The Rise & Fall of St Joseph

The birthplace of Florida’s statehood and a bustling port city in the 1830s, Old St. Joseph dropped off the map overnight, resurrecting in the early twentieth century as the resilient seaside town of Port St.
- by John Branston, collage illustrations by Cliff Alajandro


Anyone driving East over the George Tapper Bridge across the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway on U.S. 98 to Port St. Joe quickly will see why this part of Florida has been called the Forgotten Coast. To the right is a stretch of snow-white sand without a structure on it. Next to it is an enormous field, bare but for a few pine trees and the remnants of a railroad. Beyond that, St. Joseph Bay sparkles in the sun, while beach walkers wander far out into its shallow waters at low tide searching for scallops and crabs. In the distance, St. Joseph Peninsula forms one of the best natural harbors on the Gulf Coast. Its sand dunes and beaches, including seven miles of pristine natural area, have been called the best in the United States.

Port St. Joe, with a population of around 3,600, pretty as a postcard and flat as a tabletop, is devoid of the shopping malls, tourist haunts, and high-rise condominiums and hotels that line many of the beaches along the Gulf.No building here is taller than three stories. Public parks outnumber the two motels.

The quiet scene gives little hint of this area’s resilience and importance in Florida history. If it weren’t for the historic markers, few people would know this former town was the birthplace of Florida’s statehood and a rival of Tampa, Mobile, Pensacola, and New Orleans as a cosmopolitan port city.

It was called St. Joseph but is often referred to these days as Old St. Joseph. Its rise and fall from boomtown to ghost town spanned less than ten years from roughly 1835 to 1845.The high and low points of the town’s story read like a capsule version of Florida history mixed with today’s headlines—a real estate boom, political intrigue, financial collapse, a yellow fever epidemic, a great hurricane that washed nearly everything away, and a resurrection sixty years later as people rediscovered the area’s natural beauty and bucolic charm. At the center of this remarkable story was a young visionary who both recorded and shaped history as editor of the St. Joseph Times, Peter W. Gautier Jr.

If events had unfolded more favorably for St. Joseph, Gautier would have a more prominent place in the
history books.As it is, the biographical details of his life are somewhat sketchy.The son of a well-to-do Methodist minister from Georgia, he came to the Florida Territory around 1827 and eventually settled near Apalachicola. Situated at the mouth of the Apalachicola River,Apalachicola was a port for exporting cotton from Alabama and Georgia plantations and importing goods from New England and Europe.

Gautier showed unusual ambition and energy as a young man. By the time he was thirty years old, he was practicing law, serving as a Franklin County representative to the Territorial Council of Florida and operating a hotel in Apalachicola. Always on the lookout for new opportunities, he found one in 1835.The catalyst was a decision that year by the United States Supreme Court in a case involving John Forbes and Company, an Indian trading company also referred to as the Apalachicola Land Company. Beginning in 1804, the company had acquired from the Indians 1.2 million acres of land in the Florida Territory, including Apalachicola and its river system. The court’s ruling upheld the Forbes Purchase and made property owners in Apalachicola liable for financial settlements.

Rather than pay tribute to the land company, some of the town’s leading citizens moved outside its boundaries to St. Joseph, about twenty-eight miles west.The saints, as they were called,were the successors to a series of short-lived settlements on St. Joseph Bay.The Spanish and French built forts near the
bay in the eighteenth century, but there was no permanent settlement until the Florida Territory was purchased from Spain by the United States in 1819 and formally became an American
possession in 1821.

The rivalry between St. Joseph and Apalachicola had been evident as early as 1829, when the owners of a St. Joseph establishment placed this advertisement in a handbill, with a prophetic hint of the doom by disease that was twelve years away: “St. Joseph offers many unparalleled advantages; the heat of the day is constantly tempered by the cool and invigorating sea breeze, and the absence of any large body of fresh water entirely exempts the city from any local causes of disease. Sea bathing, that important preservative of health,may here be enjoyed in its greatest perfection,having a large and commodious building expressly for that purpose.”

The Supreme Court’s decision in the Forbes case in 1835 raised the stakes. Promoters of St. Joseph drew plans for a “healthy and salubrious” city. The United States government established a post office at St. Joseph on December 28, 1835, and the community was chartered as a municipality on January 11, 1836.

But to achieve economic success, the saints would need to grab a large share of the shipping business from Apalachicola. What was needed was a canal or railroad that would divert river traffic from the Apalachicola and Chattahoochee rivers to St. Joseph via Lake Wimico.

The chief promoter of St. Joseph, Gautier made his move to St. Joseph in 1836, bought the St. Joseph Telegraph newspaper, changed its name to the St. Joseph Times, and installed himself as editor. A contemporary said of Gautier that he would have been a great editor “if he would only find out what his principles are and stick to them. Between his duties as marshal, as editor, his admiration for the fair sex, his fondness for good company, good wine, and good jokes, he is always in a state of bewilderment.”

Gautier’s arch rival was Cosam Emir Bartlett, editor of the Apalachicola Gazette. “The rumor that the merchants were moving to St. Joseph’s Bay is without foundation,” Bartlett wrote in 1836. “That place exists only in name and in the mind of a small band of speculators, who would build a city at public expense, could they dupe the people by their arts and untiring zeal. But it is a bad cause, a very bad cause.”

The two editors carried on a propaganda battle so heated that the editor of the Floridian in Tallahassee finally told them he would take no more of their “news” unless it came in the form of paid advertising.

The saints proved to be more than big talkers. Their answer to Apalachicola’s river port was their navigable harbor protected by a peninsula nearly ten miles long.They built a wharf with an eight-hundred-foot dock. After completing eight miles of railroad in 1836, they shipped in the first two steam-powered locomotives to operate in the territory, and three hundred passengers in twelve cars made the inaugural run in twenty five minutes. But Lake Wimico proved too shallow for river steamers—to the delight of Apalachicola businessmen—and the railroad was abandoned in favor of another one thirty miles long that was completed in 1839. Because of the fire hazard, steam locomotives were banned from the corporate limits of the town, and railroad cars had to be uncoupled and pulled from the terminus by slave-driven mules.

Gautier and the saints had plans for much more than a railroad. They twice tried to relocate the Franklin County seat from Apalachicola to St. Joseph, but were unsuccessful. Instead, they used their political influence to create a new county,Calhoun County (from which the present-day Gulf County was carved in 1925), with St. Joseph as its county seat.

The biggest prize of all was the Constitutional Convention that would prepare the way for Florida to become a state. St. Joseph and Apalachicola, along with Tallahassee and Pensacola, battled for it in the manner of modern cities chasing a sporting event or major convention. Thanks to its political connections and Gautier’s tireless efforts, St. Joseph won and residents set about building a convention hall and housing for the delegates and press corps who would arrive by steamship.The last 269 Seminoles were removed at gunpoint two months before the first Constitutional Convention of Florida began December 3, 1838. It was attended by a who’s who of Florida powerhouses, from the then territorial governor to future state governors and senators.Even Bartlett had to admit in print that “the city of the Saints presented quite a hustling appearance this morning.”

Statehood was not universally popular among the delegates. The strongest opposition came from residents of St. Augustine, who wanted to divide the territory at the Suwannee River into East and West Florida,each of which would have been larger than states that were already in the Union. East Florida, they reasoned, had a natural outlet to the Atlantic Coast, while West Florida’s outlet was the Gulf of Mexico. Other issues were incorporations based on “faith bonds” (backed by little more than good faith),
dueling (a disqualification for political office), and the location of the future state capital, which was fixed at Tallahassee for five years, after which a permanent site would be chosen.

They worked six days a week and stayed in session until January 11, 1839. Gautier published one thousand copies of the journal of the convention and five hundred copies of the constitution itself. Delegates approved the constitution by a vote of 50 to 1, but St. Joseph voters rejected it 233 to 50 in May of 1839. Congress did not ratify the constitution until 1845, when Florida entered the Union, making it the twenty seventh state.

The years just before and after the convention were the heyday of St. Joseph. According to some accounts, by 1840 it was the most populous city in what is now the state of Florida, with estimates as high as 6,000 and even more than 10,000 residents. Those numbers are doubtful, however, given that the official census of all of Calhoun County in 1838 reported a population of 1,645 people, including 532 slaves.

Whatever its population, St. Joseph was a busy and growing seaport with dreams of rivaling Charleston, Mobile, and New Orleans. Life was good, even elegant, in the boomtown on the bay. A luxurious establishment called the Railroad Cottage specialized in “La Quisine Francais.”Mrs. Stewart’s Private School for Young Ladies offered instruction in grammar, geography, French, music, history, writing, and needlework. A Methodist church was established with its own pastor, Peter Haskew, assisted by circuit riders from Apalachicola. Steamships from New England and other ports delivered the most precious commodity, ice, along with fine fare as indicated by this shipment of groceries and wines from both New York and Boston: “Madeira, sherry, port, claret, muscat, champagne Holland, gin, Jamaican rum, cordials assorted, sugar, coffee, molasses, soap, sperm and tallow candles, pickles, tea, ginger, chocolate, nutmeg, cloves, prunes, almonds, figs, lemons, pickled salmon,smoked and pickled beef tongues …”

Contemporary newspaper reports described “some very pretty residences and not a few large and commodious houses for business.”The Calhoun Course racetrack, with its circular one-mile track, offered purses of one thousand dollars to horsemen who came from as far away as Tallahassee. The Mansion House, the town’s first hotel, erected in 1829, was described as “hard to beat in the science of gastronomy” with a proprietor who “lives to eat.” Another hotel, the German Ocean House, boasted three game rooms, a bar, and a ten-pin alley. Fresh oysters from the bay were a local specialty.

Charles Downing, a territorial delegate in Congress, praised St. Joseph’s “splendid bay and the noble enterprise of its citizens.” Raphael Moses, whose autobiography describes the five years he spent in St. Joseph, said it had a “delightful climate, lovely situation, and as generous and whole-souled a population as is to be found anywhere.”

But no sooner had St. Joseph laid the foundation for statehood and its own promising future than the economy tanked. Cotton shipments plunged due to low river stages. Georgia cotton began moving by rail to ports on the Atlantic. The St. Joseph railroad was abandoned in 1840. St. Joseph’s boosters made a game try at becoming a tourist town, with a “snowlike beach” and “crystal flashing water,” for wealthy plantation owners from Alabama, Georgia, and middle Florida, but it was not to be. St. Joseph’s number was up. It was about to be battered by a double calamity that residents were powerless to prevent.

In 1840, two ships arrived from the Antilles. Unknown to the saints, they were death ships.Already some of those aboard, including Captain George Kupfer of the schooner Herald, had died of yellow fever, or yellow jack as it was called. Kupfer was buried in St. Joseph Cemetery and, according to local lore, either he or his ailing shipmates who were left behind spread the disease that began to reach epidemic proportions
in early 1841. A story in the Pensacola Gazette described the scene: “Daily showers had filled the noisome marshes surrounding the city with lukewarm, fuming water; the moist, hot air was sweltering and depressing. Swarms of mosquitoes rose from their many breeding places in marsh and swamp, as well as from the numerous ditches that interlaced the city. So many messengers of death.”

Undertakers ran out of coffins and grave diggers. The newspapers described how men half crazed with fever would run to the woods for safety,“with heads bursting with inexpressible pain and eyes forcing themselves from their sockets.” Victims included many prominent people, among them delegates to the Constitutional Convention and their wives,newspaper publishers from Tallahassee and Apalachicola, and physicians. Historians have noted that Apalachicola and other cities managed to survive yellow fever outbreaks, possibly because they were spared the additional disasters that befell St. Joseph.

By late 1841, only an estimated five hundred residents were left. Gautier wrote that “the sickness in our town has materially abated” and tried to assure his dwindling readership that the epidemic had run its course. But only months after the epidemic had taken so large a toll on the local population, a second blow landed on the shores of the still-reeling city. In September of that same year, a hurricane hit the coast and destroyed the wharf and what ships were left, as well as many of St. Joseph’s homes and businesses.

Shortly thereafter, even Gautier was forced to throw in the towel. In 1842 he closed the newspaper and abandoned St. Joseph. He and his father moved to Texas, and “what happened to this remarkable man after that time remains still undisclosed,” according to Louise M.Porter, author of The Lives of St. Joseph. At least, it seems, Gautier escaped the ravaged city with his life, unlike so many of his fellow townspeople.

Edward Anderson, a passenger on a steamer that stopped in St. Joseph in May 1844, found the town’s few remaining residents preparing to leave. “The place had been deserted by the inhabitants and had an air of gloom out of keeping with our age of prosperity— fine dwellings finished in the best style have been abandoned by their owners and left to rot piecemeal in the weather, windows and doors are gaping open swinging to and fro with every gust.”

Incredibly, another hurricane made landfall near St. Joseph just a few months after Anderson’s visit.The town that had played such a pivotal role in creating the state’s constitution had been virtually wiped off the map. Ironically, it was just one year later that President John Tyler signed the act of Congress admitting Florida to the Union. In another twist of fate, St. Joseph’s arch rival, Apalachicola, would survive and take its place alongside Mobile and New Orleans as one of the busiest commercial towns on the Gulf Coast in the nineteenth century.

From 1845 until 1905, when Terrill Higdon Stone—the namesake of the state park on the St. Joseph Peninsula—lived nearby in a log home, the site of Old St. Joseph was unoccupied except for Confederate soldiers manning the coastal saltworks that operated in the early years of the Civil War. The vanished city that once had such promise spawned legends that made it either “the wickedest place in the United States” and a veritable Sodom of sin or an idyllic seaside city “bounded by towering forest-clad hills” that was washed away by a tidal wave (more likely a Katrina-like storm surge).

In 1927, historian James O. Knauss wrote two articles for TheFlorida Historical Quarterly. “An aspect of romance has settled upon the dead town, heightened through tradition and a haze of unreality engendered by the lack of definite records of its life,” the journal’s editor wrote in the introduction to Knauss’s article. St. Joseph, Knauss concluded, was no Sodom and probably no more wicked than any other Florida town, but “the temptation to use St. Joseph as an object lesson to worldly minded, amusement loving persons could not be resisted.”

The memory of the fabled town would survive the years of oblivion and become part of the lore of the new town that grew on the bank of the bay in 1909.This time it was called Port St. Joe to avoid complications with tax deeds for Old St. Joseph.The Port Inn was built in 1907; a modern bed-andbreakfast inn of the same name stands near the site today. The bathing pier across from the Port Inn was known for its high slides and carousel swings attached to sails out over the water. And in 1910, the Apalachicola & Northern Railroad was completed to Port St. Joe.

As it had done before, the city would draw on the beauty and bounty of the bay as its fortunes turned for the better. Port St. Joe’s economic engines would be fishing, pulpwood, and a new pastime dubbed “autoing” by the Apalachicola Times, which proposed a dirt road to Port St. Joe because “the entire section is on the eve of a development that will surprise even the most sanguine booster.” If the history of this
city reveals anything, it is that the past is often prologue to the future: after hard times, St. Joseph, or Port St. Joe, returns, only stronger. And as they worked to reclaim this beautiful section of the Forgotten Coast, residents of the new town would not forget the area’s past. In 1923, just off the bay, a park and monument in honor of the old city and the Constitutional Convention was dedicated in front of a crowd estimated at three thousand people. In many ways it was another pivotal moment, as the old town of St. Joseph, in memory as well as in fact, had been reborn.

Editor's note: The second part of this feature will trace the history of Port St. Joe into the present and will appear in the Fall/Winter 2006 issue of the SweetTea Journal.