FLORIDA’S FORGOTTON COAST: LIFE ON THE APALACHICOLA BAY
WORKING THE BAY
Melaine Cooper Covell
James Hicks
Monette Hicks
Monica Lemieux
Carl McCaplan
James & Betty McNeill
Charles & Rex Pennycuff
A. L. Quick
Henry Tindell

TOOLS OF THE TRADE
Wes Birdsong
Corky Richards
Bobby Shiver
Charles Thompson
Genaro “Jiggs” Zingarelli

PROCESSING THE CATCH
Terry Dean
Grady Leavins
Lynn Martina
Fred Millender
Janice Richards
Anthony Taranto
Tommy Ward

THE SWEET SIDE
Donald Smiley
George Watkins

VINTAGE APALACH
Seafood & Honey

WHERE TO EAT
Apalach Eateries

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Interviews & photographs by Amy Evans

This project sponsored by the St. Joe Company.

James McNeill Jr. was born at Indian Pass, just west of Apalachicola, in 1924. His father, James McNeill Sr., was originally from North Carolina. Working the rivers rafting timber downstream, James Sr. eventually made his way to Florida. Soon after, he got into the turpentine business and eventually acquired some 13,000 acres of Florida wilderness. James Sr. passed away in 1941. In 1947 James Jr. married Betty Lane. Together, they established the Indian Pass Seafood Company. The McNeills also operated a commissary, a remnant of the turpentine camp days, catering to the families that worked for them and lived in the remote area. Today, the commissary is better known as the Indian Pass Raw Bar. James and Betty’s son, James McNeill III, came up with the idea for the restaurant. In 1985, after Hurricane Kate hit the Florida Gulf Coast, they turned the old commissary into the hangout known today. The turpentine and seafood businesses are gone. Hurricane Dennis wreaked havoc on the area in July 2005. But the McNeills have bounced back, yet again. The Indian Pass Raw Bar has been renovated. But the oysters are the same. They still come from water that laps up on the shores of Indian Pass.

Listen to this 3-minute audio clip of James and Batty McNeill talking about the days before there was a road at Indian Pass and how kids would to get to school.
[Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.]

What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

Subject: James & Betty McNeill
Date: March 22, 2006
Location: The McNeill’s home – Indian Pass, FL
Interviewer: Amy Evans

Amy Evans:  This is Amy Evans for the Southern Foodways Alliance on Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006 and I'm—am I between Indian Pass and Cape San Blas or where are we right now?

Betty McNeill:  You're on Indian Peninsula.

On Indian Peninsula, okay. And I'm with Jimmy and Betty McNeill and their family has the Indian Pass Raw Oyster Bar, which is being renovated as we speak. And we're in their house here visiting, and I'm going to ask each of you to introduce yourselves for the record. Mrs. McNeill, please ma'am?

For the record, I have been at Indian Pass since I married Jimmy in 1947 and I—there's no point in trying to lie about my age as thirty-nine. [Laughs] I will be eighty this year, I think, because I was born in 1926, so that figures out—anyway, but we've lived at Indian Pass all of our married life. And you're dealing wit—particularly with food, which we didn't get into until after the 1985 storm Kate. But as far as introducing myself, I grew up in Port St. Joe and married Jimmy, who grew up here at Indian Pass, and we have not left here. [Laughs]

And Mr. McNeill?

James McNeill:  I believe my wife—her mind is either slipping a little bit or she's putting something off. [Laughs] We haven't lived at Indian Pass all our lives since we were married.

BM:  No, but you were born here.

JM:  Well, yes. [Laughs]. We had the pleasure of going to school—I did, at University of Florida. I had already before World War II got a scholarship to the Georgia Military College. I couldn't have gone to college. Things—the family was not rich enough to pay any—any college fees at that time but then I went into service and became a B-17 pilot during World War II, and got out and I wanted—during that time and they sent me to the University of Tennessee for some highfalutin electrical stuff, and I wanted to go back to Tennessee after I got out but they were tied and up and they were full at that time, so I managed to get into  Georgia Tech, and I went to school there for a couple of semesters, and then I got a scholarship to the University of Florida, and I finished there.
In the meantime, I had met Betty. She was a sister of a good friend of mine and we—he played football, and we were all in the band. And anyway Betty and I got to going together, and we fell in love, and so far we have made a solid thing of it. We were married in 1947. Am I right? [Laughs] And I'm eighty-one years old, and we've been married all that time since then, and it seems like a short time, really.
But I was born here [at Indian Pass]. My dad came here in 1902. He was in the turpentine business; he was originally from North Carolina…He was born in North Carolina on a farm. During the War Between the States, his dad was killed. And he left his home when his mother married the second time and he began to raft trees for lumber down the Cape Fear River. And then he worked on down 'til they got down to the edge of Florida and got involved in the Naval stores—rosin, turpentine. And he gradually worked on up until he had rented some places and operated for them and then came to Wewahitchka—well, got down to Hahira, Georgia, and he had a friend there that he rented land from and then another one that he got in business with. Anyway, moving on down, he came to Wewahitchka, Florida, and he had the turpentine operation there. And all of these had been rental places from people that had property owned. But he and a couple of bankers got an opportunity to buy acreage in this area—Port St. Joe area—and down through Indian Pass to the county line, Franklin County, which Apalachicola [is in]. Anyway, they had about 13,000 acres and began turpentine.
And I was born 1924 here at Indian Pass. I have a sister that was born fourteen years before me. And I grew up here and the turpentine business gradually played out, and the people other than my father died off, and we ended up with about 13,000 acres at the end. And then we began to sell some of it for various things: beach development and developing. And I got into the seafood business after I got out of school. I’ve rambled long enough. Now, what else?

BM:  But the [Indian Pass] raw bar itself, evolved from the turpentine operation, which was a commissary for the hands that worked there. And it was also used in that capacity for the oystermen that were employed by the Indian Pass Seafood Company, when we went into the oyster business and—any kind of seafood—mullet, whatever for oh, until [nineteen] eighty-five, when the oyster beds were depleted. We had the oyster bottom leased in Choctawahatchee Bay as well as over here and we—that didn't pan out in Choctawahatchee Bay. We had [Laughs] a disastrous experience there. But the oysters here are of such quality and they're so limited; it's like the Belon oyster in a way and it doesn't—it doesn't have really the reputation, and I don't guess it ever will because we won't have that quantity to produce but like the—what's the one in Long Island? Is it Blue Point? That's—just a brand name of oysters, you know for a connoisseur, but—

JM: But we've sold a lot of oysters to Mississippi and they, at that time, were in the canning business in a big way, and we were just shucking them raw and selling them out. But we had a number of oystermen working for us. At one time we had three oyster plants in Eastpoint, Apalachicola, and Indian Pass.

So were these things that your father started or that you started?

JM: No, that I started.

BM: He passed away before he got into the oyster business, didn't he?

JM: Yes, he died in 1941.

What was your father's name?

JM: James T. McNeill. And I'm also James T—James Thomas, Jr., and we have a son that's now almost fifty years old who is named James T. McNeill, III.

When [your father] came down here, was Indian Pass already known as Indian Pass?

JM:  Well, it might have been known as that. On the map—some of the maps I have seen Indian Pass, yes.

BM:  It's a geographical fact that the pass from the Gulf of Mexico into the Apalachicola Bay, the Indians used it and that name came from there. And so the Indian Pass itself is a little body of water at the end of this Peninsula. This is Indian Lagoon out here and the Gulf is over there [points to the west]. But there was nothing here except the geographical fact [Laughs] of it being land here.

JM:  And the lighthouse at Cape San Blas was the only—well, [the] only family.

BM:  Inhabited area.

JM:  Yeah, yeah right. Now all the rest of it was just woodlands, some swamp land, and, of course, the rivers and the bays, and it was used primarily for turpentine. So it was to get the gum out of the trees and eventually end up with it in the paint business. But we went into the sawmill business after the…Well it was there, and then went into the pulpwood business. We had several pulp—pulpwood operations and the mill—St. Joe Paper Company had gone in and built up a paper mill in Port St. Joe, and we sold the trees to go to them to make paper.

Did your father, when he came down here and when you were growing up, did he talk about what it was like when he first arrived in the area?

JM: Yes, he liked it very much. There were very few people. He brought people down with him from Georgia and places that he had been and had operations going. And then people from Wewahitchka who came down and stayed here then—quite a few people that lived here later, they went to Apalachicola.

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Well and so Mrs. McNeill, you were saying [when we were standing] in front of the [Indian Pass] raw bar that your father worked at Port St. Joe Paper Company, is that right?

BM: No, it was the St. Joe Lumber and Export Company, which was a cypress mill that went into business in Port St. Joe about the time that the St. Joe Paper Company opened the paper mill. But he was in the logging end of the sawmill business and really had nothing to do with the paper mill.

Okay, and what is your maiden name?

BM: My name was Lane…My dad was working for St. Joe Lumber and Export Company when they took the virgin timber off St. Vincent's Island. And they used the hard pine that was cut from over there to make the decking for the submarine decks in World War II. And he built a bridge, which would never be allowed now with the ecological concerns, from the Mainland over to St. Vincent's Island. And it's been removed since; it's no longer in use. But that was an engineering feat that I didn't think they could do. [Laughs]

And so, Mrs. McNeill, you were saying, too, that your father built a restaurant for your mother to run?

BM:  No, he didn't build it. He bought it for the interim before his job opened up with St. Joe Lumber and Export Company, and he had bought a little restaurant that was for sale. He had come down to scope the place out before we left Alabama and [Laughs] he had acquired this restaurant—it was small restaurant, and I don't know how long we had that. We sold it to somebody…I know we had it when we came down here in '47.

What was it called?

BM:  Dad's Café, I think. It was right next door to French's. I remember we had several restaurants on the main drag there [in Port St. Joe], and now we're getting that many more. Across the street was the Black Cat Café, and then there was our place, and French's and it seemed like there was another one down the street…but as soon as we could, we got out of that business. It's not easy.

Well and you said that your mother told you never to get into it.

BM:  [Laughs] Right.

And then there you were with the raw bar.

BM:  Right. It's not really been my thing, but it's a family thing and it—when the storm came and took us out of the oyster business, we've told this before, that we still had more oysters than we could personally consume, but we did not have enough to stay in the wholesale business. So our son said [that] well, why don't we open an oyster bar and retail them, you know, by the dozen instead of by the bushel or whatever—or by the gallon?

JM:  At that time, the store here was being used for retail merchandise and our crews—oystermen, fishermen, shrimpers—had quite a few shrimp boats operating here, too. It wasn't anything like a restaurant, but after this other happened well then we had—needed something, and [our son] Jim came up with that thought, and we lived on that. It worked out.

BM:  We used to sell a lot of gasoline in conjunction with the commissary operation there until—when was it we got out of the gasoline business? When the tank is over twenty years old, you had to have a lot of insurance and those tanks were put in the early [nineteen] thirties and so [Laughs] they never had a leak, but we didn't feel like it was cost-effective to buy the insurance…And so we got out of the gasoline business. At one time during the War before the—Highway 98 was back behind us to the north and the east of us. This place sold more gasoline than any other place in the county, according to our supplier—more Gulf [brand] gasoline, anyway.

JM: But the whole coastline, we owned a lot of property here, having been in the turpentine business. And [we] began to sell off parts of it. And as time has gone on, well, it's become more and more valuable. Today it's—well it's—it's very valuable—so valuable I can hardly pay the taxes on what we have left. [Laughs]

BM:  We didn't have any competition because the St. Joe Paper Company owned all the land that we didn't own, and they weren't selling, and we weren't either, so we had no competition as far as the filling station.

So Mr. McNeill, when did you start working on the water? Did you start with shrimping or oystering or both?

JM: No, when I came back from—right after I finished college, my family had been operating the store. They had been running that for the other people who were in business. There was a man named Bragdon—Oscar Bragdon, who had gone into the oyster business and shrimp business. And when I came back—he had worked for my father.

BM:  His father had worked for your father too.

JM:  Yeah, and he grew up in our household and through the years it was like—he was my older brother, and eventually we were in business together. I went in business with him, and that's the way we got into that end of the business.

And when you say you went into business with them—?

JM: Well okay in the oyster and shrimp business.

So you started an oyster house together?

JM:  He already had an oyster house…He had that down at the end [of Indian Pass] here, where we now have a campground.

BM:  There's no road out here. The only way to get in and out from there was a village down there where the oystermen lived during the season and they had to ride the beach and Jimmy used to pick the kids up down there and bring them up by the beach to catch the school bus by the store because there was no road here until [nineteen] fifty-two or fifty-three, right?

JM:  That's about right—about [nineteen] fifty-two, yeah, it was a State road. The road right in front of the raw bar now runs from Apalachicola to Port St. Joe, and it was State Road 30 and then—then—

BM:  It was Highway 98.

JM:  —it became Highway 98 as things built up. But that was the way they—well, we had a school here in Indian Pass when I—my first and second year I went to school in Port St. Joe. My sister taught school there. But then the third grade through the sixth it was a school of enough children that there was a school here at—well one place—building we had is in back of the—back of the store at that time and later, we had one down at the Indian Pass itself, which is another mile and a half from here, and the kids went to school there. I had to go to school somewhere else after the sixth grade. They couldn't teach beyond that level, so I went to school in Apalach[icola]. And I'd go down to the county line, which is three miles from the raw bar toward Apalachicola. The school bus would pick me up there and carry me to Apalachicola and then bring me back to the county line. And most of the time I'd either hitchhike a ride or I—we had Shetland ponies, and I'd ride my pony to the county line, or we'd catch rides with other people. And everybody was friendly to everybody.

I feel like your son told me that—when I was here before—that some of those benches out in front of the raw bar are from school buses from way back when?

JM:  That long bench there, we had it in the back of a pickup truck and the kids—we would go down to the Pass. By that time, this road that we just came in down here had been built. And we had two benches in the pickup truck, and we'd fill it up with kids and bring them up to the raw bar. It was a store then. And the school bus from Port St. Joe would come down and pick them up…You brought them up on the beach—that's the little benches were on the side of the truck that was used to haul the oysters, and then in the afternoon [Laughs] all the children back and from home to the store to catch the school bus there, riding on the beach. And when the weather was bad and they couldn't go on the beach, they had to come up through the sand dunes.

Did you ever go out on an oyster boat yourself or did you just manage the [oyster house]?

JM:  Yes, I did. I didn't do it on any regular basis, but I learned enough that it was hard work, and that I needed to hire people to work for me.

BM:  Well after we got married, he—I did not care for raw oysters, but he was going to shuck some for me, and we sat out in the yard until nine o'clock at night, and he had a half a cup of oysters shucked. [Laughs] He is not a hands-on oysterman anyway.

JM:  I was accustomed to having people do things for me. It worked pretty good too. [Laughs]

So you said that you over the years though had a few [oyster] houses. You had some in Eastpoint and—?

JM:  Oyster houses, yes ma'am. I had one in Apalachicola—a small operation—and we had twelve shuckers and in Eastpoint. We had oh, it was probably—hmm, thirty? Maybe thirty [shuckers]…And the other oyster house was the one in—in Indian Pass. We had—that was—I guess, thirty-five shuckers there.

So in the early days where were you selling all your oysters just in the immediate area, or were you able to ship them out?

JM:  Well we shipped some of them on the railroad. Carried them to Apalachicola and they went north. But as times got better, Alabama and Georgia—trucks would come down and buy the oysters for it and then the—the people would have trucks of their own to deliver them.

So how have you witnessed the oyster industry change over these many decades you've been in it and watching it?

JM:  Well the problems that have come up were not attended to begin with. Well having things in—that would infect them and you'd have to shut down because of the oysters not being safe. And the biggest thing was people spreading out the [idea that] they were not safe to eat, and it wasn't true.

BM:  There was a time, if anybody got sick and had eaten an oyster in the last year, they blamed it on the oysters. But it is a fact that damaged immune systems do pose a hazard for uncooked food of any kind. And, of course, it's not just raw oysters that are problem. But the problem with the oyster business is the lack of the habitat now, don't you think?

JM:  Yeah.

BM:  So much settlement along the oyster growing areas that we just are depleting the areas for growth. We have a small lease out here and Buddy Ward has got a big lease on St. Vincent's [Island]. And I don't know if—the State tried to start taking the leases out.

JM:  That's the only two now…We had 113 acres that we leased from the State and we planted and grew oysters, and then we finally got down to fifty-one or fifty-two acres.

BM:  The State is discouraging private leased bottoms. I don't know why because that seems to me that that would enhance the quality of the product, as well as the availability of it.

JM:  Times change and things are different. The same people are not operating that work—at the time I was.

Do you have any other children in addition to Jimmy?

JM:  We have a daughter who is what, fifty?

And what [is her] name?

JM: Linda.

And so did they grow up working in the oyster house?

JM:  Not the beginning. Jim, he worked a little bit in the store to begin with, and then he—in school he was going to school and went to college in Panama City and he got a job working with Glidden Paint—Paint Company then during the summer…Yeah, during the summertime he got a job working with them…And a little bit later on, as our business began to grow more, he decided well, he might like to work with us again. And he did and has worked with us all the time since then—one phase or another and finally became pretty well management of the business.

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So can you fill in the holes between the oyster house and that business and then just having the raw bar? Or are there still other elements of the business that are in operation?

JM:  Well, no. We—I mean the real estate business—we did not push the sale of real estate. But there were some people who wanted to buy, and we cooperated as much as we could with them. We were holding back as much as possible for our family to develop as time came along, and, of course, we had no idea that the prices were going to reach such a fabulous high thing.

BM:  We have the campground but then that was part of our holding the—we tried to do whatever it took so that we could remain at Indian Pass. [Laughs] That's about it. So whatever comes up that will enable us to stay here, we try to involve ourselves in. But Jim [our son] has decided that he doesn't ever want to live anywhere else, and that was the main reason he wanted to get away from—to get back here and involve himself in the business in one way or another. But things just sort of happened. We wouldn't say it was planned in any way. But from the store to the raw bar was because of a hurricane, really, and it looks like the hurricanes are going to keep visiting us every twenty-five years or so.

And that was in—was it [nineteen] eighty-five, you said?

BM:  Uh-hmm, the hurricane [Kate] came.

And that's when the raw bar really became a restaurant?

BM:  Right. He debated whether to build it back or not and then they opened back—back up as a sort of a convenience store, which is sort of a step up from the commissary. And the raw bar, it just sort of evolved into a—it's going now as maybe you could tell. It's going to be more of a food establishment than a convenience store, and we hope that it will pan out. We've had really, really good acceptance. We had no idea that the business would be as popular as it became and that it was—it just filled a niche, apparently, that was not filled before. In fact, people say there's no place like it [Laughs], and I don't know whether that's a compliment or not. [Laughs]

So tell me about the days when it was a commissary. Your son was telling me about there being a meat counter and using that big butcher's block to cut meat and stuff like that.

JM:  Yes, well [we] tried to make it into a regular store and we had meat cutters and—

BM:  We bought a quarter of beef every year and it was really a commissary that—and a grocery store to furnish whatever anybody would need that—people did not go to town, and when they got there, they didn't have any more shopping either in Apalach or Port St. Joe than they could do at Indian Pass. So that was the way the store operated then. We sold everything from blue jeans and tennis shoes and [Laughs]—well, you name it.

JM:  We've had people from all over the country call us and wanting to know if we were still in business and serving and some of them hadn't seen it; it had been written six or eight years before and—but it—it appealed to them so much and they had people drive all the way from California here to eat Indian Pass oysters. And the oysters are excellent.

And [your son] Jimmy was also telling me about that air pump out front—that it's always given free air for all these eighty years or whatever?

JM:  Yes, right.

BM:  The only thing is, people kept stealing the gauge on the thing and [Laughs]—and that was expensive, so we started taking it off so people didn't take it during the day. You know, we kept the gauge inside that you could use it, but the thing was attached to it, and it was so handy to use even in self-service for me, which I despise. I could do it without too much difficulty.

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About what year did the oyster house that was down here on Indian Pass close?

JM: When we—we started with the campground because we were not getting enough oyster business and shrimp business. That would have been in the [nineteen] eighties, nineties?

BM:  It was before then I think. I don’t remember right off—I'd have to get my books out to see when it was—paying the shuckers and all.

So whose idea was the campground?

BM:  Actually, we started that when the St. Vincent's Island was sold to the Department of the Interior, and the Federal Government took it over, and they started having managed hunts over there. And they couldn't spend the night on the Island so they needed accommodations on this side, so we opened up some campsites, and we put in a bathhouse and it evolved from that. We only had seven or eight sites but—

JM:  We used the old—the oyster business—the family oyster business was playing out and we—we convert some of the older buildings that they lived in to campsites. Got into it in a round-about way.

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So has it been interesting to watch folks come into this area for recreation over the years instead of just coming to hunt on St. Vincent's?

BM:  It's just a fact of life. I hadn't thought about whether it was interesting or not, but the camping industry is such, you know—it's a growing thing. I can't believe that people would put the investment they have into these motor homes that cost hundreds and thousands of dollars [Laughs] and go around, but we—we had—I don't think the business was very good except for the managed hunts and things like that and people that were aware of it—we never advertised it very much and we were off the beaten path. By that time the road was no longer designated as [Highway] 98 through here. But you really have to have that as a destination…we did advertise a little bit, but we never made it a big thing out of it. I guess it paid its own way.

JM:  Oh yeah—oh yeah; and it employed some of the people that had been working with us in the seafood business and—put them in the campground business. The storms do make a difference in your business though.

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Well and Hurricane Dennis made a big difference in the raw bar's business, obviously.

BM:  Yeah.

JM:  Oh yeah.

So and you were mentioning earlier when we were up there too about your mother having the gypsy tea room [inside the raw bar when it was still a commissary]. Can you talk about that?

JM:  Yeah, well this was back during the turpentine days and Apalachicola was a big town—very few people in Port St. Joe that would be traveling to come to the beach. This was a beach that was for people from Apalachicola. There was no way to get to the Islands over there then like St. George's Island—having a bridge and all and people in St. Joe would go to Beacon Hill instead of coming to Indian Pass. The road was paved out there, and there was a bay there that they could go swimming in where as here the bay was full of oysters. The Gulf was fine for swimming but that's a different time. And the people in Apalachicola wanted a place to come to eat. Mama was a real good cook and she had parties during the year when my sister was growing up and quite a few of the young—

BM:  She loved to entertain didn't she?

JM:  Yeah, she was real good and was very popular with the people, so they wanted the business and eating—a place to eat and so they decided that they would put in a little food place and then mama decided that they'd name it the Tea Room and they put on supper on Saturday night for twenty, thrity people to come out and eat, and then it got so it would happen two or three times a week. And they—it helped through—all World War II came along, too, at that time; things changed then.

What kind of things would she make?

JM:  Real country fancy meals…There's not a lot of people living—left living that will remember Gypsy's Tea Room.

To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.