Curator's Choice

Episode 43: Museum of Industry

• Ayla Sparks • Episode 43

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Discover a treasure trove of history as your host Ayla Sparks, along with guest Jess Cragg, take you through the industrial evolution of Pensacola, Florida. Our episode unearths how the Industrial Revolution reshaped a fort town into a center of progress, revealing the ingenuity behind Snapper Smacks and the monumental role of trains like the T.R. Miller Mill Company Steam Engine #12. As we walk through time, you'll be captivated by the narratives of industries, from timber to turpentine, that left an indelible mark on the Gulf Coast.

🌊 Maritime Saga: Red Snapper Industry
Step into the past with vibrant tales of Pensacola's maritime saga, where the red snapper industry reigned supreme before succumbing to overfishing and ecological challenges. We canvas the transformative impact of trains on the local economy and share the poignant history of brick making in a sandy region. The rise of the Pensacola Ice Company and its revolutionary fish preservation methods unfold, painting a picture of innovation amidst adversity. The Museum of Industry stands as a testament to these stories, with artifacts that connect you to a time of bustling industry and cultural richness.


☠️ Pirate Archaeology and Turpentine?
Shift to the darker side of the Gulf of Mexico as we explore pirate archaeology and the turpentine industry's reliance on penal labor. Discover the realities of the pirate's life beyond romanticized tales through the co-authored book "Deadman's Chest." Jess Cragg's insights provide a unique lens into the past that continues to shape the present and future of this coastal gem.


 🔗 Episode Links:
"Dead Man's Chest: Exploring the Archaeology of Piracy" Co-authored by Jess Cragg: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/227/edited_volume/book/111420

Guest:
Jessie Cragg earned her Bachelors in History, with a minor in Archaeology, from the University of Georgia. She earned her Master's in History/Public History from the University of West Florida, focusing on colonial and early republic maritime history. She has previously worked for Gulf Islands National Seashore, the Pensacola Lighthouse & Maritime Museum, and Emerald Coast Tours but is currently the Curator of Exhibits at the UWF Historic Trust. She also serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Pensacola History Illustrated, a publication of the Historic Trust. She is currently the Vice President of the Northwest Florida Maritime Landscape Alliance for Preservation, and recently co-authored a book chapter with Mike Thomin on identifying pirates in the archaeological record. Jessie is also a certified SCUBA diver, and is about to start the Heritage Awareness Diver specialty course, so while not at work she spends most of her spare time under the water. 

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Jess Cragg:

But, like I said, it was really hard to transport fish very long distances. So they actually built specific vessels just for fishing red snapper. They're called snapper smacks because they figured out a way to have the hole filled with water so that the fish were live, so they could transport them farther. And as you're going through and you're sailing, you would hear this smack, smack, smack. Every time the ship would roll because the water inside would smack against the hole and the fish would all get turned up. Oh my god, these poor fish. So they called them snapper smacks. I know right.

Ayla Sparks:

Hi, I'm Ayla Sparks and this is Curator's Choice, a podcast for history nerds and museum lovers. From ancient relics to modern marvels. Each episode of the show features a new museum and a curator's choice of some amazing artifacts housed there. These guardians of history will share insights, anecdotes and the often untold stories that breathe life into the artifacts they protect. Thanks for tuning in to this mighty oak media production and enjoy the show. Hello and welcome to another episode of Curator's Choice.

Ayla Sparks:

Today on the show, we're embarking on a journey through time, exploring the industrial revolution that turned the quiet frontier garrison of Pensacola, florida, into a vibrant metropolis.

Ayla Sparks:

Our lovely guest today is Jess Craig, curator of Exhibits at the UWF Historic Trust, and as our guide, she will be taking us on an insightful exploration of Pensacola's past. Discover the profound impact of timber, turpentine, fishing and brick making on the city's growth, beautifully showcased at the Museum of Industry, which itself is housed in one of the city's once abundant warehouses. Jess shares with us the fascinating maritime legacy shaped by the red snapper industry, including the innovative vessel known as Snapper Smacks, and the fascinating life history of one such vessel housed at the Museum the Snapper Smack. Buccaneer Railroad development takes center stage in our exploration, serving as the engine of progress for transporting Pensacola's abundant natural resources, showcased by the Museum's newly restored 1904 TR Miller Mill Company steam engine. We take a stroll through their reassembled sawmill and discover the industrial transition from timber to turpentine and its many uses. Spoiler alert it's in everything. So, without further ado, let's jump right in with Jess. Why is Pensacola so special and unique in its industrial sense and why is the museum even there in the first place?

Jess Cragg:

Oh boy book, look, I'm ready Bring it.

Ayla Sparks:

I'm so ready, so okay.

Jess Cragg:

So Pensacola's history dates back. I mean, we were peopled over 13,000 years ago, so people have always been coming to this space, to this bay, to these resources, to this coastline, because climate's great, food is abundant, resources are here, and that kind of has held true since 13,000, 15,000 years ago when people first arrived here, right, they loved it. Then, they love it now, they love it then, they love it now, and I can't blame them. I'm a transplant too, but I love it down here. Pensacola's history, I think, is really unique, not only within our state or along the Gulf, but within the country as a whole, mostly because we do get to claim the title of being the first European long-term settlement in what is now the United States. There's been a little bit of rivalry between Pensacola and St Augustine forever, because St Augustine is the oldest continuously settled city in what's now the United States. But we beat them by about two or three years.

Ayla Sparks:

I feel like that could go on a t-shirt for the museum or something like actually, St Augustine. Oh, we have it on a t-shirt.

Jess Cragg:

That is one of our staff shirts. It says number one, pensacola number two St Augustine. That staff shirt was actually a collaboration with one of the local breweries in town and the brewery actually hired a plane to fly over St Augustine. It said number one, Pensacola.

Ayla Sparks:

Okay, so like this rivalry is real.

Jess Cragg:

It's real and it goes deep. So Pensacola is founded by Europeans in 1559. I think St Augustine is 1565, so a couple of years later. But our founding group was an expedition under a guy named Tristan de Luna and he had oh gosh, I'm going to get this number wrong 500 people or something, maybe a little bit more, About seven or eight ships. They stopped. They left from Spain, they went to Veracruz, Mexico, first, got supplies, they built a ship in Veracruz specifically for this venture, and then they also took families with them, they took soldiers with them, they took Aztec warriors with them and they moseyed their way up to Pensacola Bay.

Jess Cragg:

Now, Pensacola Bay had been founded or discovered a few years prior to that, with some de Soto expeditions and things like that. But this was really the first kind of we're going to settle this area. This is going to be Spain's. So they showed up here in 1559. They lasted about two years. Problem came because of our location in the northern Gulf. They got hit by a hurricane about two months after they got here. They hadn't even offloaded the supplies from the ships yet and they just were wiped out. The ships sank in the bay, their supplies were gone and they were basically stuck here until someone came to rescue them two years later. So it wasn't an easy exploration or settlement by any means. And then they did go home and then St Augustine was founded a couple years after that. But that still gives us the edge and we still claim it.

Jess Cragg:

History is history. So we just recently actually revealed our America's first settlement trail. So that's kind of the tagline we've been sticking with because it's true. So that's kind of the founding of our town by Europeans anyway, and then it just builds from there. We were tossed back and forth between all European powers, basically up until the United States got hold of us in 1821. So we just bounced back and forth between English, spain, french were here for a little bit, but then they left and went back to Louisiana, back to Spain, back to England. It was kind of all over the place. But everybody just to.

Jess Cragg:

This very long story is that everybody really wanted to keep Pensacola in the bay because it was one of the very few natural deep water, well-protected bays on the Gulf of Mexico. The only other one was really Tampa Bay and it was pretty shallow and if you're at the northern part of the Gulf of Mexico it gives you a pretty good starting location to go anywhere else along the Gulf Coast. So it's kind of a hotspot for all these European powers and on top of that we had a lot of natural resources here that definitely added to it. So that's really what triggered our industrial boom. So, starting just prior to the Civil War, but really after the Civil War, we were officially in American state. We came to state in 1845.

Jess Cragg:

Florida seceded Pensacola. Half of it was Union controlled for the entirety of the war. Fort Pickens was out there on the bay and it was the one of two or three, maybe one of two forts that was never occupied by Confederate forces. So it was held by Union soldiers the entirety of the war.

Jess Cragg:

Eventually the Confederate forces pulled out of Pensacola, the city seat relocated to Evergreen, alabama, and the Union forces kind of took over Pensacola and a lot of what our site buildings, museum buildings are now, were involved in that. The Old Christ Church was briefly a hospital during the Civil War for Union forces, but after the war, when the city seat returned and they started rebuilding, we had in Northwest Florida millions and millions of acres of wood, and when you're rebuilding the south after it's been ravaged by war you need a lot of wood. So we were perfectly positioned to be able to capitalize on those resources. We had that deep water port already where ships could pick up that lumber and send it around the country, take it to bigger ports along the east coast, and we were just kind of situated just right and the timing was right, so it really kicked off our industrial boom.

Ayla Sparks:

It's really easy to get to those woods too, because you guys have a top level 300 feet. So no matter where you're collecting this wood, the most you're going to have to hike it's up a 300 foot hill.

Jess Cragg:

Yeah, exactly. And because we have all of the waterways that crisscross our area, a lot of the lumber industry would just saw timber float it down the river to the port. It's a lot easier than dragging it through the woods and then load it on the ships, so off it goes, obviously.

Ayla Sparks:

I'm from Nevada, where we don't have a lot of rivers to just float all this lumber, so we were hiking, yeah, yeah no, we got lucky with the water transport, for sure.

Jess Cragg:

And so then we built a lot of warehouses. We built a lot of buildings this industrial boom basically from 1865 until about 1930, the Great Depression and so during that time a lot of warehouses were built, and the Museum of Industry is in one of those old warehouses. So on the outside it very much looks like a warehouse. It's actually two warehouses that were right next to each other and then there was like an alleyway between them and eventually they were joined between that. So when you go into the Museum of Industry, the half that you can get to as the visiting public, with the exhibits and everything like that, was one of the original warehouses. If you go through a side door you see the alleyway and then there's our collection storage on the other half.

Jess Cragg:

So the building outside looks very, very big, but the exhibit inside is actually only one half of the building. But Industry is. I think it's one of our most popular museums because not only is it really well done but it tells a story that's so intrinsic to Pensacola's history and past and why we became kind of this booming city and we're growing again and getting bigger and bigger. That's not necessarily due to Industry now, but it was really kind of the turning point for the city and you keep saying part of the museum.

Ayla Sparks:

So what's really neat about the area as well is you guys basically have a historic village that you can explore. So I want to tell us a little bit about that we do.

Jess Cragg:

So the UWF Historic Trust officially has over 30 individual properties. There's a lot.

Ayla Sparks:

I love historic village places where you can go and, just for the entire day, learn, learn, learn. It's fantastic.

Jess Cragg:

But you can spend more than probably a day down here. The concentration of most of our buildings are in our downtown quarter, so it's about two or three really blocks right in the heart of downtown that was built, all of the buildings that were in, and the site that we now own was originally where the original fort of the city of Pensacola, the settlement of Pensacola, stood. So there's a lot of archaeology that's gone into it over the years to figure out exactly what was where and where was built. But we're situated right between two plazas Plaza Ferdinand and Seville Square, and those were essentially the parade grounds on either end of those older British and Spanish forts. And so then, as the city started building up, forts weren't really a thing anymore. The fort wasn't necessarily it's not like a fort like St Augustine, like you would think of it being this giant coquina structure. A lot of it was a wooden palisade kind of going around, and then there was some structure around it and buildings inside it, and then the town grew up around it and then, as the fort fell apart and we transitioned into an American city, things built up inside of where the fort was now, and so that's our site for the most part. We do have some outlying sites, so we have quite a bit for people to visit. Oh, I love the fatigue to walk around here the most.

Jess Cragg:

So, across our site, our mission as an organization is to interpret, preserve and share the stories of Northwest Florida and the Gulf Coast.

Jess Cragg:

So we don't only focus on Pensacola, although Pensacola kind of being the main city region in the area, a lot of our stories do stem from Pensacola, but we cover everything from, I would say, most of the panhandle. Northwest Florida kind of has an arbitrary boundary, depending on who you're talking to. We go as far as you know Tallahassee if it's something really crucial or important, and then a lot of the Gulf Coast stories are also Pensacola stories. So if we talk about, for example, one of our biggest celebrations every year in town is Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras originated in Mobile, which is about a 45-minute drive just to the west of us, and New Orleans is known for Mardi Gras and that's only three hours away, right, but it's still really important to Pensacola because it's a Gulf Coast tradition. So we don't necessarily limit it to just the city. So that's really what we focus on is elevating and preserving the stories of the people that have lived here in the past.

Ayla Sparks:

Very cool and obviously a big part of that museum is the industry and I had no idea. To be fair, I'm not really from the area but I had no idea. The industrial history and now the listeners do have a little bit. But in the museum itself, the way that you guys have shown the different industries, it's actually like stepping into that area and seeing the production of it during that time, which I think was really fantastically done.

Jess Cragg:

Yeah, it's one of my favorite spaces to take visitors into, for sure, in the Museum of Industry, because it's so immersive and it really feels like you're walking into a sawmill or a brick kiln or you're standing on the docks looking at all the fish that you can catch. So it's one of the highlights of our site, for sure, and that people can really dig into why industry matters here, and I think before I came here too, it would be something that I would be like oh, industry, it happened everywhere, that's exactly how it's done.

Ayla Sparks:

You learn history and school and it's like industrial revolution.

Jess Cragg:

Woohoo, you kind of just breeze past it, because that's the end of the year usually.

Ayla Sparks:

Yeah, exactly.

Jess Cragg:

That's as far as you get, but I think once you come here and you kind of start going through that space and start reading about how important it was for the people on the city of Pensacola, it's really easy to kind of get lost in it. But it also helps you understand why it matters and that context is so, so important.

Ayla Sparks:

So do you have two particular artifacts or exhibits that you would like to share with us?

Jess Cragg:

So the Museum of Industry is interesting the way. I wasn't here when that display was set up and done. It's probably oh gosh, I should have looked this up before I started this conversation. I would say it's probably well over maybe 10, 15 years old since the last time it was redone and I've only been in this position for four years, so it was before my time as curator here.

Jess Cragg:

But I think what they did really well is they incorporated our biggest artifacts besides the buildings themselves into that space, but they left out a lot of the little bits and pieces that we have in our collection that might kind of help add to the story.

Jess Cragg:

So the Museum itself is really interesting because you walk in and it's super immersive and you see all these things.

Jess Cragg:

But there's really only about two major artifacts in there, believe it or not, it doesn't feel like that when you're walking through, but in terms of our collection, there really is only two major big artifacts in there, and one of them is the train that's technically not even in the building, it's outside, and the other one is the sawmill. It's got a lot of bits and pieces and moving parts and it kind of takes up the back half of the entire building and you can walk around it and kind of go through and see it moving up and down and see parts of where the sawmill would have worked. Those are really kind of the only two major pieces that are in there. There are other things in there that I think are also equally as important, but they are not necessarily historic artifacts. So we have a recreation of a brick kiln and brick making was one of our biggest industries across the entire Spain of Pensacola kind of existing, which is surprising because you would think we were just all sand.

Jess Cragg:

Yes, that's exactly what I would think Sand and citrus, yeah wrong, yeah, basically, but we don't even really have orange trees here. Northwest Florida is kind of its own little thing, not really what you would think of, as, like the rest of Florida, we kind of pride ourselves on being unique, but it's the sand doesn't necessarily lend itself to brick making, but around the parts of town there are elevations and cliff banks that are actually clay, so it's deposits that have washed down over the millennia from Appalachian Mountains and parts of Alabama and Georgia. South Georgia is kind of surprisingly not too far away. South Georgia is all clay, which I know because that's where I did my archaeology field school and we just dug through clay for six weeks. So clay is not that far away. And that really allowed Pensacola to start exporting and manufacturing bricks by the literal brick ton. We had bricks going out every day on ships, hundreds of ships coming through here per week taking bricks out and around the country, and in fact one of ours.

Jess Cragg:

So we have four brick and mortar third system forts that were built around to protect the Navy yard from the entrance of the bay in case anybody ever tried to enter and attack it. The biggest of the forts is Fort Pickens. It was started in 1829, completed in 1834. And it's right at the entrance to the bay, in a directly across from that was another smaller little kidney shaped fort built out of brick and it was Fort McCray. And then across the bay again, over on what is the Navy yard now, was Fort Brankis, and they kind of made a little triangle in their guns would protect the entrance to the bay, and the goal was to protect it from outside forces. It turns out the only use that I ever saw was the Civil War when we were fighting each other. But it took millions and millions and millions of bricks to build those three forts. And Fort Pickens is huge. Even missing one of its bashings like it is now, it's absolutely massive. So brick making became a really big industry here in the 1830s because they were building all of these forts.

Jess Cragg:

Once the forts got built, they started exporting those bricks, because all of the third system forts were built in the same manner. They had the same Corps of Engineer architects over them, they had the same plans, and so we started exporting bricks to help build other forts around the country too. So actually one of the last forts we sent bricks to was Fort Jefferson down in the dry fortugas. So if you ever go there and I haven't made it yet, but it's on the list there is apparently a section of it where you can see two different colored bricks.

Jess Cragg:

The foundation and stuff has one and then there's a pretty stark line and then there's different colored bricks. That's because we were exporting bricks to build it from Pensacola and the Civil War happened, so they had to find bricks from somewhere else. So our brick making is a huge industry. So inside the museum we have kind of a recreated kiln that shows talks about how you would build bricks and I think we had dozens of brick manufacturers in town and each one of them stamped bricks with their own signature. There was St Joe, there was Boniface bricks, so every brick you find in town has a logo on it.

Ayla Sparks:

You have a little display in the museum of all the different ones and a lot of them have, like, the dates of how old the bricks are. That was I really enjoyed looking through those.

Jess Cragg:

Oh, good, well, we have a ton more bricks, if you have a brick ton.

Ayla Sparks:

I think we'll see more.

Jess Cragg:

There's quite a bit, but I think we've got most of the major ones on display in that little grouping. That's awesome.

Ayla Sparks:

I just wanted to jump in and share a few more tidbits, or brick bits, about the bricks at the museum. First of all, did you know that there are different kinds of bricks? Seems pretty obvious, but just in case you are unaware, like I was here, they are. There are common bricks, easy enough. There are face bricks, which are graded according to ability to withstand freezing temperatures and moisture, and these are often applied on top of common bricks. There are glazed bricks, which are made primarily for walls and buildings like dairies, hospitals and laboratories, where the walls are frequently cleaned, or at least we hope so and refractory brick, which is made from fireclays, which is clay with a high non-clay mineral content, and they are very heat resistant, so they are often used to construct furnaces, kilns and fireplaces.

Ayla Sparks:

Some of the bricks highlighted on display at the museum are a brick made by James Abercrombie and Partners, which operated between 1855 and 1861. This company employed John W Crary, who invented the first brick making machine, which was utilized to make 16 million bricks for the federal government during that time. There is also a brick from W David Wow from around the 1770s, who was the first known local brick manufacturer, and they even have a souvenir brick from the Florida State Capitol building erected in 1824. Okay, back to the show. So what is special about the train? I'm assuming I'm just going to take a wild guess it probably has to do a lot with maybe transporting some of the lumber, but maybe not.

Jess Cragg:

It does, yeah yeah, so a lot of the buildings in our immediate downtown area were built to support the railroad industry. So the railroads started getting. We had smaller offshoots pre-Civil War, but really in the 1870s we started connecting our railroads to major railroad spurs across the southeast. That allowed a whole new host of industry to get started. So, for example, all of our industry really is tied to the railroads coming in and being able to export that material much more efficiently. So, like, we had fishing industry here well before the railroads were connected.

Jess Cragg:

But it was difficult to transport fresh fish very far on ships that were hot and took forever to get around the end of Florida and back up to the east coast. All your fish would rot by then, right? So most of our fish was sold along locally and then over in New Orleans market. And then the railroads happened, and then an ice company came into town and we went oh, wait, a second, that's more efficient, that's not dependent on the weather and the wind, and making sure that we can make it all the way around Florida before all these fish rot. And so the fishing industry started booming because the railroads came in here. Same thing with the lumber industry right, we would float timber down the rivers to ships and then send it out, which is great and all. But you can only get so many logs down a river at once without it just turning it to either an actual log jam or them being broken up on the way down, or again, weather dependent. But if you have these smaller railroad spurs that can suddenly go into the forest in northwest Florida, you can load up all this lumber and then just send it down by train, down to either the sawmills or down to the port to get directly exported. It becomes a lot more efficient.

Jess Cragg:

So once these railroads started coming in, buildings in town went up that helped support all of the functions you need to build this thriving railroad system right. So we had machine shops, we had depots, we had passenger trains come through here. We had depots that were built along the wharves along town. So if you look at our waterfront now, there is two piers that kind of stick out into the bay, that kind of extend past the city At one point when the railroad industry was at its peak.

Jess Cragg:

So around the turn of the century we had over 25 wharves that just right along the bayfront, stuck right out there, and each one had its own railroad track and each one had its own rail car that would go back and forth. So we were a very busy railroad kind of terminus at the end where they could bring it to ships and send it on its way. So the train that's out in front of the museum is one of those engines that helped carry all of the lumber from the interior part of the county down to the coast. So the one that we have is the TR Miller Mill Company engine number 12. The TR Miller Mill Company is actually still in existence. It's still one of the largest lumber companies in the country?

Ayla Sparks:

Do they know that you have one of their trains?

Jess Cragg:

Oh they do. They gifted it to us very kindly. We didn't go steal the trains, so we got it from them, although now I would say it's been so long probably they don't realize that we do have their train. But that one came in in 1968. So it is the second year of existence of kind of our organization. So it was one of the biggest artifacts that we had and one of the earliest artifacts that we have, and for a while it was out behind one of the deep old buildings that is also one of our buildings.

Jess Cragg:

That is now the main office for the Florida Public Archaeology Network, just across the street from where I am right now. So for a while it set back out there and then where the Museum of Industry is was the original museum for the Historic Preservation Board and then they called it, changed names about a thousand times between 1967 and now. It's been the Hispanic Museum, it's been the Transportation Museum, I think, so now it's the Industry Museum, so kind of similar things. But the train was eventually moved to in front of it and restored, I think in the 1990s.

Jess Cragg:

The train itself was built in 1904 and then rebuilt in 1921 by one of the lumber companies and then the TR Miller Company bought it in 1935 and then in 1968 we bought it from them because they were going to junk it. They didn't need that train engine anymore. It has been part of our site for a very long time and luckily earlier this year it got completely restored, which is great. There is metalwork fixed on it, there was painting that was redone and restored and now it is gleaming and beautiful and bright and going to be lovely and it's new environment when that gets built.

Ayla Sparks:

So for train engines like that, I am fairly unfamiliar with trains, even though I used to live with one that ran back and forth 10 feet in front of my house day and night. However, the trains that would be taking the goods, like the lumber and the fish, from internal Florida kind of to the coastline, were those really really large locomotives or were they kind of small, kind of transit ones that ran on separate tracks or were pretty much the same and they just used them wherever they could use them?

Jess Cragg:

So for the most part they were fairly small they were. So the tracks that came through both from the lumber mills and from larger cities like Mobile and New Orleans and eventually kind of going to the east and up to Georgia All of them use the same tracks right, and then you would have spurs that would come off and go down to the wharves or go over to the passenger depots. So it depends on what train was coming in as to what its size was and what it was doing. One of the biggest train track companies organizations was the Lewis and Nashville Railroad, so the LNN. They were really the ones that came in and just started buying up all the little track spurs around Northwest Florida and connecting them to bigger tracks and they kind of eventually became the predominant railroad company in town and they had every kind of train you could think of, you know, from little eddy-bitty railroad lumber track cars to big passenger depots that they would drop, you know, people off to coming from all over the country. So it kind of depends on the train you're talking about.

Jess Cragg:

But I believe for the most part most of the lumber engines were fairly small and the one that we have, I think, was only like a 35 ton engine and I am not. My background is not in industrial history or trains at all, so I'm sure if our historic preservationist on site is actually a very, very big train guy and if he listens to this, he's gonna be like no, that wasn't correct, but I'm pretty sure I've got it right. It was a fairly small engine for what it did, because all it needed to pull was a couple of carts with lumber, which is granted heavy. Yes, it at least fits in the yard in front of the museum.

Ayla Sparks:

That's what we're supposed to be pretty small. I'm also curious you had said that the development of an ice company really kind of changed fishing industry, being able to get it to the other side of Florida. Where in the world in Florida is there ice? Is there ice in Florida? Am I missing?

Jess Cragg:

something major. There's no ice in Florida.

Ayla Sparks:

Unless you make it. So were they making the ice.

Jess Cragg:

They were making the ice, yeah, so they had. We had probably, I would say, a dozen or so individual fishing companies. Our biggest fish industry for a very long time was the red snapper industry. Red snapper beautiful, tiny little red fish, delicious to eat, which is why it was so popular. Us being kind of built on the back of the red snapper industry isn't necessarily because snappers were amazing. It was because we had a lot of them. They were relatively easy to get like. If we had had a thought of rainbow trout, that would have been our fishing industry.

Jess Cragg:

But red snappers were kind of everywhere out in the Gulf, in the immediate area. So that's really what they started fishing for until we overfished and then they all disappeared. So we kind of shot ourselves in the foot with that one. As people usually do, we find a resource, you go too hard on it and then it's gone. Did the same thing with the lumber industry too, but for fishing. We would basically go out and fleet of fishing boats out into the Gulf, go fishing all day, all night, bring your catch back in, and then they were catching quantities that were far too large to sell in our tiny little town of Pensacola. So they started seeking other towns. They would go a little bit farther west, a little bit farther east. Destin is not too far from us and Destin's like motto is the world's luckiest fishing village, because they also were big into the fishing industry. It was kind of the industry you got into down here. If you weren't working in lumber, you're working in fishing, and so we were part of that.

Jess Cragg:

But, like I said, it was really hard to transport fish very long distances. So they actually built specific vessels just for fishing red snapper. They're called snapper smacks because they figured out a way to have the hole filled with water so that the fish were live, so they could transport them farther. And as you're going through and you're sailing, you would hear this smack, smack, smack. Every time the ship would roll because the water inside would smack against the hole and the fish would all get turned up. So they called them snapper smacks, I know right. So they called them snapper smacks and that was kind of like a in terms of maritime history. Snapper smacks are a pretty big deal for a golf course fishing, but you could still only get so far right, because fish have to eat. They have to be able to move around in order to survive, they have to get oxygen from the air, which means the water has to be constantly moving, which it was in the ship for the most part, but it's still difficult to transport these fish.

Ayla Sparks:

It's a highly stressful environment for a fish, so I'm imagining that that also contributed to their earlier demise.

Jess Cragg:

Yeah, these poor little fish were just carted all over the place. But once the railroads got here, people went okay, well, we might have the ability to transport these fish farther than just New Orleans, right, we get potentially, if we could figure out a preservation method, get these fish all the way to the interior of the country. And I mean, if you think about it now, like you can be in the middle, you can be in Oklahoma and go find a seafood restaurant, right. So it's kind of the start of that idea of like we have these resources and we want to exploit them and sell them and send them farther in the country.

Ayla Sparks:

Me again. I wanted to share some more quick tidbits from the museum. They have a small display that shares the life as a snapper fisherman and I wanted to smack some of those facts on you. Up until the 1920s, deep sea fishing boats were powered by sails. Each crew member worked from sun up until sunset standing watch, repairing sails and lines and setting and hauling fishing lines by hand. Most slept under a couple of blankets spread out on the deck in good weather and below deck in bad weather. Crews fished for about three weeks at a time and a day's catch averaged about 2,500 pounds of fish. Wages were based on shares and fishermen were paid only if the trip's profits exceeded expenses. But never fear, if expenses exceeded profits, the voyage was called a broker and crew members received a 10 pound snapper as payment. Okay, back to Jess.

Jess Cragg:

So there was a couple of fish companies in town and I believe it was the Pensacola Fish Company that was kind of part of this. We had like Pensacola Fish Company, warren Fish Company, saunders Fish Company. One of them and I think it was the fish company was like what if we packed all of these fish in ice and put them on a train and then shipped them? That would preserve them pretty well. But where are you going to get ice from in Florida?

Jess Cragg:

So they had to come up with their refrigeration method. They had to figure out how to manufacture ice in order to help transport these fish. So they developed the Pensacola Ice Company where they were manufacturing ice here in the panhandle, where it gets to be 112 degrees in July, and loading these poor little red snappers on the trains and sending them on their way. And so that really helped the fishing industry kind of explode here, because now no longer are you just selling in relatively local markets but you're able to sell it nationwide, right? So then all the fish companies went well, we've got this nailed, we know what we're doing, we can send them everywhere. We're going to go get more and more and more and more and more fish. And then we ran out of fish.

Ayla Sparks:

That was the way. Yeah, yeah, all right. So it killed the ice industry and the fishing industry. Yeah.

Jess Cragg:

You got a little too excited about their ability to sell all of our natural resources and so it kind of just went downhill. The Great Depression didn't help, right, but we were definitely running low on our reserves by that point anyway. But that story is actually told in the museum of industry through. When you walk in you kind of go around the entry. If you look over to the left there's like half of a boat that's against the side wall and that boat has a name plate on it and it says Buccaneer, and that is actually a really important boat for us as an organization. So the recreated boat that's in the museum is obviously recreated. It's not the original boat but the very first artifact that our organization ever had. In 1967, number one was a snapper smack named the Buccaneer and it was the actual boat.

Jess Cragg:

Oh wow, and they had it docked down at the port, which is for those of you who have never been to Pensacola it's literally across the street from where our site is. They had it docked down there and we basically started out as a mini little ship museum. That was what our organization did. That was our very first artifact. It was a snapper smack that was built, I think, in the 30s. So what do I say? May have been earlier. It was one of the last snapper smacks that was kind of still around as the industry was dying off and the historic preservation board purchased it in 1967. It was artifact number one and their plan was to have it docked down at the port and let people go on it, go through tours, kind of do the ship museum thing.

Jess Cragg:

Unfortunately, the boat wasn't in great shape and it had a lot of structural issues because it was pretty old by that point and it had been through the ringer of being a snapper smack for years and years and years, which is a lot of wear and tear and the company it was originally owned by the Saunders Fish Company and they were getting rid of it. Snapper industry was going down, they were jettisoning their boats left and right and then someone had it for a while and then in 1967, the organization purchased it. So we docked it down there and we were restoring it and it was going. People were going on it through tours and it worked really well for about 10 years. And then over time, boats are really expensive to maintain and if you are a nonprofit preservation board in a relatively small town that is not necessarily a tourist destination like it is now, it's hard to find the money to keep the boat afloat.

Jess Cragg:

And so in 1977, it sank at the dock and they went, uh-oh, what are we going to do? So they went through a huge fundraising campaign. They tried to get money to raise it. They were able to raise it, lift it back up out of the water. They got some grants, they got some money. People donated left and right. I think they had like $30,000 to fix this boat, which in 1977 was, I mean, it's a good chunk of money now. It's a lot of money in 1977. Things are going great. They're pulling it out of the water, they're going to send it to a shipyard over in one of the bayous to get repaired. It was going to take about a year and it sank again before they could do it.

Jess Cragg:

It was just destined for the shipyard it was just really wanting to rest on the bottom of the port. I mean, it was. I don't think I've seen any. We may have some historic photos of where it was actually underwater, but it wasn't fully submerged, it was just resting on the bottom. But you know, you can get on it.

Jess Cragg:

And they needed more money, they needed more time and they ran out of both and it was at the municipal port. So the city owns the port and owned the slip, and the city was like we need this spot if you're not going to use it. So by 1980, we ran out of money to try and raise her. The city was done with our shenanigans and basically carted it off and destroyed it. So we deaccessioned it. It is no longer in existence. We did salvage some pieces from her. We have the ship's wheel, we have a lot of black and tackles, pulleys. But the thing that we decided to do which I think was the best thing we could have done was basically rebuild half of her in the museum of industry so that you can go in there, you can see kind of her size, what she looked like, and kind of get a feel of what she was doing. And it was a very first artifact, so it was a pretty neat one. Well, the resurfaced buccaneer.

Ayla Sparks:

Yeah, yeah. So on top of the rest of these industries, one of the older ones that you have is the lumber industry, and you have an entire lumber set up in a sawmill, set up inside the museum, which I had never seen before walking through an entire sawmill. And I have to say your mannequins are actually pretty good Sometimes they're not, they're holding in there.

Jess Cragg:

They've been there for a while. Those ones are not too bad.

Ayla Sparks:

So walk us through the sawmill.

Jess Cragg:

Yeah, so the sawmill is pretty neat, so it's kind of the other major artifact we have in that museum space. Our collection totals over 200,000 individual artifacts and, honestly, probably more. We're about halfway through a 10 year full inventory of our collection, which has never been done before. So our poor collections manager has been at it for five years and has probably got another five or six to go oh boy, job security, yeah right.

Jess Cragg:

So we have so many artifacts but in that particular museum space we really only have those two major ones. So we've got the train outside and then the sawmill inside and the way they did it was really neat. So they basically reassembled the sawmill and then they built walkways and pathways over and around it so that you can basically see it in 360. And then we do have our mannequins in there just working away every day. They never gonna break. They saw the same piece of lumber. I mean eventually they'll get that one log sawed, I assume, but it's been decades. At this point they still have working on it. It's a sufficient sawmill.

Ayla Sparks:

What is that type of story called the slowdown? Yeah, yeah.

Jess Cragg:

Well, that's definitely what they're doing, but the sawmill has all of its pieces. So that sawmill was brought into our collection in 1971 from a company that was going to funk. Really, the TR Miller Mill Company is kind of one of the last major timber companies in the area and this sawmill is not from them. It was from a smaller one that kind of couldn't compete because they didn't have enough land and acreage to kind of put out the same amount that would keep them going. So in 1971, we got the sawmill and it has all of its pieces. It's got the planers, the engines, the track, the head saw, the lock carriage, the rollerbeds, all of that stuff. And it came from Barthelumber Company and it is in amazing condition and thankfully when that exhibit was put in they were able to get most of the pieces moving and working.

Jess Cragg:

So as you kind of walk through and go around it you can see bits and pieces like moving and going up and down and seeing pieces slide along the track. And I mean it doesn't go very far and obviously we haven't used it to actually plane a piece of timber since 1971. But it is a really great exhibit and kind of explaining how the lumber industry worked and, just like with fishing, we ran out of trees pretty quickly. So this was before they could really think a long. Well, they could think long term. I guess they just didn't think long term of, like, we're clear, cutting all of these virgin forests, what are we going to do when they're gone? Right? And so now lumber companies will go back in and replant. Of course, those trees grow quickly and not as well as old original virgin growth forests. So, like, if you go to Home Depot today and buy a two by four, those rings are, you know this, wide apart, because they're just growing super fast and they cut them down in a few years.

Ayla Sparks:

It's also usually like a monocrop.

Jess Cragg:

Yeah, yeah. And virgin timber forests would have had, you know, those rings be this far apart, super dense and super strong original growth timber, right. But we let cut all of that down and really by about the nineteen hundred nineteen tens, eighty percent of our virgin forest were gone. So the lumber industry had to turn to something else to try and keep going while they rebuilt the forest and let more trees grow so they could do it all over again. So what they turned to was the turpentine industry.

Jess Cragg:

So all of the trees that were left, they stopped cutting down, they stopped clear cutting most of it and they turned to basically scraping the bark off of these trees to collect the sap from the pine trees. So on the backside of that big sawmill setup that we have along the wall section is all of the tools and how they would have turned their thriving lumber business into a turpentine business. So you get to walk through kind of the whole basically breadth of our lumber industry within I don't know a hundred square feet. That's your going through it, right, just how they started transitioning to turpentine, and turpentine was used in gosh, everything. I was shocked.

Ayla Sparks:

I had no idea, because I really didn't even fully understand what turpentine was. And in the museum they have the thing okay, this has turpentine, and so does this, and so does this. That was really surprising to me.

Jess Cragg:

Literally everything you can ever think of pretty much has turpentine in it. It was such a huge industry and it's basically a distilled sap of pine trees, right? So what they would do is they would go in and they would cut I think they're called cat eyes. They would cut big scrapes in the tree and they would nail a spigot to it and hang a bucket on it and they would let all this sap drain out and then they would distill that into turpentine which would then go off to be used in everything from paints, oil thinners, perfumes, you know, like medicines still used today and like chest rubs and stuff. It's literally everything you can think of. It's like a chemical starter for a lot of products. But they kind of quickly realized that they needed to basically cut into every single tree that was left in order to get enough to kind of feed this growing industry. And they didn't have a lot of people because the people that were able to still fell trees and saw lumber and work in the mills were still doing that. So in Northwest Florida a lot of the companies that were originally timber companies and turned to turpentine industry started using convict labor and African-American labor in order to collect enough turpentine to kind of sustain this industry that they were shifting into.

Jess Cragg:

So we have a really long history of turpentining in here too. That's a little bit what's the word for it? Not as glamorous, I guess you would say as like going out fishing every day and being on the gulf right? Instead you're sending these poor people into the woods and if they're convict labor they weren't getting paid. This was in the 19, like teens, 20s.

Jess Cragg:

Convict labor would just have to go in and basically do it all day, every day, and that was part of their kind of sentence for being whatever they were convicted for, whether justly or unjustly. But we are in the deep south, so there's a lot of like really deeply rooted issues that went in with that industry as well, and so thankfully that industry kind of died off. I mean, turpentine is still used, but obviously we don't use convict labor or anything like that to do it anymore. But that's kind of the entire back corner of that museum space. So the sawmill itself is one of those artifacts, but then along the walls and around it are all the artifacts we have relating to that second phase of lumbering as well.

Ayla Sparks:

Awesome. It's really cool. I really really enjoyed the museum as a whole. I have to say my favorite part was learning about the red snapper, because what a ridiculous looking little fish that had such a big impact, and I think the display was really cute too. They're just cute little fish, they are.

Jess Cragg:

They're cute, adorable little fish and thankfully their numbers are coming back.

Ayla Sparks:

Well, thank you so much for sharing this amazing museum with us and the history of Pensacola. And I did want to do a quick little plug, because you had just co-wrote a book about pirates. Who doesn't love that topic? So why don't you tell us just a little bit about that? So if people are interested to kind of learn more, we can send them that way.

Jess Cragg:

Yeah. So the book just came out through the University of Florida Press. It's called Deadman's Chest and it is actually the third in a series of books about archaeology and piracy, and so this is the third one and chapter three is the best. I'm not biased at all, but chapter three is pretty great. So I co-wrote that with Mike Tillman, who is he works at the Florida Public Archaeology Network and he's their museum manager, among many, many, many other things that he does.

Jess Cragg:

And we are actually on a local board together for the Northwest Florida Maritime Landscape Alliance for Preservation, or INLAP, so he's the treasurer and I'm the vice president. So we got together and we both realized that like it's more of an overview of kind of how pirates were operating in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, but not the pirates you're thinking of. Right, you say pirate and everybody's like, oh, blackbeard, I love Blackbeard as much as the next guy, trust me. But these pirates were a lot more ruthless, a lot more dangerous, a lot more bloodthirsty, and they happen later than you think. I don't want to give it all away but it's pretty interesting, yeah.

Jess Cragg:

So what we did is we basically looked at what we could identify in the historic material record so either material culture left behind through archaeology or through historic documents like court cases and see if we could identify these pirates and where they were and what they were doing and what they left behind. So that's kind of the chapter that we we co-wrote together, and the rest of the book is phenomenal and there's a lot of other great content in there. So if you're at all interested in piracy and archaeology and historic resources and research and how it's all done and figured out, it's a great book to check out.

Ayla Sparks:

I'll definitely put the link to it in the show notes as well, so if anybody is interested to check it out, they definitely should. Yeah, awesome Well. Thank you so much for meeting with me. It was great having you here.

Jess Cragg:

Yeah, well thanks for contacting us. Anytime you want to talk about our exhibits, just let me know, because I can talk a lot about them Fantastic.

Ayla Sparks:

Thank you so much for tuning in and supporting Curator's Choice, a mighty, oak media production. If you enjoyed the show, please consider subscribing and rating the show on Apple podcasts, spotify, youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If you love a museum and would like to hear it featured in an episode, shoot me a message at curatorschoicepodcastcom. I'll do my best to reach out and see if I can get them to be on the show. You can also view articles, artifacts and more by following us on Facebook and Instagram. Thanks for listening to Curator's Choice, a podcast for history nerds and museum lovers.