Calhoun County

A County Record of Place, Memory, and What Comes Next

Protect Rural Florida County Memory Project | 2026

Calhoun County is one of those places where the map only tells part of the story. The longer I worked on this project, the more I found old community names, family stories, schools, churches, stores, roads, cemeteries and traditions that still mean something to the people connected to them, even when they are harder to find in the official record.

Over the last few weeks, people shared photographs, memories, family connections, questions and places they did not want forgotten. The research took us deep into the county’s past, but just as often it brought us back to what Calhoun County is now and what people hope it will still be years from now. This feature is not meant to be the final word on the county. It is a record of what we found, what people carried with them, what is still on the ground, and what may be worth protecting as Calhoun County decides what comes next.

The Land Before the Map 

Long before Calhoun County had its present boundaries, roads or towns, the Apalachicola and Chipola rivers were already shaping where people lived and how they moved through this part of Florida. Creeks, ponds, bluffs and low ground influenced settlement just as much as any later road, and many of the county’s oldest communities make more sense when the rivers are treated as the main routes through the landscape rather than simply scenery beside it.

People were living along this river country for centuries before Calhoun County existed. The Cayson Mound and Village Site near Blountstown preserves evidence of that much older occupation, while the history around Cochranetown and the Blunt-Tuskie Hajo Reservation connects the modern landscape to Apalachicola Creek families who remained part of this area as governments and boundaries changed around them. Oral histories add another layer to that record. Andrew Ramsey remembered family gatherings, traditions and places connected to his Apalachicola Creek ancestry, while other families still carry stories tied to Ocheesee and the river communities.

Those older layers are easy to miss if we only look at what is standing now. An archaeological site may be protected and largely invisible, an old landing may no longer serve boats, and a community name may survive mostly because families kept using it. That became one of the recurring themes of this project: the land often holds more history than the modern map lets on, and sometimes the first clue is simply somebody saying that a place used to be called something else.

Before the Modern Map 

The Calhoun County people know today is not the same county earlier generations knew. When Calhoun County was created in 1838, its boundaries reached into areas that later became parts of other counties, and its first county seat was at St. Joseph, a place that is no longer inside modern Calhoun County at all. After St. Joseph declined, county government moved inland to Abe Springs Bluff before Blountstown became the county seat in 1880. Those changes help explain why old Calhoun records keep leading into places that now seem outside the county.

Iola is one of the best examples. It once belonged squarely inside the Calhoun County story, and the transportation routes around Lake Wimico, St. Joseph and Iola connect this area to some of Florida’s earliest railroad development. Old records also lead into Wewahitchka and other places that later became part of Gulf County. Looking at the county this way makes the modern boundary feel less like a wall and more like the latest version of a landscape people had already been moving through for generations.

That changing map also helps explain why family memory matters so much here. People often remember communities, roads and places according to the names their parents and grandparents used rather than the names that eventually appeared on newer maps. Throughout this project, those older names kept opening doors into stories that would have been easy to overlook if I had searched only by what the map calls them today.

Getting From Here to There

For much of Calhoun County’s history, getting from one place to another depended on the rivers, ferries and roads that connected small communities long before modern highways made those distances feel ordinary. Allen Savell’s family history includes ferry operations where Highway 20 now crosses the Apalachicola, while another family memory shared during the project described traveling between Altha and Marianna by horse and wagon. Those stories put distance back into perspective, because a trip we would think nothing of today once required time, planning and a very different knowledge of the landscape.

The arrival of the Marianna & Blountstown Railroad changed that movement again. The M&B carried farm products, lumber, mail and other freight through the county, while also becoming part of everyday life for the families who lived near the line. Old photographs preserve some of the people who worked it, and family memories preserve what it was like to hear the train passing through. The railroad once extended south toward Scotts Ferry, tying another small community into the larger transportation network, and Locomotive No. 444 still sits on the old roadbed in Blountstown as one of the most visible reminders of a system that once connected the county in a completely different way.

The old Apalachicola River bridge tells another part of that story. Its construction changed how people crossed the river, but the memories shared during this project went beyond the bridge itself and into ferry history, river work and the way of life that existed around it. Every new road, bridge or railroad made travel easier, but it also changed which places people passed through, where businesses grew and which older routes slowly slipped out of everyday use. In Calhoun County, transportation history is really community history because every crossing changed the places on either side of it.

A County Made of Communities

One of the strongest things that came out of this project was how quickly people named their own corner of Calhoun County when given the chance. Blountstown naturally appears often because it became the county seat and grew into the county’s main commercial center, but the story spread quickly into Altha, Kinard, Carr, Clarksville, Rollins Corner, Mossy Pond, Mule Head Pond, Nettle Ridge, Pine Island, Ocheesee, Scotts Ferry, Frink, Hugh Creek, Broad Branch, Marysville and other places that carried their own schools, churches, businesses, families and identities.

Blountstown’s history is much larger than courthouse history. Mayhaw and Clay Mary belong inside the county’s educational and community history, just as St. Paul AME, Russ and Hand Grocery, Neal Lumber and the railroad belong inside its working and neighborhood history. Altha came into this project through farming families, school memories and the old White Building. Clarksville and Rollins Corner surfaced through family history tied to the Rollins family and Pippin Cemetery, while Carr came forward through Carr School, Carr Chapel and families whose memories reach back to a time before paved roads made movement easier.

Mossy Pond and Mule Head Pond became one of my favorite examples of how a single contribution can reopen a whole place. Lori Keel shared an old photograph identified as Hall School and Church, along with family names and the figure remembered as Preacher Ben Fortner. That one photograph brought out more family connections, more local knowledge and more questions about where the school and church stood. Kinard opened in a similar way through Nadine Stone’s story, Stone’s Store, the post office, the fire department, the library and the Kinard Carnival, while Nettle Ridge and Pine Island surfaced simply because people still used those names when explaining where home was.

Howard Johnson brought Pippin Cemetery into the project through his family history, and that conversation opened several other threads into Ocheesee, Fort Place, the Richards family and the Gregory family. Scotts Ferry brought together river history, railroad history and family connections, while Ocheesee kept leading back toward older river communities. What struck me most was how often the smallest place names opened the biggest conversations. A county can look simple on a modern map, but the people who know it understand it as a patchwork of places carrying their own memories.

How People Made a Life Here

For generations, making a living in Calhoun County usually meant knowing how to do more than one thing. Farming might provide cash, food or both, while timber work, sawmills, railroad jobs, pulpwood, livestock and seasonal labor filled in the rest. The family stories shared during this project made that clear because work was rarely separated neatly into one occupation. A household might grow food, keep animals, preserve what it could, repair what broke and still depend on outside work to keep everything going.

The Melton Farms submission opened one of the clearest multigenerational farming stories in the project, while Frances Wood Price remembered another side of rural life. She grew up in a four-room house with seven siblings while her mother gardened, cooked and canned enough food to keep the family fed. Later, Frances and her husband Doug returned home with their own children, lived for a time in a small trailer beneath a large oak and built their life while Doug balanced outside employment with farm work. Alvin and Martha Byler remembered dairy cattle, chickens and a time when home gardens were common enough that selling seed was part of everyday business, then watched that gradually change as fewer families grew as much of their own food.

Timber and lumber shaped another large part of the county’s working life. Neal Lumber in Blountstown employed generations of workers, and surviving photographs show people operating heavy mill equipment and handling veneer production in the 1950s. Turpentine and naval stores also brought jobs and families into the county, although that history was not experienced the same way by everyone. Federal court records from the 1920s document Black laborers being held or returned to work through peonage arrangements at turpentine operations in the part of old Calhoun County around Wewahitchka. That belongs beside the family pride tied to timber and turpentine work because a full county history has to leave room for both the livelihoods people built and the harder parts of the same economy.

What stands out most is how much of this work depended on family knowledge. People knew when to plant, what the river was doing, how to keep food through the year, how to repair equipment and who could help when something went wrong. Those skills rarely appear in a county timeline, but they are part of how Calhoun County actually functioned from one generation to the next.

Stores, Schools, Churches and Family Ground

Some of the places people remembered most during this project were not landmarks in the usual sense. They were stores, schools, churches and cemeteries that became part of everyday life because people kept going back to them. Stone’s Store in Kinard and Russ and Hand Grocery in Blountstown were remembered as places where people gathered as much as places where they shopped, while other submissions brought City Tire, Trickey Mercantile and old bait-and-tackle businesses back into the conversation because families still remembered the people and places behind them.

The schools carried that same community weight. Hall School, Carr School, Altha School and Mayhaw were not interchangeable buildings serving the same experience, because where a child went to school depended on where they lived and, for generations, also depended on race. Mayhaw belongs inside Calhoun County’s school history just as much as any other school in the county. Loretha Baker Jones attended Mayhaw from first through twelfth grade before returning there as a teacher, while George Yon graduated from Mayhaw, later taught there and continued his career in the county after integration. Hall School returned to the record through Lori Keel’s photograph and the family names people added around it, showing how one old image can bring an entire school community back into the conversation.

Church history was just as connected to daily life. St. Paul AME, Carr Chapel, Hall Church and the many rural congregations scattered across the county were places for worship, funerals, homecomings, meals, children’s activities, women’s groups and community support. Traditions such as the Blountstown First PH Church’s chocolate-covered Easter eggs grew from that world and became part of the county’s memory in their own right.

Cemeteries often preserve those connections even longer. Pippin Cemetery became part of the project through Howard Johnson’s family history, and Richards Cemetery and smaller family burial grounds show how much of Calhoun County’s history is still tied to family ground. When the store is gone, the school has closed and the road name has changed, the cemetery may be the place that still tells you who belonged there.

The Things You Had to Be From Here to Know

Some of the best parts of this project were the things that would probably never make it into a traditional county history. John Smith’s memories of sucker fishing brought in Ten Mile, Juniper and Cypress creeks, with Four Mile coming into the conversation too, and the stories were not really about fishing alone. They were about knowing when the suckers were running, knowing which creek to head toward, knowing how people used homemade torches before modern lights, and knowing that a good run could turn into a fish fry and a family story that lasted for years.

That same kind of local knowledge showed up everywhere once people started talking. The Kinard Carnival, church eggs, Death by Chocolate, bait shops, old swimming places, fishing camps, hunting, moonshine stories, familiar road names and the way people gave directions all carried the kind of history that rarely gets written down because everyone around it assumes somebody else already knows.

Those details are easy to dismiss as little things until enough of them are gone. Then people are trying to remember what the place was called, who owned the store, where everybody used to swim, which creek they fished or why a certain turn in the road had a name that never appeared on a county map. Those memories belong in the county record because they tell us what Calhoun County felt like to the people who actually lived it.

How This Record Came Together

This project grew far beyond the original research because people trusted me with pieces of their own Calhoun County history. Some shared full family stories, while others sent old photographs, farm histories, school and church material, river memories, businesses they wanted remembered and places they hoped I would look into more closely. Those submissions gave the feature details that could never have come from public records alone, and many of them sent the research in directions I would not have known to follow.

The Live added another layer. Jami Daniels Joe, Wendy Eubanks, Allen Savell and John Smith brought very different parts of Calhoun County into the same conversation, from preservation and old transportation routes to sucker fishing and the everyday traditions people still carry. Carla Peacock’s search for Trickey Mercantile became its own example of how a family memory can lead to a larger community search, while my conversation with Howard Johnson opened several threads around Pippin Cemetery, Ocheesee, Fort Place, the Richards family and the Gregory family.

What mattered most was not how long somebody talked or how much material they sent. A family photograph could open an old school community, a farm story could lead through several generations, and one remembered business could send us looking through maps and newspapers trying to recover a place that everybody seemed to know but nobody had thought to document. That is how this record was built, not from one authority on Calhoun County, but from people carrying different pieces of it.

What Changed

Calhoun County has changed in ways that are easy to see on a map and in ways that are only obvious if you have lived there long enough to remember what used to be there. Ferries disappeared as bridges took over, the railroad stopped running, small schools closed or consolidated, businesses changed hands and some community names faded from everyday use. The physical county kept moving forward, but every one of those changes also altered the way people understood where they were and how they moved through the place.

Hurricane Michael created the sharpest break in living memory. The damage to homes, schools, churches, forests and historic places changed familiar views almost overnight, and people still describe photographs and places according to whether they were from before or after the storm. The old White Building at Altha School was one of the losses tied directly to community memory, and the Panhandle Pioneer Settlement also suffered serious damage to buildings that had already been saved once from disappearing. The storm did not only damage structures; it changed tree lines, landmarks, roadsides and the little visual cues people had used for years without ever thinking of them as history.

That is why ordinary photographs from before Michael matter so much now. A family picture may preserve a building in the background, a sign, a giant oak, a storefront or a stretch of road that no longer looks the same. In Calhoun County, “before Michael” has already become a way of dating the landscape, and that is part of the county record too.

What Is Still Here

For all the things that have changed or disappeared, Calhoun County still has places where the older story can be found on the ground. Historical markers point toward old courthouse sites, Native history, early communities and the railroad, while the M&B locomotive in Blountstown still sits on the former railroad roadbed. Cemeteries such as Pippin and Richards preserve family and community connections that reach far beyond the names on the stones, and old church sites, road alignments and river landings can still help explain why communities developed where they did.

The Panhandle Pioneer Settlement is another place where pieces of the county were physically saved rather than only remembered. Historic buildings from around Calhoun County were moved there so they would not disappear, while the Gregory House at Torreya State Park tells a similar story from across the river. The house now stands in Liberty County, but it began at Ocheesee Landing on the Calhoun County side of the Apalachicola, which makes it one of those places where the modern map does not tell the whole story.

The natural landscape belongs in this part of the record too. The Chipola River, Look and Tremble, old landings, creeks and public lands are not simply scenery around the history; they are part of the reason the history happened where it did. Once you know what was there before, an old roadbed, a cemetery behind the trees or a quiet stretch of river starts looking different. That is one of my favorite parts of local history because the landscape stops feeling empty once you know what you are looking at.

What I Hope We Don’t Lose

One of the strongest things I came away with from this project was not just how much history Calhoun County has, but how much people still care about it. That showed up in the way people answered questions, dug through photographs, named old communities, corrected details and pointed me toward somebody else who might know more. Jami Daniels Joe and the Calhoun County Community Foundation have already been doing that kind of work by collecting stories, highlighting local people and traditions, and helping keep community history connected to the present instead of treating it as something finished and put away.

The Calhoun County Public Library is doing the same thing from another direction. Wendy Eubanks talked about preserving photographs, VHS tapes, yearbooks, newspapers and family material before time takes them, and the Memory Lab gives people a practical way to preserve those things. The Panhandle Pioneer Settlement, Frances Wood Price’s preservation work and the people who have spent years collecting local stories all fit into that same larger effort. Some people preserve a building, some preserve a photograph, some preserve a story, and some simply make sure the next person knows who to ask.

What I would especially hate to see lost fifty years from now is the pride and generosity I experienced while doing this project. I never made it to Calhoun County in person while the project was underway, which is why the Live mattered so much, but people still welcomed me into their stories. I was invited to come visit, meet families, see places for myself and learn more when I had the chance. John Smith even invited me and my family to come sucker fishing with them. That kind of welcome told me something no archive could have shown me because people were not only proud of the county’s past; they wanted somebody else to understand why the place still mattered to them.

That same pride came through when the conversation turned toward the future and Keep CalCo. Rural came up during the Live. What I heard was not simply a desire to freeze everything in place, but a concern about whether Calhoun County can grow without losing the things that make it feel like Calhoun County in the first place. The old community names, working traditions, family places, rivers, schools and little landmarks do not have to stand in the way of what comes next. Knowing what made a place matter can help people decide what is worth carrying forward as the county changes.

That is the part I hope survives along with the photographs, buildings, cemeteries and records. Fifty years from now, I hope somebody can look back at Calhoun County in 2026 and see that people cared deeply about where they were from, that they still knew the names of small places, that they still shared family stories and that they were willing to open their own history so somebody else could understand it.

This Record Is Still Growing

This feature does not hold every Calhoun County story, and I do not want it to pretend that it does. There are still photographs I have not seen, family places I have not found and stories that somebody reading this probably knows far better than I ever could from a distance.

A few of the actual submissions are still missing one piece. Carla Peacock shared the story of her great-grandmother, Jeanette Taylor Trickey, whose family remembers her mercantile in Altha at the location where Waldorff Ace Hardware stands today. The location is known, but the family has never seen a photograph of Trickey Mercantile, and I would love to help find one.

Another family has been searching for a photograph of the original City Tire building in Blountstown, which opened in 1981 and is remembered as having stood where PeoplesSouth Bank is today before the business later moved. An old street scene, parade photograph or family snapshot may have captured that first building without anyone realizing how useful the background would become decades later.

The third question came from the Goodman family, who shared photographs and newspaper clippings connected to Marion Goodman. Their family knew him as Blountstown’s police chief, but the newspaper record uses both titles. Some articles identify him as Chief of Police, while others refer to him as town marshal. I would love to figure out whether he officially held both titles at different times, whether the title changed during his service, or whether the two terms were sometimes used interchangeably in local reporting.

Those loose ends are part of why I hope this record keeps growing after the feature is posted. If something here reminds you of a photograph in a drawer, a family story, an old place name, a cemetery, a store, a school or something about Calhoun County you do not want lost, keep adding to it. I still have plenty left to learn, and after everything people shared with me, I am looking forward to finally seeing some of these places for myself.

Thanks CalCo., I'll see y'all when the suckers are runnin’.