Catching Up: Camp Helen State Park

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Howdy! I’m in Jacksonville. I just took a relaxing drive today, so it’s time to catch you up with another state park I visited. Camp Helen is situated between Lake Powell and the Gulf of Mexico near Panama City. While it’s a Florida state park now, it was, until 1987, a private company resort! Even stranger, it wasn’t a Florida company’s resort! It was owned by the Avondale Mills Textile Company co-founder (and future Alabama governor) Braxton Bragg Comer. Avondale Mills’ corporate offices were in Birmingham, Alabama. (You may have heard of Avondale: the company was sold and relocated to South Carolina, and in 2005 a train collision caused a chemical spill that killed six workers and two others.) This was back in the early 1900s, remember. Comer, according to the Encyclopedia of Alabama, ran Avondale Mills much like the coal mine companies ran “coal towns.” That was part of the reasons for Camp Helen: it was the company providing company-approved recreation. Of course, during the Depression that wasn’t a bad thing, certainly more than a lot of people had. (An interesting side note: the black workers at Avondale Mills also could visit Camp Helen…just not at the same time the white workers were there. ) There are displays telling the history of the connection to the Alabama company and the Florida state park in the museum. Most of the enjoyment, however, is walking along the beach, or through the tree canopy trail. As you can see from the photo, there’s lots of trees and lots of Spanish moss on the trees. (It’s really not Spanish nor moss, and it’s not a parasitic plant.) It was a pleasant walk in an area linking Florida with Alabama textile history. The photo is the tree canopy trail.