ARROW History Home - Apalachicola Region Resources on the Web

Regional History
History of Timbering
County Histories
Oral Histories

History:
Stories, Maps, & Photos

History and the Apalachicola River Basin - History is the study of the past. We live in the present and plan for the future. So why should we care about things that happened many years ago in the Apalachicola River basin?

Peter Stearns offers two reasons for knowing your history:

History helps us understand people and society. Reliance on only current events will severely handicap our attempts. How could we evaluate the role of beliefs such as religion in shaping family life or society if we don't know what happened in the past without such beliefs or religion?
History helps us understand how our communities evolved. If the City of Apalachicola did more business in 1860 than all the rest of Florida combined, then why is it not like Miami today? When and why did seafood become such an integral part of Apalachicola? History provides answers to such questions.

There are different ways to look at history. History can be studied from a geographic standpoint (e.g., the history of a county or state), a time period standpoint (e.g., The First Spanish Period from 1513 to 1763), or from a topical standpoint (e.g., the history of tourism in Florida). Because the ARROW project confines itself to a particular area (i.e., the six counties immediately bordering the Apalachicola River and Wakulla County), it makes sense to deal with history from a geographic standpoint.

By clicking on one of the history links to the left, one can get either a region-wide history of the project area or specific county histories. If you have additional historical information for either the region or for one of the counties that you think should be included on one of our historical web pages, please contact us.

History is an on-going and continual process. The actions and decisions being made today in your local community will be your children's history. Make sure that tomorrow's history for your local community will be one that you can speak of with pride.