Cedar Key is an old fishing village about 50 miles southwest of Gainesville, an island in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s often referred to as “old Florida” because not much has changed here in decades. I set my novel Ghost Key here. It isn’t a tourist mecca, like the 113-mile string of islands that stretch from Miami to Key West, connected by a single road and 42 bridges. In fact, I’m always surprised how many Floridians have never heard of Cedar Key.
We’ve been visiting the island for years, staying in different areas – in a condo on the Gulf, in a house on a magnificent salt marsh, and most recently in a house on stilts on a dead end road that faces Gooseneck Bay. A dog friendly house.
Cedar Key has an intriguing history. In 1999, an archeological dig at Shell Mound, 9 miles north of the island, found artifacts in the top ten feet of a 28-foot tall mound that date back to 500 BC. A skeleton that was 2,000 years old was found in an ancient burial site. What lies even farther down inside that mound?
The original Cedar Key was called Atsena Otie Key and lies about half a mile away. In the late 1800s, it was home to a pencil-wood factory – Eagle pencils – and several hundred residents. The cedar trees that provided the wood for the pencils were wiped out and in 1896, so was the island. That was the year a hurricane and a ten-foot storm surge flattened Atsena Otie Key. The survivors moved to another island and built the present-day Cedar Key.
Today, the original island is managed by the Cedar Keys National Wildlife Refuge and if you rent kayaks or a boat, the island is accessible. We did kayaks one day and rented a boat the next and took the dogs with us.
They were overjoyed to be on solid ground after two hours of drifting and fishing, and leaped into the water to cool off.
Then we all headed for the boardwalk and path through the wilderness of oaks strung with Spanish moss.
The path used to be the main street through town and all along it, white butterflies flit and dance through light and shadows until it ends at a spooky cemetery.
When you enter this place, the air changes. It’s not that the heat or humidity are replaced by frigid air; it’s something more subtle. I immediately felt that all the white butterflies we saw coming in were spirits, and that some of them were the spirits of the 25 people buried here.
Several of the ornately carved gravestones have withstood the weathering of more than a century. As I snapped photos with my phone, I suddenly felt like a time traveler, plunked down in a strange little town in the late 1890s. I started wondering about and imagining the lives of some of the people buried here. For a novelist, this place lends itself to the wild and unpredictable.
The challenges the residents of this island faced just in terms of climate must have been formidable. The interminable heat. The bugs. Just the bugs would be enough to make me flee – mosquitoes the size of 747s, no-seeums barely as large as a period that bite their way through your hair, spiders with massive webs strung between the trees.
These people also faced disease – malaria and typhoid among the most prevalent And, of course the hurricanes and dramatic tide changes. At low tide, there was probably a floor of soggy mud all the way to today’s Cedar Key. Low tide would have been a great time to harvest clams and crabs. Here’s Megan, pretending to eat a dead Horseshoe crab she found in the sand.
I knew that if I stood in the midst of these oaks that shaded the cemetery, relaxed and with my eyes shut, I would be able to pull that time around me. If I did that, would I be able to get back to my own time? Coward that I am, I snapped my photos and kept moving.
The gravestones – the etchings of dates, of signs and symbols, the names themselves – reveal bits and pieces of a lost culture. Fragments have survived in the present day Cedar Key – the stilt houses built on tall concrete pilings to withstand any storm surge, the fishing tradition, the camaraderie and friendliness of the people who call this place home. And always wherever you venture of the island, there’s the lure and mystery of the sea.
I went to college at the University of Florida and groups of us would drive to Cedar Key for dinner on weekends. There were the old Florida restaurants on the side of the road selling fresh cooked seafood. When I lived in Orlando in the 1980s and 1990s we flew there and I was amazed at the changes to “improve” the place. A boardwalk with all the tourist trap shops. This was on the mainland, not the island. It was such a shame to see this progress in reverse.
How fortunate that you saw it in the days before! Still, compared to places like Key West, Cedar Key still reminds me of Old Florida.
Beautiful. Interesting. A book coming from this? The state of Florida ought to hire you to write about all these things the rest of us know nothing about.
That would be fun!
Sounds like the perfect beginning to a novel. I couldn’t help but wonder about all the souls that lived and died there in the late 1800’s.
I actually thought of you, Nancy, as I was walking thru that cemetery. Weird, huh?
It is a special place, no doubt. I love the feeling of Cedar Key as you describe it here. It does sound like a completely different part of Florida. The bugs would deter me from visiting for any length of time, though. 🙂
The no-seeuums are bad, but with OFF, you’re good!