Big River

EDITOR'S NOTE: Award-winning environmental journalist Bill Belleville embarked on a boat trip all the way along the St. Johns River, from its headwaters in Indian River and Brevard counties, 310 miles north through Jacksonville and out into the Atlantic Ocean at Mayport. He wrote about his pilgrimage in a book called River of Lakes: A Journey on Florida's St. Johns River (University of Georgia Press). Excerpted here are portions of the book that describe the river's path through Northeast Florida.

The massive Shands Bridge rises up from the water to the north, right beyond the easterly peninsula of Pacetti Point and Palmo Cove. After being lulled into a buzz-like complacency by the broad, repetitive nature of traveling through the middle of the St. Johns River, the appearance of the bridge startles me, looming on the horizon, one long, low span engorged by a behemoth hump.

The hump is the only way for any boat larger than a skiff to get under the bridge, and I aim for it.

I think of this bridge as the gateway to suburban Jacksonville, the tangible arch through which the river passes for another transformation. There are only 50 river miles left before the ocean jetties at Mayport, and they will soon be busy, eclectic miles, indeed.

To the right, the confluences of both Six Mile and Trout creeks slosh in slow motion out into the shallow Palmo Cove, the last bastion of eastern shore wilderness. Upstream, each creek is spanned in turn by S.R. 13—the William Bartram Scenic Highway—in a set of low-slung concrete bridges.

Huddled on the opposite shore from Palmo Cove is Bayard Point, a 10.5-square-mile conservation area that sprawls southward from the foot of the bridge. It is another one of the low-profile, unsung water management tracts bought to keep wetlands intact—storing floodwaters as it preserves natural lands.

Bayard Point is the last truly wild stretch of river I will find before Jacksonville; if I wanted to linger, I could wander through a forest of bottomland hardwoods, pine flatwoods and communities of sandhills, perhaps even encountering warblers and woodpeckers, deer and wild turkey, bald eagles, even the massive but harmless eastern indigo snake.

But there is a mystery to be considered here. It has to do with the naturalist Bartram, who not only traveled upriver in two separate explorations but actually lived and farmed along the St. Johns for almost two years.

Over the top with artistic sensibilities, Bartram—naturally enough—became a dismal failure as a farmer. His abandoned 500-acre indigo plantation fell so completely into obscurity that later historians couldn't find it when they looked earlier in this century.

This particular secret remained sealed until 1995, when history professor Daniel L. Schafer from the University of North Florida did a bit of clever sleuthing. He began by reviewing the only firsthand description of the plantation, recorded by a wealthy South Carolina merchant named Henry Laurens. The merchant visited Billy there in August 1776 and came away disturbed by the condition of both the writer-naturalist and the farm.

The plantation, wrote Laurens in a letter to Billy's father, John, back in Philadelphia, is "the least agreeable of all the places I have seen, on a low sheet of sandy pine barren verging on the swamp.so shoal and covered with umbrellas that.the water is stagnated."

Schafer pondered the description of the land. In London, where the Public Records office recently completed restoration on documents immersed by floods and sewage decades ago, he discovered deeds and maps of the "East Florida Claims Commission." In three of those files, he found references to the land owned by Bartram.

The site of the plantation, says Schafer, is a squat peninsula of land known as "Smith's Point," bordered on one side by the easterly footing of the Shands Bridge and on the other by "Little Florence Cove." The plantation house itself, which Laurens described as a "hovel," likely stood near where Florence Cove Road ends, a relic still awaiting the "ground-truthing" of archaeological examination.

It is this point of land I approach by late afternoon. It has been a long day, and I anchor across the river from the cove near the wilderness of Bayard Point. The sun sets, tinting the sky crimson in the west, launching a sliver of a crescent moon into the dusk of the east.

Sreen Cove Springs first comes before me just beyond the Shands Bridge, and it does so in the form of a series of 1,000-foot-long piers once used to mothball a fleet of World War II ships. A couple of the southernmost piers seem to be given over to a marina. Just downriver, the piers give way to a shallow cove. The workaday town of Green Cove Springs itself pushes up against the point of land bordered by the cove and Governors Creek just to the north.

I have an old colored postcard of Green Cove, from the halcyon days when it was the most prominent landing and resort between Jacksonville and Palatka, back when the town radiated out from the luxury hotels that housed the steamboat visitors.

Like the other riverside resorts, Green Cove sported a winter "season" that both began and ended with the glitter of tony balls at hotels like the St. Clair and the Clarendon, which adjoined the artesian sulfur springs. Today, a hydrological report shows the springs still active, pumping out three cubic feet per second—barely 2 million gallons per day.

On the opposite riverbank, a visitor named D.R. Mitchell told of a "similar spring and a place called Remington Park, and a hotel is talked of." But on the spit of land where Remington Park is mapped, there is a clue to a reality far more tangible than the promotional premise of an artesian spring and another resort hotel.

At the peninsular tip is a cape with the unlikely name of Popo Point. It is the site of the Fort San Francisco de Pupo, a small Spanish fortress so lost in time that mapmakers have discarded all but one word of its name and converted the "u" to an "o" in what remains. First built of wood by the Spanish in 1737, Fort Pupo was destroyed by the British forces of General Oglethorpe in 1740, and then rebuilt from coquina. Now, it has vanished.

I have turned in my houseboat and will travel from here to the ocean in a 25-foot custom-built aluminum-hulled research vessel operated by the St. Johns River Water Management District. Used to monitor water quality along the lower river, the boat and its crew routinely travel the St. Johns in pursuit of science, even on the most grim of days.

The lower river, which is inviting, if formidable, on a pleasant, sunny day, looks serious and steely and decidedly unfriendly today. "Even the fisherman has to respect us when they see us out on days like this," jokes biologist John Burns, a specialist in sea grasses along this stretch of the river.

Off we go from a ramp near Green Cove Springs, headed into a steady chop and a chilled wind made even colder by our speed. Aboard, hunkered down in the lee of the skimpy cabin with us, is environmental specialist Dean Campbell. Campbell grew up in Palatka, upstream from here, and as a boy remembers seeing the remains of the outdated and abandoned steamship Hiawatha gradually slough itself off into detritus, until it became part of the flow of the river itself.

Upcoming off our easterly gunnels is Black Creek, a major tributary on the lower river. Steamboats once traveled all the way upstream to Middleburg, and live oak cutters floated their lumber in rafts downstream to the sawmills at Jacksonville.

Ship captains routinely stopped to "water" here, believing the creek's waters were both "sweeter" and hardier here, less likely to become stagnant on long voyages, even ones that sailed outside the river and down the coast of Florida.

With its very own drainage basin of 500 square miles, Black Creek is in turn fed by no fewer than 14 other creeks, which trail off in all directions for a combined total of 143 extraordinary miles. Along with the Ocklawaha and the Wekiva, Black Creek is usually the only other St. Johns tributary to be included in most guides to canoeing and kayaking in Florida.

Found here and nowhere else on earth is the Black Creek crayfish (Procambarus pictus), along with three species of endemic midges. Many scientists believe pictus itself to be the earliest surface-dwelling crayfish to colonize the newly formed peninsula of Florida, truly a living fossil.

North we go, slicing through the steady winter chop, past Fleming Island and its Hibernia Point to the west and Switzerland to the east, two places named by original settlers with ineffable longings for their European homelands.

The Fleming family from Ireland carved out a thriving cotton plantation here in 1790 under a Spanish grant, constructing a grandiose manor house with seven chimneys. Switzerland was so named by Francis Philip Fatio, a Swiss from Bern who settled here during the British ownership of Florida in 1772.

The mouth of Julington Creek passes to the east. Stretching a half-mile from shore to shore, Julington easily dwarfs portions of the upper river I have seen below Palatka, and it sports its own arched bridge, which I notice is busy with toy-sized vehicles streaming to and fro over it like slot cars.

On the north shore of Julington is the muscular peninsula that holds Mandarin, with its own treasure trove of secrets. "We're right over the site of the Maple Leaf," says Campbell suddenly, referring to the Civil War-era Union steamer sunk in mid-river by a torpedo in 1864.

And there it lay, preserved from both wood-boring teredo worms and rot, a time capsule holding detailed memories of one brief moment in the Civil War, until Jacksonville dentist and avid amateur archaeologist Keith Holland decided to open it.

After careful research—and with approval of state and federal officials—Holland's crew of mostly volunteer divers found the site and began the painstaking chore of excavating it in 1987. Work took place in two-knot currents and total darkness, as mud sediment and tannin blocked out surface light.

But the diligence paid off: Over the next few years, more than 6,000 artifacts would be recovered, including handmade checkers, an officer's sword handle, a powder flask, a bale of tobacco and a still playable wooden flute. In 1994, the Maple Leaf was even recognized as a National Historic Landmark Shipwreck Site.

However, there is more here at Mandarin than maritime history, however fiery it may be. Like other high and dry landings, the site was once a Timucua village, once named Thimaqua. British settlers built over it, calling their own village St. Anthony; later the Spanish translated that to San Antonio. By 1821 Thimaqua became Mandarin, for the hybrid orange sometimes grown here.

Ashore on the edge of Mandarin Point is the former site of writer Harriet Beecher Stowe's homes and her 30-acre citrus grove. Wintering here from 1868 to 1883, the prim New Englander and her husband, Calvin Stowe—the dignified, white-bearded "Professor"—are still pictured in sepia-tinted photographs sitting on the front porch, next to where a giant oak grows through the porch roof, under cornices of gingerbread and wooden arbors woven with vine.

From her home, the author and abolitionist shipped crates of fruit northward; each stenciled with the label "Oranges From Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mandarin, Florida."

Stowe was as messianic about her love for Florida as she was about equality for former slaves, and it was revealed to the rest of the world in her collection of essays, Palmetto Leaves, published in 1873. In it, she raved about life on the wild, broad St. Johns, where "our life is so still and lonely.that even so small an event as our crossing the river for a visit is all absorbing."

Along with the Arlington River in downtown Jacksonville, Julington Creek marks the boundary of the zone where the incoming wedge of saltwater from the ocean first meets fresh water and mixes with it.

To the west as we go is the suburb of Orange Park and the former site of Laurel Grove, a once-grand slave plantation of Zephaniah Kingsley. It was one of a chain of plantations that stretched up and down the river from Drayton Island back in Lake George.

The upcoming Buckman Bridge, a six-lane span of metal and concrete, carries autos for more than three miles across the river at the southernmost loop of I-295, beginning not far from Laurel Grove.

Freshwater grasses, even the ones still surviving, disappear just south of Jacksonville as the incoming saltwater wedge washes over the river bottom. But unlike other estuarine nurseries, no widespread pastures of sea grasses arise to take their place.

To the west, we churn past Piney Point, upon which the Jacksonville Naval Air Station and its contingent of madly zooming military helicopters are mounted.

Just on the other side, the Ortega River joins the main stem, running in the same direction like an acceleration ramp on an interstate highway. The confluence of the Ortega marks the last bit of wide river I will see before the St. Johns reaches the ocean.

Here the broad St. Johns begins to funnel itself up agilely into the "Narrows" of Jacksonville, before doglegging due east, north, and east again, at rather astoundingly unnatural angles of nearly 45 degrees. The channel here will become especially tight, the current swift and the bottom deep—up to 70 feet and more in spots. Tides moving in from the ocean shift directions about every six hours.

For serious sport boaters with the need for provisions, densely settled Ortega is widely known for its one-stop shopping: Not only are there food markets and marinas up and down the creek, but there are restaurants and yacht clubs—in fact, nearly anything one might expect from a shopping plaza.

Hydrologically, the Ortega River is another spider-webbing waterway, winding through a 99-square-mile drainage basin, confluxing with its own set of tributaries, including the Cedar River, and creeks named Butcher Pen, Wills Branch, Fishing, and—the most distant—McGirts.

Oddly, all of Ortega was once called McGirts Creek. It was so named for Dan McGirt, who once set up an outlaw camp on the bank of the stream. McGirt was a turncoat Revolutionary War soldier who fled his regiment, joined up with the Rangers of British East Florida, and, with them, led raids through northern Florida and southern Georgia, torching the homes, huts, and camps of patriots as he went. When the war ended, McGirt's zeal for plundering continued in a most egalitarian fashion: From his river camp, he robbed and raided British, American and Spanish settlements indiscriminately.

Downstream, past the territory of Dan McGirt, we go under another bridge—this one the Fuller Warren. With its preponderance of no fewer than six road and railroad bridges, Jacksonville is not only the most bridged segment of the St. Johns but also perhaps the most bridged large river in all of Florida—all within a few miles of waterway.

Urban Jacksonville sprawls out around me, and it is a place of tall, shiny buildings, all mighty testaments to human enterprise on the river, a virtual canyon of ambition. Yet there is a special aesthetic to all this, especially by evening, when the lights of the riverside city sparkle and the arching spans across the water are electrified, all of it reflected in the mirror of the black river, creating a dynamic skyline as uniquely Floridian as any I've ever seen.

When entrepreneurs first went inland in Florida to exploit the resources, they came to this place, setting up a water-powered sawmill upstream on Six Mile Creek in 1819 and the first steam-driven sawmill on nearby Trout Creek in 1829.

By the mid-19th century, there were around a dozen mills in what is today the greater Jacksonville area, buzzing and slicing the newly valuable live oak and first-growth pine into ship's timbers and hulls. The availability of these "naval stores," combined with an ocean port, spawned a frenetic shipbuilding trade. The Industrial Revolution, not due to begin for another quarter-century in the rest of the world, got a jump start in Florida right here on the river.

It takes a fierce imagination to remember that this is a mere cortex to a deeper body of time, that a Timucua village called Wacca Pilatka—the place where the cows cross—was once here. Narrower than the rest of the lower river, this was a natural place to herd livestock—to ford cows—and to ferry supplies and people from one side of the river to the other. Jacksonville, in fact, was once originally "Cowford" by the British.

The name Jacksonville seems modernistic in comparison, even though it dates from 1822, when the newly surveyed city needed a serious American name and a soldier who had served under Andrew Jackson came up with one.

Even then, though, the ghosts of the Timucua surely outnumbered the settlers by the multitudes: In 1830, the population was only 100. Steamboats began to appear a year later with the docking of the George Washington, and change has arrived in quantum portions ever since.

Out to the middle of the channel we go today, headed for the sea itself. Bottlenose dolphins, tiger and hammerhead sharks wander in and out from the Atlantic, sometimes turning back at downtown Jacksonville, sometimes not. Shorebirds like royal terns have become more common than herons or egrets, which have accompanied me over most of the river.

Although news accounts often have this river "ending" in Jacksonville, it needs another 20 to 25 miles to wind its way from here to the sea. It is headed east now, for the first time in its life. Its shores, which have variously guided the destiny of Florida by acting as boundaries—between the Europeans and the Seminoles, the British and the Spanish, the Union and the Confederates—now draw the line between the compass points of north and south, rather than east and west.

The maps Campbell has given me are fascinating glimpses into the evolution of this grand maritime finale. As we brace ourselves on the bouncing deck of the research boat, Campbell offers a Cliff Notes version of the historic transformation:

"The massive sandbar at the mouth of the river used to restrict flow and depth of the current. After the jetties were put into place to keep the channel open, and the government began dredging 'cuts' along the channel, the course of the river was changed forever. Islands disappeared, or turned into part of the mainland."

There are plenty of industrious things here shoreside as we continue our voyage downriver, and they are serious, metallic, Byzantine-looking things indeed. After all, this is the Port of Jacksonville, and it is a sprawl of public docks and private terminals that stretches along the river for nearly 15 miles to Blount Island.

Somewhere along this route is the Dames Point Bridge, a giant harp-like affair that became the newest major span to be built across the river in the late 1980s. The northernmost link of the I-295 beltway, it became the access needed to open the last bit of undeveloped salt marsh along the northern leg of the river.

Woods thankfully reclaim the shoreline, studded with a few homes. And then, tucked in amid the thickest wall of foliage, a dream of the past emerges. It is Fort Caroline—or at least an imagined replica of what the French fort might once have been—and it sits on a low slab of riverbank along a stretch of river mapped as St. Johns Bluff.

It is a stockade-like defense with wood-trimmed picket walls, the sort of fort that would have been hastily built in 1564 in an environment with few solid mediums but trees and dirt. This is the Fort Caroline National Monument, and it has been constructed this time not by desperate French settlers but by the National Park Service, which readily admits that "no physical evidence of the colony has been found."

Instead, this is the "probable area where the early story of European colonization of northeast Florida took place." The triangular fort, surrounded by a small moat, is based on a drawing by Jacques Le Moyne, the resident French artist who gave us our first and best illustrations of the Timucua.

Forget Jamestown and the "Lost Colony" of North Carolina and even Plymouth Rock—which would not be reached for another 76 years by the intrepid Pilgrims. This is the site of the first known European settlement inside the present-day borders of the United States. And it is a testament to the collective amnesia about Florida's role in early American history that it is not more widely recognized as such.

After an initial landing by Admiral Jean Ribault at the mouth of the river in 1562, the fort and surrounding settlement were built two years later, under the command of Rene Goulaine de Laudonniere. It was not staffed by farmers and craftsmen, who could have helped the colony become self-sufficient, but by some 300 soldiers and sailors, among them only four women, said to be wives. Its purpose was to stake a French claim on this exotic new territory.

After first touching on today's Fort George Island at the river mouth, Ribault found both a people and a place that seemed lifted out of a mariner's dream.

"They be all naked and of a goodly stature, mighty, faire and as well shapen and proportioned of bodye as any people in all the worlde, very gentill, curtious and of a good nature," wrote Ribault. As for the land itself, it was the "fairest, frutefullest and pleasantest of all the world, habonding in honey, veneson, wildfoule, forrestes, woodes of all sorts, palme trees, cipers, ceders, bays.And the sight of the faire medowes is a pleasure not able to be expressed with tonge."

Despite the lush bounty of fish and game that surrounded them, the French nearly starved during their year here, begging and even stealing food from the Timucua, until they were finally reduced to eating acorns.

The Spanish, even more driven by the lure of treasure, and not terribly pleased with the Huguenots nesting on the shores of La Florida, captured and then slaughtered most of the French, claiming the fort for their own. Only a handful of French escaped to the woods, but among them was Jacques Le Moyne, who fled finally back to Europe, where he re-created the detailed illustrations of the people he closely observed for more than a year.

And so, in its present incarnation, Fort Caroline opens the door to a gigantic, sprawling historic landscape. It is a landscape that not just honors the French arrival on the river but also acknowledges the once vital presence of the Timucua, who welcomed them as friends. It does so by protecting a 72-square-mile expanse of forest and wild salt marsh and beach, all veined with some 20 tidal creeks, inside the surrounding Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve.

Stretching away from the site of the replica fort on both sides of the river, the preserve covers what was once Timucua territory, from the river north across Clapboard and Cedar Point creeks, and up to the edge of the sea, all the way to Big Talbot Island and the Nassau River on the coast.

To the south is the fishing wharf of Mayport, named in honor of the first French inscription for the river. Shrimp trawlers named Sassy Lady and Papa Hobart are berthed along its seawall; off in the distance, framed by the rock jetties, another trawler returns from the ocean, gulls encircling like mad butterflies, outriggers down to give it balance, or perhaps to fill one last seine with seafood.

And now, finally, here is the full view of the sea, a perspective that consumes half of the far horizon, even at this distance. Off to the right, the human-made Mayport Basin holds a Brobdingnagian aircraft carrier, one that draws 35 feet of water. There is a naval station and air base here, and on the tip of the barrier island at St. Johns Point, not far perhaps from where Ribault first placed the stone column with a French coat of arms to claim the rivere du Mai and its land for his country, is a U.S. Coast Guard Station.

The water around us now is full of swirling eddies where the outgoing downstream current introduces itself full force to the incoming tides, the last noble molecule of upland St. Johns marsh meeting the indomitable sea.

During my journey, I have gone where there is no measurable current—except perhaps the longing for one—to a place where hydrologists say 58.4 million gallons of water a minute swirl back and forth, between the river and the ocean.

To our left, I see two surf fishermen, braving the weather, silhouetted on the sliver of Fort George Island beach in a late afternoon mist of spindrift and sea. Ahead, through the bookends of the jetties, is the ocean itself, the medium that brought every European here for centuries, the doorway that first introduced the interior of Florida to discovery and settlement, that chased the Timucua into history.

Just beyond is the place where the whales still come to breach, giant mammals that Le Moyne first drew with their heads out of the water. This frothing Atlantic is the beginning of the St. Johns River—as well as its inevitable and timeless end—and I let my heart surge out with it, into the folds of oceanic creation.

A POWERFUL SENATOR, A RIVERSIDE RESPITE.

It was midnight in mid-September, and the harvest moon was shining straight down on the St. Johns River.

State Sen. Jim King (R-Jacksonville), his wife, Linda, and several other couples had just finished watching a Florida State University football game on the television in their riverfront mobile home retreat when they got an urge to take a boat ride.

"It was such a beautiful night that we got out on the water to take a midnight, moonlit cruise," remembers King. "We turned the motor off and kind of drifted. It was like the only people on earth were on this boat. And when you looked up all you could see was the black sky, the big full moon and stars. It was almost a religious moment."

Such are the emotions the mighty St. Johns can evoke as it winds its 300-mile way north from the Central Florida headwaters to the Atlantic Ocean terminus at Mayport.

It's that kind of river magic that has more buyers heading farther and farther upstream to find their own bargain-priced slice of riverbank. But even a riverfront manufactured home in an out-of-the-way spot such as Welaka, located more than 70 miles south of Jacksonville in Putnam County, can now cost more than an average house in the city.

"For generations, the ocean was king, or the Gulf," says King. "Now the rivers are having their day."

King, who bought several mobile-home lots in Welaka's Sportsman's Harbor several years ago, has seen his property values double in recent years as city-dwellers—some friends of his—have made similar purchases.

Lots on the river with mobile homes and docks that were bought by retirees a decade ago for $50,000 to $60,000 are selling for $300,000 to $500,000 now, King says.

"I think you'd be hard pressed to find any area in Florida where the property values have accelerated as fast. It's become a very desirable location. People are streaming in from all over."

And so the story goes on up the river to Jacksonville, with price tags climbing the farther north you go.

"A lot just sold on River Road [in Jacksonville] for $3.1 million," says Realtor Elizabeth Hudgins of Prudential Network Realty. "People are becoming enchanted with the river. It is now increasing in value at an equal rate, almost, to the oceanfront. It's all about water. The river is getting very hot."

Of course, in some spots, the river has always been hot. Ortega, for instance, the exclusive enclave of old-money Jacksonville, is as toney as ever, says Hudgins, with many homes selling for $4 million or more.

—Teresa Burney