St. Andrews State Park in Bay County, Florida

Photograph: St Andrews State Park Dunes.jpg by Royalbroil · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Restored from the credited Wikimedia Commons file, normalized to the consistent attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Portrait originals retain their complete composition over a softly blurred extension of the same photograph.

Bay County attraction

St. Andrews State Park

Bay County · Panhandle & Emerald Coast

Over 1,200 acres at the eastern tip of Panama City Beach, with beaches on both the Gulf and the lagoon and a boat to Shell Island.

QUESTIONS THAT NAME THIS PLACE

Where Can You Camp on the Coast in Florida?

ABOUT THIS PLACE

The state bought the first 302 acres from the federal government in 1947 at two dollars and fifty cents an acre, and opened the park to the public in 1951 once the bridges made it reachable. It has grown past 1,200 acres since. Native people came here for the shellfish long before any of that. The first recorded resident was Theodore Tollofsen, a Norwegian sailor whose boat wrecked on the point in 1929; he homesteaded the land, was known locally as Teddy the Hermit, and stayed twenty-five years. In 1942 the War Department put a harbor defense installation on the high ground above the new pass, with artillery set among the dunes, and one of the gun mounts is still there to look at. The park has two kinds of water. The Gulf side has surf, and the lagoon behind the rock jetties is calm and shallow, which is why families with small children go there. Shell Island lies across the pass, cut off when the Gulf to Bay pass was dredged in the 1930s, and a shuttle boat runs across. Seabirds and sea turtles nest on it

GETTING THERE

Get Directions ↗Official place website ↗

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