Old Palm Valley held out from change for a long time. But nothing lasts forever
Old Palm Valley held out for a long time from the rush of development that's transformed much of Florida. Long a swampy and out-of-the way spot hideaway between Jacksonville and St. Augustine, it was old Florida with pioneering families that had been living there for a century or much more.
Once called Diego or Diego Plains, it stretched from close to the coast all the way west to Durbin Swamp. Split by the man-made Intracoastal Waterway, known to locals as the Canal, with a sleepy two-lane drawbridge over it, it was vintage Florida — and it couldn't last forever.
First Ponte Vedra and golf began creeping in from the east, leading to some tensions and a lot of change. After all, the two unincorporated communities in St. Johns County were just so different, as the Times-Union's Paul Van Osdol wrote in 1987: "Ponte Vedra Beach is oceanfront estates, country clubs and condominiums. Palm Valley is swampland, fish camps and mobile homes."
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It's hard to tell the difference now, though.
And then from the west came sprawling, booming Nocatee and suburbia, out on the old Diego Plains.
So that's Palm Valley today, largely gentrified and mansion-ized — but still with fish camps on the Canal.
Local historian Scott Grant wants people to know about the old community.
"People have been living here an awfully long time, long before there was golf, long before there was the Inn & Club, way, way long before there was the TPC. They were kind of swamp people, but they were living here for a long time," he said.
He's speaking at the first Palm Valley History Festival on April 22, a free event at the Palm Valley Community Center, 148 Canal Blvd. It goes from 1 to 7 p.m.
He plans to cover the area's history beginning with Spanish explorers, through pioneering families and bootleggers and all the way up to today.
Part of Grant's presentation focuses on Ernest Matthew Mickler, known as Ernie, son of a big, ancient Palm Valley family. He was a "renaissance man," Grant said, who as a young man had a folky musical act with Petey Pickette that had some local popularity.
He really came into celebrity, though, when in 1986 he published a spiral-bound book called "White Trash Cooking" with recipes such as Mama Leila's Hand-Me-Down Oven-Baked Possum and Our Lord's Scripture Cake.
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The tongue-in-cheek but loving tribute to Southern cooking sold 650,00 copies, got rave reviews from Harper Lee and The New York Times and Vogue, and Mickler became a celebrity, even appearing on TV with David Letterman.
The Times-Union also wrote about him several times, with the paper's Joel Crea praising his book as "a fun-to-read fanfare for the common man and his cuisine."
And Mickler, in his introduction, made sure to explain the difference between white trash and White Trash, saying "manners and pride separate the two ... where I come from in North Florida you never failed to say 'yes ma'am' and 'no sir,' never sat on a made-up bed (or put your hat on it), never opened someone else's icebox, never left food on the plate, never left the table without permission and never forgot to say 'thank you' for the teensiest favor. That's the way the ones before us were raised and that's the way they raised us in the South."
EDITOR'S NOTE: The Times-Union will be discontinuing Vintage TU as a weekly feature. However, it may appear from time to time as a historical lookback.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Palm Valley, near Ponte Vedra, transformed by golf and gentrification
