Making the Vista Camp a Visitor Destination

From the time Sandra Roe Smith and Linda Roe Alexander gifted the property to the US Fish and Wildlife Service's (USFWS) Lower Suwannee National Wildlife Refuge (Refuge) in 2011, Friends has looked forward to Vista being regularly open to visitors. Vista will highlight the Refuge’s role in protecting the river, restoring trees, and contributing to the re-wilding of North Florida. The Refuge is actively seeking funding to enhance public access and offer wildlife-based recreational activities that showcase their conservation and restoration efforts.
          What has happened so far
  • During the life-tenancy, planning & preparation
  • Since Refuge took over, removal of unsafe & unusable outbuildings
  • Urgent building-saving actions on Cook's House
  • Consultation on regulations & capabilities
  • Preliminary decisions for future near-term and long-term initiatives
Friends and the Refuge continue to plan and prepare for Vista to welcome more visitors more often.

Going forward, Friends hopes to take the near-term steps needed to allow increased visitor use, while the Refuge takes  long-term steps toward maximizing the visitor experience.

Friends is discussing providing interpretive trails that tell the story of the land's recreational use over time, as well as its evolution from a commercial, resource extraction past, to a preservation and conservation present and future.

The Refuge is seeking multi-million-dollar funding to restore and repurpose the buildings, dock, and waterfront.

Friends Took the Lead

Although Vista is Refuge property, belonging to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Friends has taken the lead to pave the way to its future as a visitor destination and community asset. Given the staffing and funding challenges it faced, the Refuge did not have the capacity that Friends had to initiate this work.
Soon after the gift was made, and while the life tenancy agreement was still in place, Friends began saving money annually from its small revenue base of about $5,000 a year to use for preparatory actions. In 2016, with consulting assistance from experts at University of Florida, Friends developed a Vista planning statement, began gathering maps, documents, and historical records, and did a careful photographic survey of the property.

A Planning Charrette

Early in 2018, Friends held a charrette, a formal, moderator led gathering in which stakeholders discussed options for the eventual use of the land and buildings. The result was general agreement to use the gift as an information and interpretation station for visitors, telling the story of its history and the Refuge’s role in conserving and managing the surrounding lands

A Historic Structure Assessment Report

In summer of 2018, Friends applied for and received a $50,000 grant from the State of Florida Division of Historical Resources to hire Bender & Associates Architects who conducted exhaustive historical research and wrote a structural assessment of the 12 buildings that existed on the property at that time. Concluding that Vista appears eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places as a cultural landscape they wrote:
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The results documented that the modest structures at Vista were built in the 1930s and early 1940s, with relatively minor additions and upgrades made through the 1960s. The property still includes historic structures of relatively recent vintage. Among them is the Main House, a building in mostly good repair that served as a rustic but comfortable short-term lodging for guests. 

The Cook’s House was likely company-built lodging for workers and may have been moved to Vista from Sumner. It may be older than the other structures. The building has much to tell visitors about who lived and worked in this part of Florida, including many African-American workers.
 
The site has a boathouse and dock that gave access to the river with its abundant fish and wildlife. They were rehabilitated after a 1948 flood but currently are again needing a major restoration to be safe and usable. A now ruined houseboat was repurposed as supplemental lodging decades ago, after being set on pilings when it was no longer seaworthy.

A short canal-like landing not far from the buildings served as an artificial backwater where steamboats could load and unload away from the current of the river.

Cook's House Weatherproofing

In 2021, Friends again applied for and received a grant from the Division of Historical Resources. It provided $75,000 to restore the roof and windows of the Cook’s House, doing whatever else was needed to get the building out of the weather so it could later be fully restored.
 
That project included a gift-in-kind of about $10,500 in professional services from Debbie Meeks, then-president of Friends and an expert in historical preservation. With help from some additional Friends’ volunteers, she removed, repaired, and reinstalled all the windows to historical-restoration standards at no cost to Friends or the grant funds. The Division of Historical Resources credited the gift-in-kind toward Friends’ $15,000 required matching gift on the grant.
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If you are curious to see how Debbie and her crew restored the windows, Click Here for a photo essay.

Inventories and Garden Plans

While work has been going on at the Cook’s House, Friends’ board and other members pondered next steps. Short-term repairs recommended by the structural assessment for the Main House were considered. Artifacts in the Main House were inventoried and curated. Items from the garages and boat house were inventoried and stored. A conceptual plan for pollinator landscape was laid out by volunteers with guidance from native plant and pollinator experts.

Conceptual Master Site Plan

Friends’ former board member Mark Gluckman who has extensive professional experience in site planning, prepared a conceptual master plan. It addresses the entire site, including a boardwalk past the former landing for steamboats and through the former cypress swamp.

On to the Next Phase

Friends has been able to get the ball rolling and keep making progress. Going forward, the partnership of Friends and the Refuge will continue to be the key to success.

If Friends decides to take on the creation of interpretive trails, the Refuge will be there to help secure the buildings and spaces that are unsafe for visitors and to provide caretakers on the the property. As the Refuge applies for mega-grant funding to restore and repurpose the venue, Friends will be there to seek and secure community support for the applications.

The Friends role as an active advocate for, and an engaged partner of, the Refuge is on full display as Vista becomes an integral part of the Refuge.