Festival set for Sopchoppy Depot on Sept. 10

By CHARITY TUMBLESON Reporter

The festival will run from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Depot Park on Rose Street.

Food vendors will also be present and the monthly Sopchoppy Community Market will be going on with local vendors selling homemade and homegrown products.

In addition to the festivities, there will be live music featuring local musician Frank Lindamood.

Bonnie Allen, the granddaughter of Clifford C. Land who founded turpentine operations in Tate’s Hell in the 1930s, will have a presentation on the history of turpentine. Her exhibit will show the difficult process of gathering sap and distilling it into resin with many photos, artifacts, letters, and documents from the C.C. Land Turpentine Company, illustrating the challenges of this long-ago profession. Turpentine camp workers needed exceptional strength to wield the heavy hand tools and had to master skillful techniques to maximize the amount of sap they could get from a pine tree without destroying it.

C.C Land kept the company going until wage labor laws made it no longer feasible, and this was the last operating turpentine camp in Franklin County.

In the late 1940s, the business converted to logging and cattle raising. Allen will also have samples of the many medicinal products made from pine derivatives.

Nelson Martin, who spearheaded efforts to restore the Depot, will be speaking on the history of the Depot with a timeline dating back to 1893. The City of Sopchoppy was started by the building of the Carrabelle, Tallahassee & Georgia Railroad. Originally the Depot, built in 1891, was part of the CT&G Railroad which was then sold to the GF&A Railroad in 1906, a year after Sopchoppy was chartered as a city in 1905.

For many years the Sopchoppy economy was centered around the railroad with the locomotives transporting lumber, turpentine, honey, farm produce, fish, and oysters packed in barrels of ice as well as sturgeon caviar from the Sopchoppy River.

The Sopchoppy Depot was in active use until 1946 and was restored in 2010. It now serves as a museum with historical displays and a collection of old photographs, archives, and recovered artifacts and is the last remaining depot building on the GF&A rail line.

On Aug. 16, the Depot hosted a ribbon cutting for the newly made mural of one of the 10-wheeled locomotives that used to ride along the Georgia, Florida & Alabama Railroad, also known as decapods.

Michael Pace and Pat Tabuchi helped design the mural by digitally enlarging a small photo of the locomotive.