Past Perfect

With ecological restoration, La Florida may live again.

by Jim Noles
photography by Richard T. Bryant, Dr. John David Tobe, Nikki Ritcher

SweetTea Journal (Summer/Winter 2007) – Even today, the sight would be impressive. To an American Indian living along Florida’s Gulf Coast in the summer of 1539, the spectacle must have been awe-inspiring.

First, with their horses’ hooves clopping softly in the dirt, came the cavalry scouts. They were lean, leathery Spanish lancers. Whenever they intercepted a ray of sunlight slipping past a longleaf pine bough overhead, their steel helmets and breastplates flashed brightly. Then came the main column, some six hundred men strong. Hernando de Soto, a hardened and occasionally ruthless veteran with two decades of exploration and conquest in the New World, led the column. A consort of trusted lieutenants rode close by.

Thanks to Spain’s King Charles V, de Soto carried the authority to “conquer, populate, and pacify” the land christened “La Florida” by Ponce de León a quarter century earlier. Some say he named it in honor of the Easter celebration known as Pascua Florida—“the feast of the flowers.” Others claim he named the land simply after the blooming flowers carpeting it.

Such issues of etymology may not have interested the companies of foot soldiers plodding behind the officers’ vanguard. Some shouldered musketlike harquebuses or heavy crossbows. Others carried long, axlike halberds. Still others hefted shields and kept a loose hand on the hilt of the swords hanging from their belts. Troops of cavalrymen rode among them, while packs of war dogs loped alongside their masters. Behind the soldiers, blacksmiths and leathersmiths led pack animals burdened with the tools of their trades. Two dozen clergymen—priests, acolytes, and monks—walked among them. Enslaved Indian porters labored under their own heavy loads. Even a group of shepherds herded cattle and swine into the line of march, while a small rear guard of cautious troopers brought up the back.

But as impressive as the spectacle of de Soto’s adventurers might have been to the land’s inhabitants, the Northwest Florida landscape unfolding before the conquistadores’ visored helmets was, in its own right, equally breathtaking.

“They would’ve seen absolutely gigantic trees,” surmises Dr. John David Tobe, a scientist with Tallahassee-based Ecological Resource Consultants, and a twelve-year veteran of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. With a master’s degree in floristic biology and a Ph.D. in molecular systematics, Tobe has made a career of studying Florida’s botany and ecology and currently is consulting for The St. Joe Company on forest restoration issues. “In the upland areas,” he says, “de Soto would have moved through vast tracts of widely spaced longleaf pines, with trees much, much older than we see today, growing in the wiregrass.”

Tobe’s assumptions match the observations of Cabeza de Vaca, another Spaniard who traveled through this same region. He wrote of “a country difficult to traverse and strange to look at, for it had very great forests, the trees being wonderfully tall and so many of them fallen that they obstructed our way so that we had to make long detours and with great trouble. Of the trees standing many were rent from top to bottom by thunderbolts, which strike very often in that country, where storms and tempests are always frequent.”

As they marched, de Soto’s men occasionally encountered the often tea-stained waters of rivers and creeks bisecting the longleaf groves. “In those places, they would’ve descended into shallow, cool, moist ravines,” Tobe imagines. “All of the sudden, it would have been a whole new … world of magnolias, white oaks, swamp chestnut oaks, and endemics found only in this area of the world, like Florida yew and torreya.”

At times, such ravines would give way to vast stands of cypress trees and massive stretches of wetlands known as wet prairies. Tobe cites the fully restored areas of the Apalachicola National Forest as approximately what the conquistadores would have seen. “The national forest,” Tobe says, “has extensive wet prairies full of pitcher plants and orchids. It is a botanical treasure. You can find up to thirty or forty species per square meter.”

Once in Northwest Florida, de Soto wintered in the bountiful Indian province of Apalache. “The province of Apalache is very fertile and very abundant in supplies, with much corn and beans and squash, and diverse fruits, and many deer and many varieties of birds, and near the sea there are many and good fish, and it is a pleasant land although there are swamps; but they are firm because they are over sand,” declared Rodrigo Rangel, de Soto’s private secretary.

The profusion of agricultural abundance was no accident. The region’s unchecked forest fires (sparked by the lightning) cleared the ground for crops. It also kept the longleaf pines’ botanical competitors at bay.

As Lawrence Earley notes in his book Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American Forest, “fire in longleaf pine forests is like rain in a rain forest. … A longleaf pine forest may seem parklike, yet it is really a combat zone in which longleaf vies for survival with rival pine species and the resident oaks. As long as fires burn regularly and keep the ground open, there’s no contest.” In the absence of fire, however, the loblolly pines and the oaks would muscle in on the ground and eventually win the battle for the canopy above.

“Today,” Tobe advises, “if you wanted to see what de Soto experienced, you might be able to find it in the old-growth areas of the Blackwater River State Forest and the Wade Tract Preserve.” Somewhat ironically, such old growth is present today because those areas have been aggressively managed with fire, which enhances the growth of native plants, especially longleaf pine forests and pitcher plant prairies.

“Periodic fire in pinelands creates an open landscape of regenerating longleaf pine and stimulates the ground cover to flourish,” Tobe says. “Although … recognized by restoration practitioners as an excellent restoration tool, [using] prescribed fire carries the risk and liability of wildfire. Because of this, the opportunity or willingness for such burns is limited in many places in Northwest Florida today.”

After de Soto passed through Apalache, La Florida remained unsettled by Europeans for the next two decades. A short-lived colony in Pensacola failed in 1561, and permanent European settlement would not come until 1565 with the founding of St. Augustine. For its part, Pensacola would not be resettled until 1698.

Meanwhile, St. Augustine anchored a string of missions stretching inland to the Apalachicola River. In 1675, the bishop of Cuba, Gabriel Díaz Vara Calderón, visited the missions and later shared his observations with Spain’s queen. “During January,” Calderón wrote, “they burn the grass and weeds from the fields preparatory to cultivation, surrounding them all at one time with fire so that the deer, wild ducks and rabbits, fleeing from it fall into their hands. … Then they enter the forests in pursuit of bears, bison, and lions [Florida panthers], which they kill with bows and arrows.”

In the coming decades, British raids against the missions during Queen Anne’s War would deal a crippling blow to Spain’s colony. Nevertheless, toeholds of settlement remained in St. Augustine and Pensacola. In the decades that followed, Spain, in control of La Florida once again, offered generous land grants to prospective settlers. The majority of such settlers were Anglo-Americans, however, who preferred Washington’s rule to Madrid’s. By 1822, Florida was a territory of the United States and home to some eight thousand people. They founded Tallahassee in 1825 and incorporated the city that would become Apalachicola four years later. St. Joseph, now known as Port St. Joe, followed in 1835.

In that period of time, northern Florida’s population doubled. Under the weight of subsequent generations, the environment felt the heavy impact of its new inhabitants. They cleared tracts of land and planted crops like cotton and corn, while their cattle and hogs roamed the open ground beneath the longleafs. Other settlers exploited the region’s virginal longleaf pine and cypress forests. “Longleaf had more uses than any other tree in North America, if not the whole world,” Roland Harper, a renowned botanist, declared in 1913. From thriving ports like Apalachicola, or via railroads such as the Pensacola & Atlantic, the region exported hewn logs to Europe and South America, railroad ties to Mexico, and sawn pine lumber and shingles across the United States. Cypress, timbered from the region’s wetlands and marshes, fed a particularly hungry lumber market in New Orleans.

“Not the least of the many contributions made to the Nation by the Deep South, is Florida Tidewater Red Cypress, the Wood Eternal,” declared Florida’s State Department of Agriculture in 1937 in a pamphlet entitled Know Florida. “Today, it ranks with the best of our commercial woods and is particularly prized for boats, tanks, vats and the like where constant exposure to liquids is necessary. It resists termites, ranks high on paint tests, is considered a first rate structural timber, and is unsurpassed for natural finished, inside paneling, for office, and dwellings, Florida produces more cypress lumber than any southern State and very near as much as the total of all other States.”

The region’s forests had strategic value as well. The longleaf pines not only provided board, planks, masts, and spars for ships, but also were the source of resin, pitch, ropes, and tree nails—all essential to a navy in the pre-ironclad age. So important were the pines to the U.S. Navy that this timber resource was referred to generically as “naval stores.” The region’s pines also were milked for resin, that basic raw material necessary to produce two other vital naval stores products: rosin and turpentine.

“It’s hard for us to imagine today how bewitching the word ‘turpentine’ once was, how powerful its allure,” Earley wrote in Looking for Longleaf. “ ‘Getting turpentine’ became a mania in the nineteenth century, driving thousands into the forests of longleaf pine where they fought off the heat, rattlesnakes, ticks, chiggers, and loneliness while cutting ‘boxes’ into the living trees, chipping trees, spooning the raw gum into buckets, and carting heavy barrels of it along woodland pathways to the turpentine stills.”

Not surprisingly, Florida’s lumbermen, “turpentiners,” and farmers took a far dimmer view of a raging wildfire than their Indian predecessors. Earley describes the bias of East Coast– trained foresters against fire as a tool for managing healthy forests. In 1928, those foresters “create[d] the Dixie Crusaders, a group of evangelical young people who brought the message of fire exclusion to villages and hamlets throughout the longleaf pine region,” Earley recounts. “Propaganda films were shown, posters distributed, and lectures given. An estimated 2 million men, women, and children saw these shows; some of them had never seen a movie before. … ‘Everybody Loses When Timber Burns,’ was one of the slogans of these crusading fire haters.”

Complementing such propaganda, the interlocking web of roads and railroads between their settlements and camps created firebreaks where none had existed before, making the containment of forest fires more likely. As the years progressed, the raging infernos that had once swept the forest floor clean (and created ideal conditions for the longleaf pines) diminished in scope and intensity. “This growing human population started subdividing the landscape, effectively bisecting and dissecting it,” Tobe explains. “At first, they really couldn’t control the fires, but the fires were increasingly confined. The reduction in the size of the fires increased the areas of fire-suppressed vegetation.”

“Fire-suppressed” is a somewhat counterintuitive term—by it, Tobe means plants that grow in areas where fire has been suppressed. “In those fire-suppressed areas,” he explains, “the opportunistic slash and loblolly pines, titi, and oaks would begin to dominate the landscape, particularly as more longleaf pines were cleared.

“Before long,” he continues, “the longleaf forest was overrun. The once-open pine forest has now become a thick green wall of vegetation crowding up against the roads in the Panhandle. It is a completely different landscape from the open, parklike woods that de Soto would have seen.”

The longleaf, however, wasn’t the only species challenged by a fire-suppressed landscape. Species such as the red-cockaded woodpecker, the gopher tortoise, the indigo snake, the Eastern diamondback rattler, the Southeastern fox squirrel, and pitcher plants rely on the cleansing effect of fire to foster and cultivate their own unique habitats. In the absence of the fires, these plants and animals risk losing the battle for their particular niches in La Florida’s ecosystem.

With regard to the longleaf pines, the acreage numbers seem to speak for themselves. In de Soto’s time, there were some 92 million acres of longleaf stretching across southeastern North America. By 1996, only 2.95 million acres were left in isolated, fragmented stands.

Yet the loss of such a remarkable ecosystem has not gone unnoticed. Today, The St. Joe Company—the same company that once timbered hundreds of thousands of acres across what de Soto called La Florida—is taking the lead in restoring vast parcels to the same natural state that de Soto experienced. The effort is well under way at two locations in particular—the five thousand–acre Breakfast Point tract in Bay County and the three thousand–acre Devil’s Swamp tract. The first phase of canopy clearing and removal has been completed on both sites. Admittedly, the motivation is not wholly altruistic. Federal and state environmental agencies require The St. Joe Company to mitigate for its various development projects elsewhere in Florida, and its work at Breakfast Point and Devil’s Swamp certainly fits that bill.

The vision, however, is broader than mere mitigation. When Jim Moyers, a wildlife biologist with The St. Joe Company, contemplates the restoration of these and other swaths of land in Northwest Florida to their precolonial environmental conditions, the excitement in his voice is contagious. “We are managing thousands of acres with the goal of restoring—as best we can with the knowledge we have—the ecological conditions that would have existed five hundred years ago, at the time the first Europeans saw it,” Moyers declares. “The key is going to be the restoration process, and how we get from here to there.”

Thomas Estes, director of environmental permitting and conservation for The St. Joe Company, shares the burden of turning such a vision into reality. Like Moyers, he sees more of an opportunity for something than mere mitigation. “This is a chance to show that virtue can be profitable,” Estes says, “and to build a legacy that is well beyond rooftops.”

He also recognizes that the key will be the restoration process itself. “Before The St. Joe Company, much of this land was opportunistically timbered by smaller outfits,” Estes says. “In the early 1900s, they would just cut and move on. In some places, it was completely overgrown. In others, it has been said you could stand in a clear-cut and see for eighteen miles.”

And as this era transitioned into one of modern industrial forestry, better management practices were established. The St. Joe Company, for instance, maintained a policy of not cutting timber on its own properties unless it had no other options and began hiring land-management foresters to improve the quality of timber on its holdings as early as the 1950s.

Still, the need for natural rehabilitation from many years of industrial forestry is obvious and, as Estes explains, “on paper, restoring this land should be relatively simple. First, you have to remove the canopy, which really means taking down the loblolly and slash pines to more savanna-like densities. We’ve already done that to a large extent at Breakfast Point and Devil’s Swamp. Second, you reinstate fire into the natural cycle. Third, you manage for the various habitats.

“In practice,” Estes says, “you have to adjust to site conditions and circumstances. You take into account weather, topography, hydrology, growing season, scheduling, and logistics. Some areas will be actively replanted with species appropriate for the desired habitat, such as longleaf pine. In others, nature will be allowed to take its course with long-term management, such as prescribed burning.”

Tobe has already observed the latter. “In areas that have already been cleared, the usurping species have been pushed back and the longleaf is regaining its dominance again,” he says. “Still, it would take incredible hubris to guess what exactly will come up in each area. We don’t always know what has survived in the soils and surrounding landscapes. But seeing what will come up is part of the excitement.

“There is just all this natural capital in Northwest Florida,” he adds. “We should enhance what is still present, and accentuate it, and bring back the … inviting forests that de Soto experienced. That is how we will recover these natural landscapes to their original state and see La Florida once again.”