Moonshine to barn building: The sheer grit of Santa Rosa Beach history
The remote island of Santa Rosa Beach with sandy soil and vicious mosquitoes made life difficult for early settlers, but some pioneers flourished living off the land, said Vernon Bishop.
“My dad went up north for the first few years after moving here until he started his citrus nursery,” Bishop said. “He’d ship them away for a few quarter or dimes; it didn’t take much to live back then with hardly any taxes.”
The environment might have been trying, but there was plenty to eat.
“You farmed the land, ate what you grew and we’d go to the bay and get oysters and fish,” Bishop said. “It was a dead place, but there was plenty to eat and if you didn’t have enough you were just plain lazy.”
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COLLECTION OF COVERAGE
Moonshine to barn building: The sheer grit of Santa Rosa Beach history
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The schools in the area have changed too.
“We would walk to school and all eight grades were in the same classroom,” Bishop said.
The first time any industry came into the area his family took in road workers during the building of Hwy. 98. One of the boarders sparked one of Bishop’s fondest memories as a kid.
“It has been 73 years, and I still remember his name like it was yesterday, Oley Tedwell, he had a Harley Davidson and he would take me for rides when I was 12 years old,” Bishop said. “Oh my goodness, I loved to ride on that thing.”
Vernon Bishop is the oldest living man born in Santa Rosa Beach, and his cousin is the oldest living woman born here, he said.
Gilbert Ray, Chat Holley’s grandson on his mother’s side, has a lot of admiration for how “the old timers lived.”
“Other than driving a school bus in his later years, my granddad fished, hunted and tracked; he pretty much lived off the land his whole life,” Ray said. “He and daddy always went into the woods together.
One time, during Holley’s moon-shining days, “someone found the still and left a note telling him he better clear out,” Ray said. Unperturbed, Holley “hid behind a tree and jumped out when he came back there and told them ‘he could be in them woods if he wanted to’ and that was the end of that,” Ray said.
Bishop told The Sun he was proud of how the town has grown and the work he did to make it happen.
In addition to helping with the Lion’s Club and creating the Mosquito Control and Fire Station, he had a hand in many-a-barn building.
“I helped build three churches too,” Bishop said. “And I mean work, work. Sometimes I would be the only soul out there.”
