Our Day in Cedar Key

This blog will chronicle our (Pat and Patty Anderson's)

cruising adventures on the Great Loop!

DAY 215 - November 2, 2017

We are SO glad we decided to stay a second night here so we could have a day in Cedar Key today!  After taking Baxter to shore, I put the second seat into the Sea Eagle.  After breakfast, we both got into the kayak, paddled to the park, and pulled the kayak up under a tree off the beach.  Then we walked up 2nd Street. Our first stop was the Chamber of Commerce Visitor Center, which was just opening for the day! 

2nd Street in Cedar Key - truly "Old Florida"!

Island Hotel and Restaurant on 2nd Street, established in 1859

The Visitor Center is a mini-museum in itself! The woman there spent quite  bit of time telling us about Cedar Key, and among the facts we learned was that the principal industry in Cedar Key is now farm raised clams on leased beds. This web page is well worth reading - aquaculture now supports 500 jobs in this small city and surrounding keys. Cedar Key is now a leading producer of clams in Florida. She also told us that the school in Cedar Key is the smallest in the State of Florida, with 270 students, kindergarten through high school, with only eight seniors this year!

There was quite a bit of other historical information in the Visitor Center, as well as a large display of all kinds of shells.  We took a brochure with a map, but the best advice she gave us was to rent a golf cart!  We would not have been able to see one-tenth of the interesting things we saw without the golf cart. We asked her where we could buy local seafood retail, and she looked at a list and told us the only place selling retail seafood that  we could get to on a golf cart (due to the restriction of not being able to drive a golf cart on Hwy 24) was Cooke's Seafood. 

The golf cart rental place was back down by the boat launch and park, and we rented a two-person golf cart for four hours from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Three people from Indiana were there at the same time, and they rented a four person golf cart. We kept running into them  at various places throughout the time we had the golf cart!

We first wound back and forth through the numbered and lettered streets looking at the houses, and working our way toward the school, the cemetery, the Cedar Key Museum State Park, and Cooke's Seafood.  Cedar Key is much smaller than Apalachicola, and is not as rich in fine old houses, but is has a few!

House on residential street in Cedar Key

After navigating the residential streets, we came to the school, which is on a high point next to the water reservoir, which was the first thing we had seen as we were approaching from the Gulf. The school mascot is the shark, and the little pull out at the rear of the school was signed "Shark Drop-off"! 

Cedar Key School, home of The Sharks!

We proceeded on to the Cedar Key Cemetery, which has a lot of old graves. There are also a lot of contemporary graves. If we had gone to the cemetery after the Cedar Key Museum State Park, we might have known some names to look for, but we didn't so we just drove through and stopped when something looked interesting!

An apparently old grave - we could not read a marker

Those are clam shells adorning this grave!

The Cedar Key State Park Museum was fascinating. It is not a large museum, but it lays out the history of Cedar Key and the surrounding area from pre-historic times through the early 1900s. The exhibits were very well done and the artifacts in each section were thoroughly explained. Cedar Key was once important - as you might guess - for the milling of cedar, which supported the pencil industry!  Faber and Eagle, brands many of us remember using in grade school, both had factories in Cedar Key. Unfortunately, they did not practice sustainable harvesting, and soon all the cedar trees were gone! 

There was also quite a bit of information at the museum about the cross state rail line, and the man who almost single-handedly brought it to be by David Levy Yulee, a U.S. Senator.  The rail line ran from Fernandina Beach on the Atlantic Ocean to Cedar Key on the Gulf of Mexico. The first train arrived on the rail line in 1861, and operated with daily passenger and freight service between Cedar Key and Fernandina Beach until the 1880s, when a new rail line bypassed Cedar Key in favor of the larger port of Tampa.

Some books were for sale at the museum, and one of them caught my eye - "A Thousand Mile Walk" by noted conservationist John Muir. John Muir is well known and remembered in Washington State, and I wondered if this book covered his time in Washington, but it turns out this thousand mile walk was from Indiana to Florida, and he spent about three months in Cedar Key in 1916. Our friends from Indiana were there at the museum at the same time, and were delighted Muir's walk started in their home state!

Perhaps the most interesting thing at the Cedar Key State Park Museum was not inside the museum proper! It is the St. Clair Whitman house. A brick path leads from the museum to the Whitman house past a huge iron cauldron that was used by the Confederates to boil sea water down to salt to a modest looking house a short distance away. Whitman was an avid collector of shells, prehistoric Indian artifacts and other items of historical significance. The house was originally located in the residential area of Cedar Key, but was moved to the State Park Museum in the 1990s,  and  was restored and furnished to its condition in the 1920s when the Whitman family lived in it.  Some of the furnishings are original, and others, like the round table and mismatched chairs in the kitchen, were as his descendants remembered and described them.  Many of Whitman's personal possessions are there also, including his glasses, hearing aids, harmonica and cigar boxes (I wondered however about the authenticity of the cigar boxes)!  His collections of shells, arrow heads, and other artifacts are there too, all as he had organized them. This is am impressive look back in time!

St. Clair Whitman House

When we left the Cedar Key State Park Museum, it was a short drive to Cooke's Seafood. We were not ready to buy yet since we wanted that to be the last thing before returning to the boat, but we wanted to see what was available. We were hoping for some grouper or other white fish to make ceviche, but all they had was mullet, and we were a little skeptical about ceviche made with mullet!  We decided - probably not a surprise - on a pint of shucked oysters!

It was time for lunch when we were done at the Cedar Key State Park Museum, and we chatted a bit with the folks from Indiana, who recommended Steamers down by the pier, especially the Bloody Marys! On the way to Steamers, we stopped at the hardware store for some more propane bottles, since we want to make sure we don't run out, and at the liquor store for the same reason!  So we headed down to Steamers, parked the golf cart, walked upstairs, and - shock of all shocks - had Bloody Marys and a dozen oysters on the half shell each!

Bloody Marys and ouysters at Steamers in  Cedar Key

After lunch, we headed to the one little grocery store in town, and although we did not know we needed $60 more worth of stuff, that is how it turned out! Our final stop was back at Cooke's Seafood, where we bought our pint of shucked oysters, It was almost 2:30 p.m., so we headed back down to return the golf cart, load up the kayak, and paddle back out to the boat!

Baxter got his afternoon trip to shore, and `when  I brought him back, I went out for a couple more photos. Finally we got our pelican picture! 

Pelicans on pilings at boat ramp

What is this bird? There was one of these birds on every single float around the swimming beach!

Daydream anchored in front of city park at Cedar Key

Then it was time for sundowners! After sundowners, we moved on to the pint of oysters for supper! Patty thought that a pint of shucked oysters surely could not contain two dozen oysters, but they were small to medium sized, and there were quite a few more than two dozen! We did not have any shells to have them on the half shell, so we used little custard cups. We put a few oysters in each cup and then  put lemon juice, horse radish and hot sauce on them. They were just as good as the restaurant oysters, but instead of $15 a dozen, they were $15 a pint!

This was a very good day, and we will always have wonderful memories of our day in Cedar Key!