'All here under our noses'

There’s buried treasure in Santa Rosa County, and its hidden right under people’s noses.

On Saturday, the Blackwater Pyrates, a local group dedicated to area water conservation and preservation held a special presentation at the Santa Rosa County Auditorium in front of nearly 250 people on the Shipwrecks of the Blackwater River unveiling the river’s secret past.

But while many people think of shipwrecks as pirate ships with loot and eye patches galore, Dr. Della Scott-Ireton had a better lingo for the wrecks. Scott-Ireton was one of two guest speakers at the presentation that dug into the past of Santa Rosa County shipwrecks.

“These are not the Titanic we are studying, but they are the workhorses that carried the supplies and the people that this area needed that made Florida what it is today,” Scott-Ireton said. “A shipwreck gives us clues to the human past.”

The nearly dozen or more wrecks that have been found in the Blackwater River alone over the past few decades have hinted that northern Santa Rosa County was once a booming logging town.

During the Pensacola Shipwreck survey of 1991, experts, including Scott-Ireton, were able to find over a dozen wrecks lining the Blackwater and Escambia rivers. But the Director of the Northwest Region of the Florida Public Archaeology Network said she was certain there were more in the river than what researchers found over 20 years ago.

“The HMS Mentor wrecked in the Blackwater, and we can’t find it,” Scott-Ireton said. “We rely on archeology to tell us stories from the past.”

So far, archeology has proven that Milton and parts of north Santa Rosa County including Bagdad were once lumber-industry driven.

Mill-town or “Hell” as they used to call Milton could only be accessed by boat or train coming from Pensacola before 1926.  So for the most part, Milton was separated from its neighbors for years. 

“They used to say ‘You need a ticket to Milton?’…’Yeah, I’ll give you a ticket to hell,’” said Dr. Brian Rucker, a professor at Pensacola State College, another guest speaker at the presentation.   

In the 1800s Milton was the busiest town in Florida according to Rucker who has been studying the area for decades.

“In 1860, Santa Rosa County was the most industrious county in the entire state of Florida,” Rucker said.

Why?

Because of a tree that was found to be abundant in the area. That tree was the long leaf yellow pine.

Unfortunately, settlers wiped out nearly the entire yellow leaf pine population, or at least those trees that were hundreds of years old.

“Yellow long leaf pine was the biggest export in Santa Rosa County in the 1800s,” Rucker said. “They were money driven then, they didn’t realize they had wiped out all of the trees.”

By the early 1900s the timber industry had sunk to the bottom of the Blackwater River.

“It’s all here under our noses,” Rucker said.

Back when researchers scoured the Escambia and Blackwater rivers for shipwrecks in 1991, it was clear that finding old ships wasn’t going to be easy.

“The water is murky, it’s almost black,” Scott-Ireton said.

So researchers had to rely on boat-driven metal detectors to find many shipwrecks in the Blackwater River.  Sounds like an easy task, but Scott-Ireton said it wasn’t.

“Most of the boats built at the time were built of wood,” Scott-Ireton said.

That material made it a daunting task for researchers to find ships.

To this day, faculty and students at The University of West Florida and Pensacola State College are continuing to dig into the rich history of the area and the murky waters of the Blackwater River to find more buried treasure.

“These are time capsules...stories of our past,” Scott-Ireton said.