HISTORY & HERITAGE
Historic Downtown Port St. Joe
Gulf County · Panhandle & Emerald Coast
A paper mill town that lost its mill and rebuilt itself around the water, on the coast Floridians call the Forgotten Coast.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
Port St. Joe has about 4,054 residents and sits 23 miles west of Apalachicola. Its history runs in two arcs. The first town, St. Joseph, was founded in 1835 and by 1837 held 12,000 people, the largest in Florida, and hosted the delegates who drafted the state's first constitution in 1838. Then a fire in 1841, yellow fever and hurricanes in 1843 and 1851 cut the population to a few hundred, and the place effectively disappeared. The railroad came back in 1909 and the town was rebuilt under the name Port St. Joe. The St. Joe Company opened a paper mill in 1938, and for sixty years that mill was the town. Visitors disliked the smell; local people said it smelled like bread and butter, because it was the payroll. The mill closed in 1999, unemployment went to twenty in every hundred and the population halved. What followed was unplanned: people looking for quiet beaches found the town, and the downtown filled with restaurants and shops again. The beaches, the state park on the peninsula and the scalloping are what bring visitors now
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