October 18: A visit to the Bureau of Archaelogical Research in Tallahassee was led by Florida Architect and Historian Deborah Desilets. Tallahassee photographer Nicole Alfonso accompanied the group
Chandler’s Tourist Camp
By Deborah Desilets, Architect & Historian
Stories sometimes come layered like a wedding cake marrying together many different parts. This marker did.
The year before Dad’s passing he called me to bring home his music, songs he had long ago written for Mother. I came with the music and he filled me with more stories like how he traveled from Rhode Island to Tallahassee. He recalled how he first stopped at the Ben Bridges ball field and signed up to teach Little League. I thought; Really! And asked, “Not Cascades?” “No, Ben Bridges Ball field.”, Dad said. But where was it now? What had become of it? All these questions led me to the RA Gray Library to research and unravel a fascinating local history of baseball, the Dixie Highway, Tin Can Tourists and local auto camps, motels, and hotels.
The Chandler’s Tourist Camp marker, placed Sept 21, 2016 at Cascades Crossing, off Adams Street and FAMU WAY, shares a multi-layered local history. The marker celebrates Chandler’s one man’s vision for automobile accommodations in Tallahassee, the beginning of Florida’s Automobile Tourism on the Dixie Highway in Florida, Lake Ella and the crossroads of the Old Spanish Trail, and the long parallel roads leading south to Miami Beach.
Layered in this story is a deliciously sweet piece of my memory, the Ben Bridges Ball Field, that was Dad’s Field of Dreams, and where he came to start a family. From our modest house behind a barn on the Dixie Highway, at the edge of Southwood Plantation, across from cow fields, in a small pasture with a babbling creek, shaded by live oaks hung with Spanish Moss, crepe myrtle, magnolias and wild Cherokee Rose we shared a red dirt road with the flashing neon lights of the Dixie Motel where my first memories of trucks, cars, southern hospitality in waves of friendly faces, and the noise and humming of life whizzed by.
The City of Tallahassee celebrated the Grand Opening of the Capitol Cascades Crossing bridge on Oct 17, 2016. Bridge Design By FIGG Engineering, Tallahassee, Florida, Constructed by GLF, Miami, Florida.
