida, but in the lake district the water supply is obtained by pumping. North of Lake Okeechobee the Kissimmee Prairies, covered with grass and patches of palmetto, and interspersed with scattered hammocks, represent the State’s largest cattle ranges.

The major part of Florida’s shallow surface soil is underlaid by a deep limestone foundation. Sinks or potholes, varying in size from one to hundreds of acres, occur where the crust is broken. The huge Florida springs, the lakes, and many of the surface streams also result from breaks in the limestone. Underground watercourses often cause the earth’s surface to cave in, exposing streams such as the one at Falmouth Spring, the Santa Fe and Alapaha Rivers, and Bear Creek, which disappear only to reappear miles beyond. The disappearance of lakes is also a familiar occurrence. One explanation of this phenomenon is that logs, stumps of trees, and other refuse clog openings in the limestone bottoms of the lakes. In time the debris rots and the water escapes into subterranean channels, but suction from escaping water draws other floating refuse and sediment to plug the holes again and allow the lakes to refill. Lake Iamonia, north of Tallahassee, has gone through this process several times within the past century. Lake Neff, in Hernando County, has disappeared and returned three times since 1917.

Florida’s 27 major springs range in flow from about 14,000 to 800,000,000 gallons per day. Silver Springs, southeast of Ocala; Rainbow Springs, near Dunnellon; and Itchetucknee Springs, south of Lake City, in the order named, are the largest. Wakulla Spring has the largest volume from a single fissure in the earth. Some rivers—the Suwannee, the Withlacoochee, and the St. Johns—rise in swampy ground and are later swelled by the flow from springs. Rivers west of the Suwannee have their sources in the hills of Georgia and Alabama and become deeper after receiving the inflow from west Florida springs. Among these, the Apalachicola, Escambia, and Choctawhatchee Rivers were important trade routes before the development of highways and railroads connecting the ante-bellum plantations of south Georgia and Florida with the Gulf of Mexico.

The largest and most important river in the State, the St. Johns, flows northward, parallel to the east coast, and empties into the Atlantic Ocean east of Jacksonville. Dredging has opened the river to navigation by ocean liners as far as Jacksonville, a distance of 26 miles, but since 1841 small steamers have been plying the river as far south as Sanford, 200 miles from the sea.

Projecting into subtropical water, the Florida Peninsula enjoys a mild atmospheric drift from the Atlantic to the Gulf, and its climate in consequence is unusually pleasant and uniform. Below-freezing temperatures are rare, and snowfall is a subject for historians. Temperatures in January, the coldest month, average about 58.7° F., and in the warmest months, July and August, about 81° F.; the average for the year is 69.4°. In central and south Florida the average extreme range lies between 90° and 43°, while in north Florida the mercury sometimes drops below 32° for short periods. In summer the salt waters of Florida become lukewarm, and in winter their temperature is about the same as that of the north Atlantic in summer. But atmospheric warmth above Florida waters in the winter months is, of course, less than that above northern waters in summer, and at times winter sun bathing on Florida beaches is a somewhat chilly pastime.

Evaporation from the thousands of lakes and the encircling waters contributes to an annual average rainfall of 58 inches. Much of this precipitation occurs from April to November, usually when it is most needed to insure good crops and lower summer temperatures. The peninsula has a daily average of sunshine in excess of six hours.

The warm Gulf Stream curves around the peninsula’s southern tip and flows north along the Atlantic coast. This factor, however, is not as important to Florida’s climate as was once believed; geographers explain that the general marine influence and latitudinal position of the State would assure mild temperatures, apart from the proximity of the Gulf Stream. For short intervals each winter cold waves invade the State, bringing frost, delaying maturity of crops, and sometimes damaging fruit trees. The winds bearing this cold come overland from the northwest, and are not tempered by the Gulf Stream.

Florida and other South Atlantic States lie in the general path of tropical hurricanes, arising mostly in the Caribbean Sea in the fall of the year; but many of these storms blow themselves out before reaching land, or they come ashore with their destructive forces greatly spent. For the most part they describe a clockwise arc into the Gulf or up the Atlantic coast, although sometimes they reverse themselves. These atmospheric disturbances, caused by wind rushing toward a low-pressure area, take the form of a huge doughnut, with high wind revolving around a calm center or core. Because of this formation, the storm passes through three stages at any given spot in its path: first a furious gale in one direction, then a dead calm during the passage of the core, and finally a wind equal in velocity to the first but in the opposite direction. It is during the period of calm that inhabitants unfamiliar with the structure of the storm often leave their shelters, and are caught in the last stage. Buildings weakened by strain during the first wind are frequently wrecked by the second blast. Torrential rains usually accompany a hurricane, and water blown into unroofed buildings accounts for much property damage. Loss of life in the past has been chiefly because of poor housing and unpreparedness; one storm struck in the Everglades before Lake Okeechobee was diked, forcing that body of water over a wide territory to the south, where many laborers housed in flimsy shacks were drowned.

Government weather stations now determine the approximate path of all disturbances, and newspapers and radios give ample warning. Though the revolving wind may exceed 100 miles an hour in velocity, the forward movement of a hurricane seldom exceeds 20 miles, and this leaves plenty of time for those in danger to board up buildings or vacate the territory.

GEOLOGY AND PALEONTOLOGY

The far-reaching Floridian Plateau includes not only the State but an even greater surrounding area that lies less than fifty fathoms beneath the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Primarily an offspring of the sea and bearing the marks of its marine parentage, the plateau was built up largely during the most recent of the five geologic eras; it is the youngest part of the United States, a land infant but 45,000,000 years old.

During the convulsive age of mountain building the Floridian Plateau remained comparatively calm, only rising and falling in a rolling motion, with a down dip into the Gulf of Mexico. This process still continues; in the last 25,000 years the plateau, tipping on an axis that runs obliquely up the peninsula from Key West to a point below Fernandina, has lifted 6 feet at Miami and dropped 30 feet at Pensacola.

In the Paleozoic era of earth history, the area that is now the Mississippi Valley was a vast sea, and east of this, in the Appalachian region, lay the land mass to which is now attached the Floridian Plateau. But the hills of Florida are not a part of the Appalachian Mountains; they stand out principally because surrounding material has settled or eroded away. The crystalline rock that outcrops in Georgia is not found in Florida, except for deeply buried fragments. Neither do the subsurface waters that feed the State’s springs and artesian wells originate in the Appalachian Mountains. Nor is the peninsula a great coral reef, as was once believed. Less than one per cent of its structure is coral.

Although the foundation rocks of Florida are covered with a stone blanket of marine deposit at least 4,000 feet deep, geologists surmise that they are probably folded and wrinkled in much the same way as are similar rocks in the Piedmont Plateau, which extends from the Hudson River to Alabama. The layers of marine sediment that rest upon the basement rocks were formed when the entire section was beneath the sea, and are composed for the most part of the skeletons of microscopic sea animals. During the Triassic, Jurassic, and Lower Cretaceous periods of the Mesozoic era, the State area was above the waters, but was submerged many times during the Cenozoic (Recent), the age of mammals. At no time, so far as can be learned, did the land ever rise very high above sea level, or did the sea ever cover the land to any great depth.

The warm shallow seas that repeatedly covered the area were ideally suited to foraminifera. These tiny marine animals, some too small to be seen by the naked eye, lived and died by the millions in tropic waters. While alive they were protected by shells of lime; when they died the shells sank to the floor of the ocean to form layers of limestone, each hundreds of feet thick. During the Eocene and Oligocene epochs the strata were composed almost entirely of this matter, and the formations of these periods are nearly pure limestone. During the Miocene, however, fine sand was washed down from the mountains of Georgia and Alabama and was deposited on the Floridian Plateau to form sandy limestone; and later much clay drifted south to settle over the State area and complete its stratified layers. Thus the foundation rocks are separated from the earliest exposed strata by a mass of limestone 4,000 feet thick and by layers of red, white, and black clay.

A gentle up-arching of the Eocene and older rocks had begun before the last of these deposits was made, and this doming finally gave the structure a list which, despite torrential rains that battered and slashed to beat it down, left it 150 feet above sea level to form an island around present Ocala. Eventually, when the Suwannee Strait to the north closed, this became a peninsula less than half the size of the Floridian Plateau, and part of the North American land mass.

The tip of the peninsula extended at one time only to the lower rim of Lake Okeechobee, but far to the south of that point another formation emerged from the up-building of live coral on submerged oolitic rock. Gradually wind and waves rolled up barriers along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, extending the peninsula toward the coral reefs and eventually forming dunes that shut out the sea. The enclosed area, rank with marine plant life, became a fresh-water basin, and its decaying vegetation through the centuries turned into the peatlands that now comprise the Everglades.

A survey made along the Florida Reef in 1846 by Timothy Abbott Conrad, and followed by Louis Agassiz, gave original ground for the belief that the entire peninsula of Florida was of coral formation; and this theory was incorporated by Joseph LeConte in his excellent textbook, Elements of Geology, in 1878. This belief continued until 1886, when Angelo Heilprin determined that the progressive growth of the peninsula as far south as Lake Okeechobee was due to a combination of sedimentation and upheaval.

Geologically, Florida’s strata date back only to the Tertiary or later periods of the Cenozoic era, embracing the Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, and Pliocene epochs. Under familiar names these layers supply an inexhaustible source of road material, give Florida its lucrative phosphate industry, account for its pitted topography, and provide underground reservoirs that assure to all sections an independent supply of fresh water from local rainfall.

Ocala limestone, of the Eocene epoch, the oldest exposed sediment in the State, outcrops over a large section around Ocala, reaching north to the Suwannee River and south to the Withlacoochee River. This limestone underlies the entire State except for the extreme western portion. It is a pure-white to cream-colored granular rock, varying in thickness from 50 to 500 feet, and consists almost entirely of carbonate of lime. Chiefly composed of foraminifera, as are the older strata upon which it rests, it also contains fossil coral, sea urchins, molluscs, and occasionally a vertebrate sea mammal known as Zeuglodon, an early ancestor of the whale.

Marianna and Glendon limestones and Byram marl rest on the Ocala limestone, and belong to the Oligocene epoch. They correspond to the strata known as the Vicksburg group in Mississippi and Alabama, and appear in Florida only in the vicinity of Marianna, with the exception of a curved strip of the Glendon stone on either side of the Suwannee River near Ellaville. The Marianna limestone, a soft white rock, weathers to a dirty gray; Glendon limestone is hard, and its color runs from yellow to a pinkish hue; Byram marl consists of soft, fine-grained, sandy yellow limestone. The first two, quarried on a small scale, are used in the construction of chimneys.

The era of mountain building in the western part of North America, during the Miocene epoch, brought few changes in the contour and general outline of Florida. Six different layers of limestone, sand, and marl were then deposited: the Tampa limestone, widespread, but missing in many areas; the Shoal River formation; the Chipola formation; the Oak Grove sands in the northwestern part of the State; the Choctawhatchee formation, found both in the panhandle and inland from Charlotte Harbor; and the Hawthorn formation, also widespread, but thin, and much of it eroded away.

The most important Miocene strata are the cream-to-white colored limestones of the Tampa and the Hawthorn formations, both exposed over large areas. The former is essentially a marine and estuarine formation; the latter, chiefly a land deposit. Tampa limestone is used in the manufacture of cement, and both are used for making quicklime. The Hawthorn contains commercial deposits of fuller’s earth.

Pliocene deposits are divided into Caloosahatchee marl, the Citronelle formation, Bone Valley gravel, and the Alachua formation. The first of these, consisting of fine sand, lime ooze, and shells, was laid down in shallow salt water when the State was submerged by a calm sea. The Citronelle formation appears to have been deposited as a large delta, and the Bone Valley gravel similarly from an estuarine source. The Bone Valley and Alachua formations contain a great number of land-animal bones and phosphatic material from the Hawthorn decayed-phosphate deposits, such as calcium phosphate, calcium carbonate, and other minerals, derived from the fossil remains of extinct land and water animals. The Alachua deposits, mined in the Dunnellon region, supply hard rock phosphate, while from the Bone Valley gravel, in the Bartow region, comes pebble phosphate. Phosphate was discovered on Peace River in 1884 by J. Francis LeBaron, but was not commercially developed until 1887, when Colonel T. S. Moorehead managed to raise capital where LeBaron had failed.

The Pleistocene, first epoch of the Quaternary period of the Cenozoic era, and also known as the age of man, saw the formation of both land and water deposits. Muck, peat, alluvium, and wind-blown sand were laid down away from the ocean; while in the sea were built up shell marl, the coquina that furnished the early Spaniards with an easily worked building stone, soft oolitic rock, and coral-reef limestone. The greater part of the population of Florida occupies the Pensacola terrace, a formation of Pleistocene origin. On this terrace are the cities of Fernandina, St. Augustine, Jacksonville, Miami, Fort Myers, Bradenton, Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Pensacola.

Florida has its share of geological mysteries. One that gave rise to much speculation was a column of smoke and a red glare that appeared in the sky above the impenetrable Wakulla Swamp in August 1886 and that disappeared immediately after the Charleston earthquake. Geologists infer that it was caused by the ignition of escaping natural gas by lightning, and that the earthquake sealed the vent and thus extinguished the flames.

More difficult to explain, though unspectacular, is a row of round holes a few miles north of Brooksville, each about 36 inches in diameter and filled almost to the top with drifted sand and decayed vegetation. These ‘chimneys,’ as they are locally named, are blackened around the top, but show no indication of volcanic heat.

At Ballast Point near Tampa, geodes are frequently uncovered. These are little knots of stone with quartzlike interiors, running from light agate tints to jet black. The geode is a detached formation, and its accidental presence in the silex beds at Ballast Point is attributed to a tendency of nature to form concretions out of whatever substance is at hand. The only known similar specimens are found in the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas.

During the first two periods of the Tertiary era the only living creatures in Florida were marine animals, although the Tertiary produced in other parts of the continent the dinosaurs that are associated with prehistoric life. The Florida area was submerged at this time, and the corresponding formation—Ocala limestone—contains evidence of but one mammal, a whalelike sea monster known as Basilosaurus.

Formations of the last two periods of the Tertiary (Miocene and Pliocene) contain evidence that the State was then inhabited by strange beasts that found their way to the peninsula from many parts of the world. In the Alum Bluff beds of the Hawthorn formation in Leon, Gadsden, and Alachua Counties have been found the bones and teeth of deer, three-toed horses, camels, giant pigs, and rhinoceroses. These were not predatory types, however, and had man inhabited the State at this time he would have feared but one carnivorous animal, a prowling beast akin to both the modern wolf and the dog.

A number of significant plant fossils have been found in the Alum Bluff bed between the Chipola and Choctawhatchee formations. Among the thirteen species positively identified are fan palm, breadfruit, satinwood, ironwood, camphor, buckthorn, elm, and persimmon, all of which are adapted to the present habitat of the region. The species indicate that the flora was predominantly tropical, with additions from a temperate climate.

The Miocene three-toed horse, known as Parahippus, can be traced through several varieties to the Hipparion, the three-toed horse of the Pliocene. Hipparion, however, was not in the direct line that led to the development of the modern horse, but a branch that has since disappeared. It is not until the Pleistocene that fossils of Equus, the prehistoric one-toed horse that is often called the ‘homo sapiens’ of the horse family, appear in Florida deposits.

The Pliocene deposits, following in point of geological time directly after the Miocene, contain an even greater abundance of fossil animal remains. The phosphate mines of Alachua, Levy, and Polk Counties have yielded rich stores to the Florida paleontologist. The fauna of this age differs greatly from that of modern times. It was in the Pliocene that the mastodons made their way from the Old World by way of Asia; even at the very beginning of the age they were firmly established on the peninsula. The serrate-toothed mastodon, a great elephantlike creature with a short trunk and four tusks, wandered from India halfway around the world before reaching Florida.

With the Pleistocene era there came such a multitude of both great and small animals as will probably never be found in one region again. The great ice sheet at this time was advancing south from the North Pole; and covering the northern part of the United States and all of Canada was a glacial mass that destroyed vegetation and drove animal life before it. Herbivorous beasts sought green pastures in the warmer territories to the south, and countless thousands invaded Florida. Camels, horses, mammoths, huge sloths, armadillos, and peccaries roamed the State, cropping grass and stripping leaves from the Pleistocene trees. After them came the beasts of prey—saber-toothed tigers, wolves, and lions—which made life precarious for the vegetarians. Many of these animals bear a resemblance to the modern fauna of South America and Africa, and students of ancient life present this as evidence for the theory that camels originated in America and later made their way to the Old World long before man, possibly following the animal trail, found his way to the New World.

The most important deposits of the Pleistocene era in the State are the Melbourne bone beds, a series of patches along the east coast containing the bones of extinct animals just as they were buried thousands of years ago beneath beds of shifting sand. Investigation of these beds has been carried on from time to time, but the deposits are so rich that it will be many years before all the material can be assembled and classified.

Geological information on Florida is not to be obtained from mountains, where outcroppings can be studied with comparatively little effort and expense, but from strata thousands of feet below the surface. Usually the expense of such operations has made geological research in the State an incident of commercial enterprise, as in the deep-well borings of Marion County. Thus only intermittently have geologists been able to study that part of the earth’s history written in the rocks, soils, and waters of Florida.

THE ISLE OF FLOWERS

Florida, regarded by Ponce de Leon as ‘the Isle of Flowers,’ is entirely within the temperate zone but is influenced by subtropical waters. As a result, most of its tropical plants bloom in summer and many of the temperate zone varieties bloom in winter—a reversal of the usual order. This, together with the State’s four distinct growing seasons, produces an unusual mingling of vegetation.

High and low ‘hammocks,’ fresh and salt marshes, sand and clay hills, and rich muck beds are well suited to both native and imported plant life, but the distribution of the many species is greatly influenced by topography. Native plants are especially sensitive to elevation. In the flat pine woods a shallow depression reaching water level usually results in the appearance of a cypress dome; a rise of from six to eight feet frequently means a change from pine to scrub blackjack oak.

Mark Catesby, an English naturalist, collected specimens of Florida plant life as early as 1731, and published prints of many that he found. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, William Bartram, son of John Bartram, botanist to the King of England, created something of a sensation both here and abroad by his published description of Florida plants. Only recently a rare bulbous plant described by him, the blue ixia, was rediscovered growing on the roadside between Jacksonville and St. Augustine. André Michaux, who was sent to Florida by the French Government to gather botanical specimens, arrived in 1788; part of his herbarium is now in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Dr. Henry Perrine, a distinguished pioneer in the study of subtropical plants, met his death on Indian Key at the hands of Indians in 1840. Dr. Alvan Wentworth Chapman of Apalachicola narrowly escaped capture by Indians while he was searching near St. Marks for the feathery blooms of the titi, a native tree. His Flora of the Southern United States, published in 1860, is still a standard work. As a result of studies by these and many other distinguished botanists, more than 3,000 varieties of indigenous flowering plants have been identified, ranging in size from the magnolia to the delicate terrestrial orchid, and in many cases found nowhere else in North America. Together with thousands of imported tropical or subtropical plants, they make Florida a favorite field for the botanist and the amateur flower lover.

In general, Florida vegetation is distributed among seven more or less distinct habitats—flatwoods, scrub lands, grassy swamps, savannas, salt marshes, hammocks or hardwood forests, and high pinelands. Collectively, these contain about half of the tree species found north of Mexico, and more varieties of native trees than any similar region in America north of the Tropic of Cancer. Yet only five—oak, pine, cypress, palm, and mangrove—are the familiar trees of Florida.

Flatwoods, common throughout the State, consist of poorly drained level areas, with a sour boggy soil. Although open forests constitute their chief vegetation, they contain an abundance of flowers that bloom many months of the year. Most noteworthy in the low and wet fields of lower Florida are the terrestrial orchids, of which there are 64 varieties. Here also are the insect catchers—pitcher plants, sundews, and yellow and purple Pinguicula—together with red lilies and several species of milkwort. Among the more showy native species are the liatris, commonly called the blazing star, whose nodding purple spikes decorate the landscape in late summer and fall, and the gray-leaved, pale-blue lupine that covers the hills and roadsides as early as February.

The scrub lands, identified by small sand pines, include much of the ridge district in the central part of the peninsula, together with the sand dunes along the coasts. The ridge area, abounding in lakes and springs, is characterized by dense growths of saw palmetto, evergreen, live oaks, blackjack, and water oaks, interspersed with varieties of evergreen shrubs, hollies, and such members of the heath family as huckleberries, sparkle-berries, and fetter-bush. Many species of cactus are common. Throughout the central and lower east-coast section grows a cycad, the coontie of the genus Zamia, roots of which provide a kind of arrowroot. From these roots the Indians often made bread during the Seminole Wars, when they could not remain in one locality long enough to raise corn. Most of this region is fragrant from early March to June with the blossoms of commercially grown grapefruit, tangerine, and orange trees. (The orange blossom is of interest not only to citrus growers and wedding parties—it has been chosen as the State flower.) During the same season, fields of white and red morning-glories, sunflowers, and black-eyed Susans are conspicuous.

In the savannas of central Florida, water lettuce forms a heavy aquatic growth, and spectacular displays of the yellow American lotus may be seen on several of the fresh-water marshes. The major marine grasses are the turtle, eel, and manatee varieties. The cabbage palm predominates in palm savannas over the State. Floating water hyacinths cover many small lakes and streams, often growing thickly enough to impede navigation. On the east coast, and for a distance along the lower Gulf coast, are flourishing growths of Spanish bayonets, seagrapes, lantanas, and blue verbena (Verbena maritima).

The larger plant growth in north Florida is longleaf and other pines, cypresses, magnolias, bays, gums, and oaks. Two trees native to the northwest area, Tumion cedar and Floridian yew, grow only along the Apalachicola River. Chapman’s rhododendron is found exclusively in the sandy pinelands of west Florida.

Near the coast in lower Dade County and extending to the western edge of Homestead, an area of 500 square miles, is a region of pineland without a close counterpart elsewhere in the world. In the absence of sufficient topsoil, the trees take root directly in the soft honeycombed lime rock that outcrops here. Much of the native vegetation of southern Florida (which is free from severe frosts) occurs nowhere else in the United States. Here cypresses, mangroves, mahoganies, ferns, lianas, and aerial plant growths flourish, as well as several of the State’s most decorative palms.

Of a half-dozen varieties of oak, the laurel, water, and live oaks (the latter an evergreen species) attain great size. Many of the State’s towns and villages may be recognized immediately as older settlements by the water oaks, with their straight trunks and high branches, that shade the streets. It has been said of the live oak that a man can always rest his hand on a lower bough. The trunk is short and thick, and the spread of the tree is often greater than its height. Some of the moss-hung live oaks in Florida today were standing when America was discovered.

Although the palm is Florida’s much exploited emblem, the pine is its commonest tree. From the stunted sand variety to the tall open-crown longleaf type, the pine ranges over the peninsula on upland and plain, and masses luxuriantly in the flatwoods. The quick-growing slash is the crop pine, and with the loblolly supplies raw material to Florida’s paper mills.

Florida has but 15 native palms, among which only the cabbage palmetto grows naturally throughout the State; but to these more than a hundred species have been added from every palm-growing country in the world. The majority of the natives, which include four palmettoes, are palmate or fan-flared; and only two, the royal and the coconut, bear pinnate or feather leaves. The royal palm, now largely transplanted, grows wild on the muck lands near the lower Gulf coast. The coconut palm, also transplanted, is widespread on the Florida Keys, extending to Key West; its presence here is attributed to the buoyancy of its fruit, which drifted up from the American tropics and took root on the island reef. Other palms, small and mostly of the thatch varieties, grow on the reef.

The palmettoes, with their recumbent trunks and enormous root systems, form impenetrable mats that blanket the dry waste spaces throughout the State. They are usually of a yellow-green color; but one variety of saw palmetto takes on a startling glaucous blue on the high dunes along the Atlantic coast.

The royal is the sovereign palm for ornamental planting, but in cooler central Florida it abdicates in favor of a plumy palm, popularly miscalled Cocos plumosa, a hardy feather-leaf importation from Brazil. The Washingtonian palm, from Mexico, is another much used for street planting; it attains great height but does not shed its fronds, and unless trimmed it disports a gray ‘hula’ skirt of dried leaves that reaches nearly to the ground. Among the curious importations is the traveler’s palm, an apparently two-dimensional fan-shaped tree, the fronds of which are said to point naturally north and south. It can be tapped for drinking water, and therefore serves both as a font and a compass for the wayfarer in desert countries.

Dense thickets of red, white, and black mangroves cover the greater portion of Florida’s lower coast. Mangroves grow from floating seeds shaped somewhat like elephant tusks that anchor themselves in shallow places. These strange trees rise from tide-washed sand flats where, with their exposed perpendicular roots, they give the impression of a forest marching on stilts. The mangrove is a land builder; its aerial roots collect quantities of drifting earth and debris, and gradually the shore line back of the trees is extended. The greatest of mangrove forests are those on the Ten Thousand Islands, a wild and partly submerged region south of Marco on the Gulf coast.

The largest swamp and savanna area of the State is the Everglades, a section occupying nearly all the southern interior of the peninsula and covered for the most part with tall grasses and sedges, the most common being a tawny sawgrass. On elevations and islands are patches of live oak surrounded by fringes of coco plum. The custard apple, a species of the Annona, often forms dense thickets here; but where the land is low, cypress is the common tree. The Big Cypress Swamp of Collier County, embracing 2,400 square miles west of the Everglades, is the largest of its kind in Florida. The buttressed trunk of the cypress spreads wide at its base for greater support, and projecting into the air, sometimes at a considerable distance from the roots, are ‘knees,’ believed to be of use in aerating the tree. Known to manufacturers as the ‘wood eternal,’ the cypress dates back to the ice age; specimens excavated from ancient rock strata were neither decayed nor petrified. Known also as the oldest living thing on the earth, attaining an age of 6,000 years, the cypress grows slowly, adding but an inch to its radius in 30 years. The living patriarch of these trees in Florida is ‘Old Senator’ at Longwood, estimated to be 3,500 years old. Duckweed, floating heart, sagittaria, bonnets, and bladderwort grow luxuriously in the shallow water, and air plants thrive among the tree tops. The Tillandsia or Spanish moss, of the pineapple family, is the most conspicuous of the epiphytic or air-growing plants.

Contrasting vividly with the fresh green of new cypress foliage are the spider orchid, with fragrant, narrow-petaled, large white flowers; the shell orchid, with its showy larkspurlike spike; and the chintz orchid, bearing odd-looking mottled flowers. Great orchids (Cyrtopodium punctatum), some of them almost unbelievably huge, have been found in the Everglades. Expeditions from the New York Botanical Gardens have reported specimens with as many as a thousand blossoms, and one, estimated to be 500 years old, so large that four men were needed to lift it.

Hammocks are defined by J. K. Small, the botanist, as dense growths of trees and shrubs, mostly broad-leaved, sometimes occupying whole circumscribed portions of a geological formation, or occurring as ‘islands’ surrounded by pine woods or prairie. Hammock soil is rich in humus and is arable when cleared. In the hardwood hammocks of northern Florida, looping vines of rattan, wild grape, and Spanish moss festoon cabbage palms, magnolias, and oaks.

Florida’s jungles are made up mostly of hardwood growths—oaks, gums, bays, and magnolias—intertwined with tenacious creepers, hostile vines, and bristling plants that bar passage. One of the latter is the thorny Cerus pentagonus, of which Charles Torrey Simpson, the naturalist, has written: ‘I have abused it elsewhere but it is sufficiently villainous to call for more condemnation. I cannot conceive how it would be possible to devise a more devilish plant. Not frequently it almost fills the vacant space in the forest, thrusting its long, lithe stems through the thickest growth and appearing in the most unexpected places. Its stems may be three or five angled, and each is lined with terrific spines an inch or more in length. They are so sharp and strong that they easily pierce the heaviest leather. The explorer may be ever so alert but he is certain to run into dozens of them. He is equally sure to carry away a fine collection of its thorns, which have a vicious way of breaking off in the body.’

Two native rubber trees of the jungles are the so-called strangling or strangler fig, and a shortleaf variety which resembles the banyan of India. The strangling fig derives its name from the fact that it often germinates on trunks and branches of other trees, sending down root stems that encircle and eventually strangle the host tree.

More than a hundred ferns and plants closely related to ferns are found in the State. Fronds of the largest tropical varieties are from 10 to 18 feet in length. Of the two great fern areas in Florida, one is in the west-central lime sink region, the other in the extreme southern portion of the State.

An immense variety of rare, odd, and beautiful plants has been introduced by the U.S. Plant Introduction Garden at Cocoanut Grove, Miami, by numerous private nurseries, and by owners of large private estates. Purple and magenta bougainvillea and the golden bignonia, or flame vine, embellish walls and gateways. Hedges and clusters of flowering oleander, Turk’s-cap, and hibiscus are seen everywhere. The rapid-growing Australian pine is not a true pine, but belongs to the same group as the European paradise plant. Although not so sturdy as the native pine, the tree thrives in dry sandy soil, and is seldom damaged by salt spray. It is tall, symmetrical, and pointed, an importation of recent years used for windbreaks and street planting. Exotic fruits, silk oaks, the feathery bamboo, the jacaranda, the poinsettia, and the variegated crotons are favorites among the cultivated trees and plants.

ANIMAL LIFE

Pioneers and explorers recorded centuries ago that Florida was immensely rich in animal life. Today much of the State retains its early wilderness character and, in a great variety of natural habitats, affords refuge and retreat for numerous species. Moderate winters and ample sunshine have helped to produce a particularly abundant aquatic life.

Eighty-four species of land mammals are found in Florida. Black bear, deer, gray fox, wildcat, bay lynx, and puma inhabit the extensive areas of swamp and forest. The puma, or Florida panther, leads an isolated life in the Big Cypress country of lower Florida, more than a thousand miles from its nearest relative, the mountain lion, or western cougar. The Florida species is slightly smaller than the mountain lion.

The majority of the small animals are those common to all Southern States, but they are particularly numerous here: squirrels, cottontail rabbits, raccoons, and opossums. An unusual type is the marsh rabbit, a relative of the woods rabbit of Central and South America, which is known locally as the ‘pontoon.’ It is somewhat smaller than the cottontail and may be distinguished by its smaller ears, shorter hind legs, and nearly unicolored tail. Except for the swamp rabbit, this is the only species of rabbit that will take to the water. The small rodent oddly termed ‘salamander’ is actually the pocket gopher, while the so-called ‘Florida gopher’ is a land turtle. The salamander builds the countless little white mounds of sand that are a familiar sight in Florida. The mounds appear mysteriously overnight, but the industrious creatures that build them are seldom seen. The manatee, or sea cow, is another rarity, a marine mammal that was once particularly abundant along the Indian and Manatee Rivers. Otter and mink, once plentiful, have been greatly reduced by trapping.

The wild razorback hog, though still present and untamed, has been abolished by law; an act of the 1937 legislature declared the wild razorback legally nonexistent in order to do away with a common defense in cases of hog theft—that the culprit thought the filched beast was wild and therefore ownerless.

More than 400 species and subspecies of birds have been recorded, counting the numerous migrants that winter in Florida. The mockingbird was chosen Florida’s State bird by a vote of the school children, and made officially so in 1927 by an act of the legislature. An old argument as to the relative singing ability of the mockingbird and the European nightingale was settled in 1931 at Bok Tower, near Lake Wales, when imported nightingales demonstrated their talent in competition with mockingbirds of the neighborhood. The latter at once appropriated the song of the nightingales and made it a part of their own repertoire.

Among the common land birds nesting in Florida, the bald eagle and the turkey buzzard are the largest. Woodlands abound in titmice, catbirds, kingbirds, and butcher birds; tiny humming birds; gnatcatchers and chickadees; colorful orchard orioles, cardinals, summer tanagers, brown thrashers, blue birds and painted buntings;