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.