Telling the Refuge Story

The Vista Camp's idyllic 14-acre site on the banks of the lower Suwannee River is surrounded by Refuge lands and has the only visible structures in the last 20 miles before the river arrives at the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico.

Currently, Vista is open to the public only for special occasions, such as the Friends’ Annual Meeting, Junior Ranger days, and scheduled photography, art, birding, and butterflying field trips. Friends’ vision and intention are to make it available dawn to dusk like the rest of the Refuge.

Photo by Frank Offerle

Although understanding of and support for conservation is an almost universal community value in Florida, it is a challenge to learn about the conservation value of the Lower Suwannee National Wildlife Refuge, given its remote location and limited access roads.
 
With its majestic river-front setting and the interpretive walkways Friends and the Refuge are planning to build in the next year, Vista will share with an already supportive public the compelling story of the Lower Suwannee National Wildlife Refuge’s conservation legacy.

Photo by Frank Offerle

The story has at least two parts.

• First, the area that is now the Lower Suwannee National Wildlife Refuge has been logged over at least seven times. Pristine forests and swamps no longer exist here. But, the land that makes up the Refuge is coming full circle . . . from pristine wilderness, through a time of resource extraction, to the re-wilding that is now underway thanks to the Refuge.
• Second, the Lower Suwannee National Wildlife Refuge is a key component and contributor to the re-wilding of the entire Big Bend region of Florida.

Meadow after a burn. Photo by Larry Woodward

The Refuge is the keystone in a network of conservation lands comprising one of the largest undeveloped expanses in the Southeast. While the Refuge directly manages only its core land, it also feeds into and is supported by surrounding public and private lands managed for a variety of other purposes that are nevertheless compatible with wildlife conservation. Its mission and engaged management provide leadership for building a community of conservation lands. The so-far largely undeveloped Big Bend of Florida absorbs the storms of the Gulf of Mexico, provides important wildlife corridors, protects the aquifer and the fishable waters of the Gulf, and preserves a robust economy rooted in the natural environment.

A Portal in Time

The character of the river and surrounding lands trace back hundreds of thousands of years. Their resilient ecosystems ebbed and flowed as successive ice ages altered the climate and geography of the peninsula. These swamps, savannas, and coastal formations surround Vista. At the core of a mosaic of conservation lands seeking to restore wild Florida, Vista can lead visitors into the story of a onetime paradise much valued, lost, and newly struggling to be reborn.

Distant Past

With warm winters and a fantastic abundance of flora and fauna, Florida probably seemed a near paradise for its first human inhabitants. Vista is a rare site along the Suwannee. It is located on one of the few places where dry land abuts the river. It may also have been important to Native Americans for the nearly 15 millennia when they alone occupied Florida.

Recent History

Yearty's cedar sawmill, c. 1910 Florida Memory Image No. NO32433

Change arrived at first slowly with European exploration and later settlement of this region. Beginning a bit more than a century ago the area’s vast forests and pine savannas were felled for lumber to supply the needs of a growing nation. When turned into a commodity, the trees supported generations of early settlers and provided untold riches for some.

Regrettably, these human benefits were achieved at the expense of destroying natural landscapes developed over thousands of years, and they will take hundreds of years and much help from people to regenerate.

Vista is the site of a succession of nineteenth and early twentieth century sawmills and lumber camps. Once a recognized settlement with 85 residents, it had its own U.S. Post Office. Little is left of the mills and houses, although remnants of foundations lie under thick undergrowth.

In the 1970s, the Cummer Cypress Company donated 970 cut-over riverfront acres, excluding the Vista site, to the Nature Conservancy and encouraged nearby landowners to follow suit. Those acres became the founding lands of the Lower Suwannee National Wildlife Refuge.

Following establishment of the National Wildlife Refuge, the Vista inholding was retained by Cummer Cypress Company heirs Sandra Roe Smith and Linda Roe Alexander, who used it off and on in the following years. They donated the site to the US Fish and Wildlife Service for the Lower Suwannee Refuge in 2011 with a life tenure arrangement, and in 2022 they gave up their life estate and turned over full ownership and control to the Refuge. Since then, the Friends of the Lower Suwannee and Cedar Keys National Wildlife Refuges has been leading efforts to stabilize, restore, and ultimately make Vista available to the public.

The Hoped-for Future of Wild North Florida

Vista is both a portal and a nexus to the important living landscapes of the Refuge and the region. A wild river, swamps, pine savanna, and coastal formations, including salt marshes and an estuary that are among the most productive and diverse ecosystems anywhere on Earth, are within a short walk or drive from Vista.

The wild Suwannee River dominates and is a defining feature of the site.

A quarter mile from Vista is the joint trailhead of the Refuge’s Suwannee River and Tram Ridge Trails. The now closed, Hurricane Idalia-destroyed Suwannee River boardwalk trails formerly led visitors through remnants of the great cypress-tupelo swamps, one of region’s iconic features. The swamps remain, but not the boardwalks.

The longer Tram Ridge Trail leads through a variety of habitats, the most important of which is a beautiful section of pine savanna undergoing active restoration.

Estuaries and salt marshes can be visited by a trip down the river or a nine-mile drive on a refuge road starting within a mile of Vista.

Working in partnership, Friends and the Refuge intend to provide at Vista a publicly accessible site that will explore and interpret the role of the regional forestry industry after the Civil War into the mid-late 20th century and the role of the Refuge in restoring what was left of the region’s natural landscapes. They will highlight the role of the Lower Suwannee National Wildlife Refuge in restoring and preserving wild Florida for the benefit of wildlife populations and the American people.