Muscogee, Florida

The Life and Times of a Florida Ghost Town

Click on the image above to enter.

Muscogee, once a thriving lumber town in the 1880s, is now all but forgotten.  The state of the final resting places of many of its former residents reflects the air of abandonment that pervades what is left of the old town today.  And the relentless decay of time is hastened along by the continuing vandalism of its cemetery – the only reminder that there was once a thriving community here along the Perdido River.  A community full of stories.

Perdido in Spanish means lost and one can’t help feeling that the river was aptly named as they wander among what is left of Muscogee.  Of course, no one can expect that a town built on the clear-cutting of the virgin stands of pine that once covered the South would survive after the timber was gone.  There was no effort to replant.  So as the pine forests passed away, so did Muscogee.  But there is still a heritage from the old town alive today in the descendants of those early families.  A replanting as it were.  There are still surviving stories.  And old pictures of people who paused for a moment way back then to look toward someone with a camera.  That’s why this page exists today on the web – to capture those last images and words from Muscogee before there’s no one left who knows what happened there so many years ago.

To enter those times in a more subdued format, click on the picture of Elizabeth Dodgen Mullins’ tombstone above. And welcome to Muscogee.