Keeping the Country

In southwest Florida, nothing seemed as central to the Myakka River Valley as mystery and myth. Over the course of centuries, the region has remained largely untouched. But in the past few decades, increased development and population growth threatened to pave over this little-known wilderness. But some folks want to keep the ranch country, well, country.

Story by Michael Adno
Photography by Michael Adno & Cavin Brothers

January 28, 2020

Photos by Cavin Brothers

Lightning only galvanized the bond. When the rains came, a crew of cowboys traced the edge of the river as dark gray clouds marched west across southern Florida. In no time, the river spilled into the pasture, and as the seams came apart, purple rivulets cut across the sky. All the men in the cow crew threw on their jackets, tipped the brims of their hats down, and let the rain beat them as they drew a line toward home. Then came the blast.

“I was the first one who woke up,” Jim Strickland says.

With a purple glow hanging over the prairie, Strickland saw a string of horses with men pinned under them, dogs howling, some lifeless. And before he could place where he was, thunder blanketed the valley. 

“Everybody was laid out,” he remembers. “We’d been struck.”

On hand and knee, Strickland crawled past dead mares, hounds, and the ranch’s foreman to reach his father, who groaned under the weight of his own horse. At only 13, Strickland seemed bound to this place, and 50 years later, as he told me the story not far from that very place in southwest Florida, it seemed evident: The Myakka River Valley was as much a part of him as he was of it.

From 10,000 feet up, the Myakka River Valley looks like the moon’s surface in a range of green, hemmed in by the Gulf of Mexico to the west with a span of quasi-urban development along the coast and sleepy towns through the interior further east. Plats of farms, ranches, and industry encircle the headwaters in Manatee County where rain funnels into a serpentine ribbon of water. First, the river trickles through Myakka City, then falls south toward Old Miakka before reaching Myakka River state Park where the body of water takes shape in a series of arcs flanked by sable and oak hammocks that spill into Charlotte Harbor and then inexorably the Gulf. 

Mystery, Myakka’s most prominent trait, haunts this corner of the state that sits 50 miles southeast of Tampa, 15 miles east of Sarasota, and aligns with the northern rim of Lake Okeechobee. The name itself mirrors the complexity of the watershed. Some believe it finds its root in the Timucua word for large — “mayaca,” although another contingent points toward the Mayaimi Tribe. Lake Okeechobee itself bore the name “Lake Mayaco” on maps from 1776 and 1823, but later took the Muskogee name meaning “big water.” Others can’t place Myakka’s etymology, and for centuries have tried to discern the different spellings appended to the area by Native American tribes, European cartographers, and then white settlers who nestled into the constellation of sloughs and verdant prairies circa 1850. Even the two common spellings that persist today, Miakka and Myakka, evade a tidy conclusion. But undoubtedly, that medley of oral history, lore, and myth was centripetal to the pull of this place. 

The name was just one of many mysteries.

More than 14,000 years belonged to the native men and women of Florida – the Uzita on the Little Manatee River less than 10 miles from the Myakka headwaters, the Calusa and Creek further south along the Myakka and Caloosahatchee. But when the Spanish arrived in 1513, they swayed the hands of time. It was May 1513 when Juan Ponce de Leon entered Charlotte Harbor, where the Myakka meets the Gulf of Mexico, and there they made contact with the Calusa in a grim exchange of fire. A month later, the Spanish sailed south to the Dry Tortugas only to return in 1521. Yet again, their two ships were driven away in bloodshed. An arrowhead pierced Ponce’s thigh. He made it back to Havana before the wound took his life.

In 1771, Bernard Romans, a French cartographer, wrote of the valley, “These hills, among the dreary mangrove land, have apparently been the last retreat, and skulking places, of the Caloosa Savages [sic], when their more potent neighbors, the Creeks, drove them off the continent.” It appeared lost on Romans and the stream of Europeans who followed in his wake that they were the principal force that drove the Calusa from the continent. In 1821, the Seminole Wars bookended Spain’s cession of Florida to the United States, and in 1823, the Treaty of Moultrie Creek robbed the tribes of their land to expand slavery throughout the territory. In the same period, the individual tribes lost their names and became collectively known as Seminoles. Under the umbrella of that name, a mass migration of tribes nestled into the impenetrable river of grass that runs from the rim of Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay. They would later call it the Everglades, and for a period, the Seminoles and Miccosukee lived there undisturbed until developers drained the river of grass and bisected their safe haven with the Tamiami Trail, a highway that connects Tampa to Miami.

Throughout each century, the tribes that moved through this valley became hands on a clock, passed periodically by the hands of another world that irrevocably altered this place. In that game of cat and mouse, of colonialism and disregard, their histories grafted themselves onto the soul of the Valley and of America.

To Strickland, this land was all he knew. As early as 8, he found himself riding on cow crews on pastureland his family leased from Crystal River down to Venice, on acres that belonged to some of the most indelible landowners in the state’s records and long before there were any. But as a boy, his home was Palma Sola, a fecund nexus of roads and ancient trees in Bradenton, Florida, where the Manatee River melds into Tampa Bay, and where the subtropics meet the South. 

As the son of a rancher and politician, Strickland came to know this area split between Manatee and Sarasota Counties intimately. He’d amassed a cadre of badges in Myakka State Park as a Boy Scout and ran cattle to the edge of Sarasota Bay in the 1950s and 1960s. He remembers once coming into a stand of trees to find the stakes that would later mark the course of Interstate 75, and then, as an adult, he’d watch as development grew alongside that ribbon of pavement from the edge of the Everglades to Tampa. 

“Almost all my life, I’ve been a small rancher,” he told me. “If I paid for anything, I paid for it with a cow.”

Strickland’s father died, leaving his 17-year-old son to take over the ranching operations. Today, almost five decades later, he’s become a principal partner in two outfits in the Myakka River Valley — Strickland Ranch and Blackbeard’s Ranch. But from those roots, he would molt into something else — part cowman, part politician — and became a stand-in for a way of life disappearing from Florida.

He’s served as president of the Florida Cattleman’s Association, chairman of the Florida Cattleman Foundation and the National Cattleman’s Beef Association PAC. He’s courted a decades-long span of politicians and landowners, from the deeply white, male, Republican contingent who form the historic core of Florida agribusiness to those like Nikki Fried, Florida’s agricultural commissioner and lone Democrat now holding a statewide office. He’s worked with the Seminole Tribe, whose cattle holdings are vast and which plays a large role in agricultural policy. He’s exported cattle to Cuba and Macedonia, become vice-chairman of the Florida Conservation Group, and just last year, he was named Sustainable Rancher of the Year by the Audubon Society of Florida. 

In other words, he’s one of the South’s most prominent spokesmen for agriculture — and especially in Florida, where ranching and citrus ebbed during the past century.

Jim Strickland and his dog Bone. (Photos by Michael Adno)

It was September when Strickland and I first crept out a two-track on Blackbeard’s Ranch, named for Jose Gaspar, the Spanish pirate known as Gasparilla, who allegedly listed a ship as far north as he could into Myakka before burying a treasure here. Once the chest was set in the ground, legend has it that Gaspar murdered all his men and wound his way back to the Gulf — alone. 

In Strickland’s truck, we slipped through a hollow of pine and palmetto as he explained to me how things had changed in Myakka. In the halcyon days of ranching, a million head of cattle grazed throughout the state, and then, as land boom after land boom subsumed the peninsula, people came to outnumber the herd. Today, more than 20 million people live in what is the fastest growing state in America. That growth has led to the decline of rural lands — and to the ranching lifestyle associated with them.

As rumor has it, Americans of European descent came from other Southern states to this stretch of the river circa 1850, and by 1885, a hundred folks were recorded as living in the area known as Old Miakka. It’s said that the bones of this place were made by a “party of cowmen.” And at that point when county lines were being drawn and redrawn, the towns we know today were mere synapses in some settlers’ minds. The county seat is now a ghost town, marked by a sign deep down a country road. And between what was and what is no longer, a string of towns with names like Pine Level, Angola, Bethany, and Sandy seemed more like stories fit for campfires than part of the historical record. 

In the late 19th century, a sportsman named G.E. Shields heard “praises of this mystic region,” and made his way south to see. He wrote that his time there was “one of the brightest most romantic and exciting episodes” of his life. In 1895, Frederic Remington arrived to document the inimitable cracker cowboys for Harper’s magazine. The early, white, and poor pioneers of Florida garnered the name “cracker,” and a culture grew, one particular to people who sustained themselves in a place before believed uninhabitable. 

The root of the word that came to define them remains as difficult to pin down as Myakka. Some ascribe it to a diet of crackers, others to the sound of a cow whip, and it’s understood today as a derogatory term but also worn as a badge of honor among contemporary cowboys. For Remington, who immortalized the cowboys of the American West, the crackers must have appeared exotic, rough-shod, and unlike any people he’d come across. And among them, one cowboy became synonymous with frontier Florida and remains a topic of conversation to this day. His name was Bone Mizell, and he grew up here in the Valley, just off Horse Creek.

On his horse, a rare Carolina Marsh Tacky, Bone looked less like John Wayne than Nosferatu. His feet dangled below his stirrups as he ambled through the scrub of the Valley just before midnight, and ahead of Bone, promise marched east in the form of a dozen head of cattle. He hoped to sell the lot in Arcadia. At least that was the plan until the judge found out.

See, Bone rustled these cattle — stole them from another rancher — then modified the brands on their hides and ran them to town to sell them under cover of night, according to an account by Jim Bob Tinsley. Bone Mizell did not know, it seems, that the cattle belonged to a local judge. Nonetheless, Bone made it out of the courtroom without much of a sentence.

On another night, when Desoto County Sheriff Les Dishong broke up a poker game deep into the pines, Bone told him they were just playing for chips, but the sheriff told him, “Same as money.” The sheriff gave all the men a fine, and the next day, Bone went into town and paid with chips. 

“Hold on, Bone,” the Sheriff said, but just before Bone closed the door, he told the Sheriff, “Same as money.” 

Bone incessantly brushed up against his own mortality and bent the arc of the law. Later, as his life and legacy would become the stuff of legend in this part of Florida, Bone came to register how the character of the state was changing.

In that way, all these years later, he is not dissimilar to Strickland.

Here in southwest Florida, where a century of unprecedented growth turned ranchers into developers and cowboys into real-estate brokers, there’s a strange phenomenon where, within a fixed line of sight, you can see the two Floridas concurrently. Between the pseudo-suburban haunts along the coast and the corridor still composed of swamp and agriculture, the line blurs between the new Florida and the old Florida.

In Strickland’s truck, creeping through the Myakka Valley, the past and present meet. Strickland’s dog, named after Bone Mizell, stuck his head over the bench seat. It felt like two periods of time touching as his tongue drew up my cheek.

In 2014, Strickland and his partner, Michael Galinski, purchased a 4,500-acre bundle of land from the Mason family for $13 million, transforming it into a constellation that’s primarily a cow/calf ranch, but also raises pigs, chickens, harvests honey, and cuts sod. More importantly, the pair have established a handful of conservation easements here that are essentially parcels of land that are kept from the threat of development in perpetuity, partially funded by the state, yet the owner retains property rights. In abstract, the land remains just that — land. And this deal — similar to many Strickland has struck — is a means to preserve a part of the past but at a profit. Like he told me of the ranches, “We had to monetize this.”

This is the set of variables that form the equation. The effort to conserve what remains of Florida is a gossamer, complicated web of finding the right set of local, state, and even federal funding to keep these places from being developed. In the past decade, funding has winnowed for state programs such as Florida Forever that have kept ranchers on their land. As the profit margins for ranchers have shrunk, the quandary has pushed them against the wall - making the allure of selling the land increasingly irresistible. As one rancher told me, people will turn down good money to keep the character of this place intact, but they won’t turn down stupid money.

“The biggest threat to this area is development,” Strickland believed, “Bar none. Anything different than a landscape is a threat.” Of course, he admitted that he and his partner laid claim to acres that would inevitably be sold and ultimately developed, because as he said that’s a natural expansion of the coastal communities out east, but the pace unnerved him. For years now, he’s watched the bulldozers crawl further and further east, giving way to planned communities like Lakewood Ranch and mazes of sub-division hamlets.

“Am I mad at developers,” he asked, “No.” 

“Am I somewhat melancholy,” he added, “Yes.” He paused as we stared out onto a bog dotted with egrets, ibis, and roseate spoonbills.

Land is everything to a rancher. Land is legacy and inheritance. Land is purpose. And when ranchers can no longer afford to make ends meet by raising cattle, they’re faced with a set of existential and pragmatic questions that hang over the entire state like the troposphere. They can try to sell the land to the state as a conservation easement, seeking funding from a litany of agencies, but the sum is always less than what a developer can offer, and the process is a dense forest of red tape and bureaucracy. In turn, holding companies and industry stalwarts rush in with lump sums, and with each acre sold, a bit of Florida vanishes.

That dance becomes even more cumbersome when a rancher’s property is small, say under 500 acres. The agencies devoted to preserving rural heritage and wildlife habitat set their sights on larger tracts, especially those that boast sensitive wetlands, watersheds, or that neatly fit into wildlife corridors. The funds earmarked for these types of purchases are dispensed according to the value of property in ecological or historical terms.  While there are pools of money set aside for smaller parcels, large properties take precedent. As a result, small ranchers and their properties often slip through the cracks of an already thin and ailing safety net.

“Ranchers don’t get it,” Strickland noted of the intricate process, pointing to how the coupling of baseline studies and biological surveys become insurmountable for even the most adept. “It totally overwhelms them.” And while he’s become integral to countless pieces of property finding the right formula of funding, he constitutes one piece among many in this corner of America. As he put it, “You can’t make a cow pay for a piece of dirt.” 

“Everything they wanted was out there in the country … I got the feeling of being on that porch that everything in the whole world was there. I felt all the warmth and love that I would ever need. There seemed to be someone who could do something about anything that could happen in my life. It was a warm loving feeling and very, very safe.”

— Allen Toussaint, during a 2011 live performance of “Southern Nights”

Becky Ayech threw some food to the chicks in her chicken coop, and she watched with glee as they broke out in a fuzzy little football match. What constitutes fun for Becky Ayech might seem prosaic to some, but she likened her life in the country to something like therapy. 

“Once you hit that country,” she said, “you feel better already.”

For 40 years, Ayech has called Old Miakka home. She and her husband met in Paris, France, then moved back to Indiana for a period before her job in hospitality carried them south to Sarasota in 1979. A tiny apartment downtown inspired them to look for something out east, and when they found a home off Verna Road built the same year she was born, she took it as a sign and made an offer. 

“This is it,” she remembered thinking. “I wanted the country.”

The draw to her was the promise that life would remain slow, the land rural, and the night sky visible. Soon, she found a covalent bond in the Miakka Community Club, an organization that has operated out of a 106-year-old schoolhouse in the community since 1948. Simply put, its aim over the past 72 years has been the preservation of rural heritage. 

“For over a hundred years, this community has been here,” Ayech explained. “It still remains a close-knit community, and while we may argue with each other over every single thing, when people come and try to impose their ways of life on us, we all get together and say that is not going to happen.” When developers proposed a store at the terminus of Fruitville Road, the community said no. When they proposed an airport, they said no. A military training facility, juvenile detention center, paintball range, or golf course? Absolutely not. 

They sent letters, filled the County Commission’s chambers, and over the course of decades the core of the Old Miakka community assembled around the notion of preserving their own values and histories. As Ayech once said to a commissioner, “We’ve been here since 1850: This is our home — not an investment portfolio.” But of course, the histories they promulgated obscured others, as is the case with any record. 

The myths tied to Myakka only deepened when I tried to parse the region’s demographics and racial history. Few records precede the emancipation proclamation, although harrowing stories float from generation to generation about slavery here. Myakka City, the settlement founded in 1914, once had a black community, inextricably tied to the short lived turpentine industry. The Bradenton Herald’s Roberta C. Nelson noted in 2001, what led to its disappearance remains a mystery. White residents she spoke with conjured up memories of the Ku Klux Klan entering their church during a sermon that appeared to coincide with their black neighbors leaving town without word in the mid-1930s. Residents who asked to remain anonymous conjured similar stories in Old Miakka, and all throughout Sarasota County. Racism was as central to this part of Florida as the confluence of thunder and lightning. 

Scanning the records, two lynchings, one murder, and one mass killing appear in Manatee County, of which Sarasota was a part until it formed its own county in 1921. The first was the slaying of a black man, Henry T. Stewart, in Palmetto on June 9, 1895. The local paper, the Manatee River Journal, reasoned that self-defense was evident because spectators applauded the fatal shot. Yet little was revealed about why the assailant, C.E. Hill, found himself in the woods at 4 a.m. at what the paper described as a “negro festival in the hammocks.” 

The second grew out of an altercation between children in 1896, one black, one white, the latter the son of a sheriff. Under the cover of moonlight, a white mob knocked on the door of the black child’s home, demanding to see him. His father, who answered the door, instead fired three shots, killing three men including the sheriff. That week in January led to the death of six unidentified black men and earned no mention in the Manatee River Journal, although a story about a “masquerade” graced its pages that week. The report noted the presence of the “terrible ku klux klan, which proved to be very amiable affable persons.”

Soon after, newspapers further north began reporting on the violence: Black families were targeted, their homes burned, and notices were posted advising them to leave Manatee County. At the turn of the century, an exodus took shape. Seven years later in 1903, Henry Thomas was lynched for the alleged assault of a 15-year-old white girl. Nine years after that in 1912, the Manatee River Journal reported on a mob lynching of William English, who was accused of attempting to rape a white woman.

In this deeply proud region, the legacy of racial terror was the one thing that nobody I spoke with felt comfortable talking about.

Since the 1990s, there has been a continual and sometimes acrimonious conversation between the community of Old Miakka and the Sarasota County Commission due to unforeseen population growth: 12.5 percent in the past eight years, predicted to grow 40% by 2045. In the past four decades, the county’s population doubled itself to 426,000, according to a 2018 U.S. Census Bureau estimate. 

In the early 2000s, the county implemented a plan for the development of rural areas in eastern Sarasota County, allowing certain chunks of land to be developed with the two primary caveats of leaving half the land undeveloped and making 15 percent of the housing “attainable” — an important distinction from affordable. Colloquially, the growth management plan is known as the “2050 plan,” and what tapped into the community’s discontent was the unanimous approval to better accommodate village-like developments on ranchland, like the Hi-Hat Ranch. Over the next two to three decades, that plan would allow the development of 10,000 acres. In the past few years, the changes sparked contentious debate among those out east and set off a domino effect of landowners and developers vying for precious lands. In the past year, the issue reached a fevered pitch, and Ayech became in some ways embroiled at its center.

In every district of the county last year, a flurry of black and yellow roadside signs appeared that read: “Keep the country … country. Rural heritage not urban sprawl.”  The color of the signs was directly tied to the county’s zoning maps, because yellow indicated that the land was designated as a rural heritage resource management area rather than urban suburban (blue) or hamlet (purple), and in turn, those designations determined the amount of homes allowed per acre along with commercial or residential usage. The signs were a means to dispense a message throughout the county, a message that came from the members of the Miakka Community Club.

Just a few months ago, Ayech presented over 600 signatures petitioning the county’s planning board to look more closely at one developers’ proposal for a hamlet that falls within the borders of Old Miakka. 

“Nobody has ever used this before,” she said before laughing. “The planning commissioners hated us.”

At the heart of their fight was a means to articulate a set of questions: What forms the character of a place? And how do you keep that intact? What bound this community together was that you barely had to ask for help before it arrived. The distance from town lent everyone a certain kind of resilience. To stay up with a sick calf all night or to beckon to a call from the hen house at 3 a.m. yielded a certain kind of probity. The ability to interact with pigs and cattle, to attract purple martins and to know where the fish are biting maintained a thread between people and the natural world. 

“As you reduce the amount of rural lands,” Ayech warned, “the opportunity to do that isn’t there.”

“My way of life is a slow way of life,” Ayech explained. “Tins cans, a string. That’s the way I’d put it.” She found purpose in her garden, in communion with what was around her, and at the periodic hootenannies down at the schoolhouse. She cautioned that the ways of life so intricately tied to these acres would not be compatible with the ways of life folks seek in a hamlet-style development. The commonplace use of guns to kill hogs, fire to manage the prairie, or the lack of light were things she felt they wouldn’t accept. The sound of her roosters announcing the first arcs of light or the sound cows make when they go to breed seemed incompatible with culs-de-sac.

She believed the proposed developments along Fruitville Road and elsewhere would destroy her way of life. 

“It’s a connection,” she said, “and those connections will be lost.”

“A lot of people say history repeats itself.”

— Anna Carlton, 1977, interview with Carl D. King and Libby and Joe Warner

Strewn across a rough-hewn table, a cache of genealogical documents and records staked out the edges of a life. Between the table and the stacks of paper, Anthony “Tony” Carlton’s reverence for his roots seemed evident. 

“They never mention him,” he said of his uncle Garrett “Dink” Murphy, one of the first Anglo settlers to make a home here in Old Miakka. 

Born in Madison County in 1850, only five years after Florida became a state, Dink allegedly rode into what was then Manatee County just as the Civil War drew to a close. As a teenager, Dink stowed away to join the Confederacy, but upon being discovered was promptly sent home. Soon after, he headed south to find Myakka on the back of a mule. As to what year he arrived, nobody knows, but when he did, he sent word, and soon, family followed.

The table we were sitting at were the remnants of Dink’s home that was lashed by a hurricane some years after his death in 1934. With your ear pressed against the grain, you could almost hear the distant hum of a hurricane. Carlton’s father, Alzie, tore the place down, but Carlton saw the value in keeping the heirloom to make something of it. Carlton’s reverence seemed evident. We were talking across it, our hands resting on its surface.

Anthony “Tony” Carlton. Photos by Michael Adno

Looking up toward a framed photograph of a live oak towering over the edge of a river, Carlton turned somber. 

“I won’t ever see that again,” he said, describing the crystal-clear sinkholes that dotted the ranch he was born on straddling the edge of Sarasota and Manatee Counties. As a grin stretched across his face, he said, “Those places are still very precious.” But despite his deep ties to them, he avoids returning at all costs because, as he said, “it hurts.”

The Triangle Ranch, named for the shape of its cattle brand, belonged to the Carlton family for more than a century, ever since Tony’s mother and father moved there from Pine Level in the early 20th century. Carlton’s mother, Anna, who was born in Pine Level in 1898, described those early days as challenging in an interview in 1977. 

“I don’t know,” she said. “Our first baby died at two, and then we had three more girls, and 10 years later, we had one boy, and just as most of the people did in this country, we had a hard time, because there was nothing around nowhere.”

In the 1920s with 40 acres to their name, the Carltons made a living growing citrus and running cattle, and slowly they accrued land acre by acre. By the mid 19th century, the Carlton family held more than 6,000 acres, split between Alzie and his brother. In 1956, Alzie sold a piece of property that still haunts his son today.

In Sarasota County, maybe the most indelible road bears the name Fruitville. It traverses the entire county limits over the course of 17 miles. To the west, the road spills into Sarasota Bay and is punctuated by a Ritz Carlton Hotel. Seventeen miles east from there, asphalt falls off into a shell path where folks sell farm goods. In the distance between spanning cattle range, flatwoods, big-box stores, and omnipresent subdivisions, one finds everything that’s at stake in this neck of the woods. At the eastern end of Fruitville Road, Alzie Carlton and his brother once owned the land that is now at the center of the debate over the future of the county’s growth. In 1956, Alzie sold the land for $118 an acre. 

“Much to my regret,” Carlton joked, because today, adjacent properties are asking as much as $7,000 per acre.

It wasn’t the misplaced return that haunted Carlton but rather the threat of what could happen to the land. 

“My uncle and father had no feeling for history. Land was a commodity,” he said. His own philosophy was at odds with that. “To me, land is something you keep. You never sell it.” But in due time, that principal would be challenged, and the challenge would rise to the level of soul-rending for Carlton.

While Carlton spent much of his life away from Old Miakka, living for a period in Bartow, Florida, where he raised his kids and worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, home would always be Old Miakka. 

“Here,” he told the Bradenton Herald in 1994, “where we used to be in utter pristine country, I can see four houses. They are nice people, but I hate to see this country turn into subdivisions.”

While Carlton made his bones elsewhere, his older sister, Fleta, took over the Triangle Ranch, and when their parents died, the majority of the Ranch went to Fleta, with the remainder split among the siblings and heirs. By the time any notion of selling the property rose to the surface, six signatures were required.

“I knew I was going to die,” Carlton said, and he wondered what would happen if things turned ugly between the family, if someone wanted their piece of pie earlier than another. Could the very land that bound them together drive a wedge between them?

And with the prospect hanging over them, they set to the task of finding a buyer that would continue to operate it as a working ranch and hopefully acquire part of it as a conservation easement. As Carlton laid out the details, he grew impatient, trying to change the subject before he said, “Anyway, that got done.”

In 2016, Tony Carlton drove into town to the offices of the Conservation Foundation of the Gulf Coast to sign their names and in turn sign over the Triangle Ranch to Elizabeth Moore for $5 million, or roughly $5,000 an acre. Carlton left the office with some sense of dread, some sense of hope, but the feeling was just something he couldn’t gather words for. 

“I did hate to let it go,” he said, “but there was no choice. We protected it as long as we could.”

At 85, Carlton still runs cattle, spread across a few parcels — 80 acres here, 40 there, and another 12 acres over there, he said, pointing southeast past his property line. 

“You have to have something to live for,” he said.

When he was a kid, bundles of palmetto and stands of pines covered the place. 

“They’ve pushed out all the old pine stump, killed the palmettos, and planted grass,” he explained. Grass gave way to pavement and pavement to industry. And now with the steady drip of development pushing out Fruitville Road, not far from where I stood with Carlton late in the summer, he warned, “They’re right on our doorstep.” Just beyond where a few head of cracker cattle stood, the county rezoned a former ranch for higher density development. 

“They’re just waiting to sell the lots,” Carlton said.

When we turned around, prairie gave way to a break of pines along the river. Soon, this could all be clear-cut and give way to still canyons of stucco. Again, one could see the two Floridas concurrently. As to the character of the Myakka River Valley, Carlton noted how developers had built as far north and as far south as they could along the Gulf — from Bean Point down to Marco Island, and then he asked, “Where else can they go?” 

We stood silent and looked down at the ground, because the answer was clear.

A sandhill crane approaches the edge of a new development in the Myakka Valley. Photo by Cavin Brothers

“If the Carlton brothers had kept their land,” he said, “It would have been a whole different story.” As the point grew sharp, I wondered how you made the value of places like this — far-away, quiet places — apparent to people? How could you keep the spirit of this place from growing pale without ever having visited them, let alone falling in love with them?

State Parks were one means, but they were patrolled by rangers and hemmed in by rules — facsimiles of the wild. I thought about the Triangle Ranch, how sacred and affecting the three miles of river that runs through the property are, but those places are ultimately private.

I turned to Carlton and asked him how he assessed the value of maintaining the wild land. He looked out toward Triangle Ranch, mere miles from where we stood. He chewed on the question for a long moment before he said, “I’m not sure you can.”

“Is a gesture of charity genuine or is it a kind of deep moral tax write-off?”

— Padgett Powell, “The Interrogative Mood,” 2009

Elizabeth Moore, the woman who would eventually pay that $5,000 an acre for Triangle Ranch, moved to Bradenton from Massachusetts in 2008. 

In 2008, Moore and her husband, who co-founded the internet integration company Sapient and sold it for $3.7 billion in 2015, moved to Bradenton for a “lifestyle change,” planning to only spend a year here where their kids could play tennis outside year-round. Soon, she thought, “Gee, people actually live in Florida. They don’t just come down here for vacation,” and with that, her roots took to the ground.

In 2014, she knew little if anything about ranching, but there was something about Triangle Ranch that captivated her. Along one stretch of the river, she imagined herself alone. On the drive home, the sounds of the ranch stayed with her. 

“That land spoke to me,” she said.

It was something she’d imagined for some time, to buy a piece of real estate that could be conserved. She owned real-estate in Massachusetts and in Montana, and following her divorce, she fell in love with Triangle Ranch, imagining that maybe, just maybe, this could be that piece of real estate. She told herself, “Someone has to buy this land,” and in time she decided that someone would be her.

With her friend Mickey Davis, Moore arrived with Christine Johnson, president of the Conservation Foundation of the Gulf Coast, and Lee Amos, land steward for the Foundation. First, she met Tony Carlton and then a collection of others who were interested in putting together the funds to buy this 1143-acre property along the Myakka.

In 2015, she agreed to become the sole partner with the Foundation in acquiring the property, and in 2016, she put her name on paper with the Foundation, ensuring it became a conservation easement. 

“I was inspired to save it,” she said, noting how her sense of conservation grew out of her past in the Northeast, where vast swaths of land remained in public trusts. “It’s a race against time,” she noted, “to save land from development.” 

But then came the folly of management, stewardship, or what could be more thoughtfully described as kinship. Tony Carlton remained on the property for a little over six months, tending to the cattle and helping with the transition until Moore could hire someone to head up the litany of programs necessary to keep the ranch up to code, let alone for it to break even. 

“It’s been a learning process for me,” she admitted. “I thought grass was grass.” Now, five years later, Moore can spout words like riparian, mesic, or hydric. 

In January this year, I arrived at Triangle to find Moore with a classic brown cattleman Stetson in her hand. The plan was to see the property, to better understand her own understanding of the place, and soon, we were in a 4x4 plowing through a bend in the river, trailing a blue bird as it flew from fence post to fence post. In the 4x4, there was an entourage — her two friends from up the road, another from Old Miakka, and her hairstylist. 

With the ranch in the red, Moore hoped to find a way to generate revenue outside of the cow/calf operation and ultimately something with low impact. While there are 45 acres among the 1,143 that are permitted to be developed with 10 of those along the road, she said she held no intention to do so. She hopes to share the place with people who know little about the magic in Myakka. Underneath the awning of an ancient live oak, we stood together watching tendrils of Spanish moss undulate like a sheet above the river. The very sounds that haunted her after she first visited in 2014 were just as seductive today. She saw it painted on the faces of everyone along the banks of the river as we watched the water make its way south.

The moment recalled the truism that you can’t love something unless you know it. And it underscored the point that you can’t protect something if you don’t love it.

“A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.”

- Zora Neale Hurston, “Tell My Horse,” 1938

In October last year, fog clung to the prairie as we pressed up against the Myakka River State Park’s boundary. After swinging the gate open, the park’s manager, Stephen Giguere, jumped back into the truck’s cab and pushed into the backcountry. The clouds hung low as a column of light descended onto the prairie moving west until it lit up a dome of slash pine hugging the horizon. To some, there was little to see here, to others, it was endless.

“Most people see these as barren wastelands,” Giguere explained of the Florida dry prairie. Historically, that was the case, and in response, ranchers planted pine, hoping to suit certain species, yet when they noted decline, they learned that you couldn’t manage a landscape to suit a single species but instead had to address the entire ecosystem. Today, throughout the park’s 37,197 acres, 38 imperiled animals and 17 imperiled plants find refuge. Less than 100 yards into the backcountry, Giguere pointed to one. 

“There’s a pine lily right there,” he said. And as I walked into the brush, carving around bundles of palmetto, the place came alive with every step.

Stephen Giguere, park manager of Myakka River State Park. Photos by Michael Adno

From afar, dry prairie looks like a sea of grasses and palmetto and not much else, but in reality, this is one of Florida’s most biologically diverse and densely concentrated landscapes, boasting 40 species per square meter. Within the park, which remains one of the largest, oldest, and most visited in Florida, 12 miles of winding river give way to 10 types of landscape, spanning marsh and hammock to flatwoods and prairie. It’s the only river in all of Florida that has earned the federal designation of a Wild and Scenic River.

Sarasota’s first mayor, A.B. Edwards, sought to protect the area just as land booms first lapped the coast. In 1933, the public became inextricable to the effort with the Civilian Conservation Corps, a federal agency formed during the Great Depression that helped develop the park. In 1934, a patchwork of lands donated by prominent ranchers like Bertha Palmer and her sons, Honore and Potter, coupled with those acquired by the state, edged toward 20,000 acres. In 1941, the park was dedicated with a cadre of cowboys and politicians with their hats in hand. The span of high and low confirmed that this place was best understood as a study in contrast. In 1942, the Myakka River State Park would welcome its first guests.

For Giguere, his relationship with the outdoors formed like most — through exposure. When his father moved from Connecticut to Florida in the 1980s, he became spoiled by the heat. The winter in Connecticut wore on him, and he was done with it. He left his career as a carpenter in 1999 and enrolled in an environmental studies program with a focus on pre-European anthropology. He soon met his wife, who interned at Lover’s Key State Park, in turn spurring his interest in the state’s park system. After spending his career working at a handful of parks along the Gulf, including Myakka, he applied for the manager position in 2015. When he received word that he’d been hired, it felt like a homecoming.

It was the balance between managing half a million annual visitors and a large, complex ecosystem that drew Giguere back. 

“I think that’s what I enjoy about this park,” he said, “It’s a challenge.” Personally, the span nourished something in him, too, with the wealth of archaeological sites still left to be discovered that stretch back to the Pliocene period or projects like the reinterment of archaic human remains belonging to indigenous people that once lived within its borders. There were countless modern sites, too, like the first cattle dipping pens on what was then Meadow Sweet Pastures ranch. 

“That’s something I’m always looking for,” he said, “New, undiscovered sites to record.”

Apart from the deep well of history in the park, its longstanding engagement with the public bolstered a century-long effort to protect this area and kept Giguere’s relationship with the natural world intact. 

“If you stop and take a look,” he explained, “you see the diversity that’s out there.” One goes looking for alligators and instead finds spoonbills, orchids, or maybe some sense of peace in a break of sabal palms and laurel. From there, an appreciation for what’s below the surface tends to form.

As a whole, the Myakka River’s watershed spans over 500 square miles, while the park itself constitutes only 52 square miles. Within the park, the place seems anything but small. And north of it, past Triangle and Myakka City, the headwaters, once known as Locha Notia, or “Sleeping Turtles,” sits in the cradle of industry and development. Its perimeter is staked out by phosphate mines that belong to Mosaic and are considered time bombs. That threat is coupled with residential development and agriculture, especially in light of the Trump administration's repeal of protections for streams, wetlands, and groundwater last week, another among its efforts to pare back environmental regulations.

A decade out, Giguere and the park’s staff are looking at contiguous lands to continue the project that formed a hundred years ago as yet another slew of land booms creep up the coast, just as they had in the 1920s. The park and all that fans out around its edges is such a large tract that it tends to “act like itself,” despite the imprint of men and women. 

“We’re not managing a small piece surrounded by development,” Giguere noted, “at least where we are today.”

“Many a haggard face has grown calm and less wretched from a soothing sojourn on the Myakka; and many frivolous, unthinking souls have grown more noble from gazing upon the handiwork of God.”

- Neal Wyatt Chapline, “Florida the Fascinating,” 1914

Once the canopy of old growth spit them out, they found themselves on the Myakka for the first time. In a john boat, they drew a line up the river, rounding bend after bend until they reached a limestone shelf with sweetwater trickling down. On the banks, a group of oldtimers baited hooks and kept watch over their poles. By the time they made it home that evening, Cavin Brothers felt haunted. 

“It was another world to us,” he remembered.

As soon as his parents deemed it safe, Brothers would drop his john boat in the water and run the thing back and forth between Sarasota and Venice, plotting every oyster bar and pocket in the mangroves. The Myakka River left a mark on Brothers. The beaches in Sarasota County that he knew intimately as a surfer, celebrated as some of the most beautiful in America, didn’t compare to the pull that the Myakka River Valley had on him. Later in life, after leaving and returning, he’d make his way out east toward the river.

As a kid coming up in nearby Nokomis, Brothers recalled, the ribbons of pavement ran east until they fell off into a slew of preserves that bordered the river. It was along that very strip that he and his wife wanted to make a home. Some close friends had settled on some land nearby, and it was just a stone’s throw from family — but far enough from town to see the stars. To them, there was no better place to tend to their lives. In 2013, Brothers and his wife, Jackie, put pen to paper on five acres just off Border Road along Curry Creek, the same byway that led him to the Myakka initially.

With his own production company taking shape, Brothers and his wife set to making their house a home. First came their son, then their daughter. Even after their home burned down due to an electrical fire, they stayed put and bought the property next door. Soon, they were sitting pretty on 15 acres with a few cracker cattle, a mess of chickens, a pond filled with largemouth bass that behave like dogs — rushing to the water’s edge for Cavin to feed them — and an office space in former horse stables at the end of the road. 

Six years after settling, Brothers looked in the rearview with an acrid taste in his mouth. 

“I’m sure the writing was on the wall then,” he said. 

The telltale sign came when they incised a grid of roads that led nowhere. Then came streetlights, sidewalks, flags advertising new homes, and finally, developers razed the stands of trees that encircled their neighborhood. The county rezoned the area, allowing five homes to be built upon a single acre in a place where the maximum density was previously one home per five acres. With each tree felled, the marrow of the Myakka changed. To Brothers, his family’s lease on silence was coming to a close.

In November, Brothers, his son, and I piled into a john boat and ran out the creek toward the Myakka. The swollen river started to recede following months of incessant rain and the clear fall light returned. We wound our way past fallen trees, and then as we came to the mouth of the creek, we looked left then right to find not a soul.

With a turn of the wrist, Brothers threw the boat on plane, and we drew a line up the river, a blur of palmetto and sabal ferrying us north till we reached a thumb of sand shrouded in Spanish moss. His son took to the water, and the sound of waves lapping the boat’s hull competed with the chirr of cicadas. It reminded me of the sense of peace known by those here before European contact, the stillness that poets put down in the 19th century, and it conjured the sentiment that everyone in this story tried to find the words for. Even with the slow creep of change blanketing the entire state, it still retained that.

Jackie Brothers and her children in the woods near their home. Photo by Cavin Brothers

Brothers ran through the allure of this place back in 2013. It was a quiet haunt, far removed from the already sleepy string of towns along the coast, but the forest that once ran along the road to his home was now gone, replaced by a mountain range of fill dirt surrounded by stucco. Soon, it would be a cookie-cutter nexus of culs-de-sac, an enclave of second-home owners, retirees, and folks from elsewhere — seeking promise in Florida, just as Spanish, French, British, and American colonists have for five centuries.

In the last hundred years, Floridians made a pastime of ruminating on newcomers, bemoaning the growth, mourning the loss, and more pointedly acknowledging the grief that change incurs. The figure of how many people move to Florida each day is a favorite for both those mortified and salivating at the thought. By 2070, a third of Florida is set to be paved over, according to researchers at the University of Florida, 1000 Friends of Florida, and the Department of Agriculture. And according to the Demographic Estimating Conference, 906 people move to the state each day, annually tallying up to a city the size of Orlando. In the next 25 years, an estimated 27 people will move to Sarasota county every day. 

Here along the river, it frustrated Brothers to imagine that. The direction this particular county was headed, echoed all across the state, seemed short-sighted, even precarious, and, most troubling, it seemed to serve people who didn’t care about this place and would exercise no probity in trying to protect it.

Brothers’ son cast a line into the water as a torrent of wind moved through the trees, and he craned his head to meet the sound. His father and I sat silently looking into the tannin-stained water as it turned pink along the white sand bank. For centuries, this place cast a spell over anyone lucky enough to see it, and it seemed cruel that its fate was to be sealed under the promise of economic growth. 

Brothers broke the silence as he conjured the stream of Native American tribes, European explorers, and pioneers who passed by this very oxbow in the river. He noted that it wasn’t the beaches that cast a spell over them, but rather it was the Myakka. 

“This,” he said as his voice caught, “this was the jewel.” To him, among so many others, that belief held true. Above us, a curtain of purple drew across the sky. The sound of thunder coursed through the Valley. And after we climbed back into the boat, we drew a line toward home.

Michael Adno is a writer and photographer from Florida. He contributes regularly to The Bitter Southerner, The New York Times, and The Surfer’s Journal. Last year, he won a James Beard Award in Profile Writing for “The Short & Brilliant Life of Ernest Matthew Mickler,” which was published here.

Cavin Brothers is a director and photographer from Florida, where he founded Colorblind Media.

The Sum of Life: Zora Neale Hurston

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