A reader asked a History Mystery question about logging in Destin. He lives on Indian Bayou and was led to believe by old timers that the bayou had its origins as a logging slough created by the harvesting of cypress trees because they still have plenty of cypress stumps in his area.
It wasn’t just cypress, but he was correct that once there was logging and turpentining going on throughout Destin.
A little background — The United States acquired East and West Florida from Spain for $5 million in 1819 and Florida became a territory until 1845 when it gained statehood. In 1842, President John Tyler (with a Presidential Executive Order) took Moreno Point (what we know as Destin today) out of the public domain and gave it to the war department, and they established Moreno Point Military Reservation in the entire area.
By 1926 the War Department had not used the land and considered it surplus. Congress agreed and voted to allow the War Department to sell the land at Moreno Point (Destin) plus 18 other military installations in Florida and a total of 44 military installations nationwide.
By 1934 all of the waterfront land from the west side of Joe’s Bayou around to where the Marler Memorial Bridge is today and onto the harbor where Benning Drive enters Highway 98 — all this waterfront land was sold to the local pioneer settlers who had been living in the area. Those 43 lots sold by the War Department to the local pioneer settlers were shown in an April 1930 Survey of Lots.
The remainder of the land from where the Destin Bridge is today, eight miles to the Walton County line (except for those 43 waterfront lots already mentioned), was sold in one single transaction to J. R. Moody of the Vernon Land and Timber Company on June 25, 1935 for $38,226.22. Moody was not in the land business. He was a turpentiner and was only interested in the pine trees and their sap.
Naval stores were big business in the days of wooden boats. They stripped a portion of the pine trees’ bark, gathered their sap, and sold the sap for the production of naval stores which was used for the upkeep of wooden boats.
Moody almost immediately re-sold much of the land he had purchased in four transactions for a total of $45,000. But he kept the turpentining and logging rights on all the land he sold. So the stumps our reader mentions are probably because the land was logged by the Vernon Land and Timber Company sometime between 1935 and 1943.
Coleman Kelley worked for Moody and they were both from Red Head (a very small community near Ebro in Walton County). Moody promoted Kelley to manage his newly acquired land in Okaloosa County (Destin) and eventually worked out a lease agreement with Kelley whereby Kelley became a 50 percent owner in the Destin turpentine business for the sum of $15,000.
What Moody was really interested in was not the land, but the Long Leaf and Slash Pine trees growing on the property. He was a turpentiner and he wanted to get ‘Naval Stores’ from the pine trees. When the trees were all tapped out then he cut them down and sold them for lumber to the Bagdad Lumber company in Bagdad, Florida. Moody and Kelley established the Destin Turpentine Company for the Okaloosa County operation and located an office near the bridge in Destin.
The leases that Moody had acquired when he sold his land ran out the mid 1940s and so did turpentining and logging in Destin. We hope this answers our readers question and takes the Mystery out the History of the Logging and Turpentining period.
H. C. “Hank” Klein is a Destin historian who visits often and lives in North Little Rock, Arkansas with his wife (the former Muriel Marler of Destin). He recently published a historic book about Destin's pioneer settlers. Destin Pioneer Settlers...A Land History of Destin, Florida from 1819-1940 can be obtained from Tony Mennillo of Arturo Studios at 850/585-2909. Klein can be contacted at klein@aristotle.net.