For many year-round residents living in Ponte Vedra in the early ’70s, the tone of the winter months was decidedly quiet and retrospective. The community enjoyed the company of visitors and guests from colder climates, and it was a time for real log fires in the hearth of the Great Lounge and in the white-painted brick fireplace in the breezeway across from the lounge at the Surf Club. Cocktail parties and get togethers were smaller. The chilly, Club-sponsored, beach bonfires took on a deeper meaning when suddenly there seemed to be more time for listening and enjoying the genuine enthusiasm of those around us. Nearly everyone had a hobby of some sort, and there was an eagerness to share interests and learn from others.
Ponte Vedra Beach has always served its role as a resort community well. Long before the phrase, “the experience economy,” was made popular in national discussions on economic development, PV was pioneering the field of place-based community development through excellence by improving life through discovery: Inventas vitam iuvat excoluisse per artes.
There has always been something very special about this stretch of beach, the feel of the air, the sound of the waves at night, and the history beneath the sand; a uniqueness that initiates a pause for discernment. During these winter months, the year-round residents found time for themselves. What they did with that time was as unique and diverse as any of the finds on the beach at low tide. There was always something to discover in PV, and there were clubs for just about every interest, including relic hunting. Nothing was superfluous.
At 12 years old, I thumbtacked my hand-drawn advertisement to the cork bulletin board at the PV Post Office that read: “Railroad Spikes for Sale.” I hoped for the best.
The relics were discovered with the help of Mr. Mickler, who pointed me in the right direction, and who told me where to look. These weren’t just any old railroad spikes; these were spikes that held the rails that carried the rutile, that was used in munitions and other industries, that made Mineral City vital to national interests. The spikes were in the palmetto patch along the old railroad bed just south of Palms Presbyterian on 3rd Street.
The congregation’s new sanctuary had been completed in 1970, and its landmark triangular silhouette facing the road was the signal for many to turn left just before the large Ponte Vedra Beach billboard on the left side of 3rd Street across from the church. This was the very southern end of Jax Beach where Jacksonville city buses made their turnaround down the sand and gravel alley behind the billboard. 36th Ave. South running west wasn’t even a road, per se, but more like a dirt path along the edge of a very primitive landscape of palmetto mounds that stretched south all the way to the real-dirt road leading west to the Club’s, then retired, target and skeet shooting range.
Sid Mickler told me that if I stood halfway between 3rd Street and the front of the church, I would be standing on the site of the route of the old railroad. He said if I walked south into the palmetto field, I’d find the ground sloping off to the left and the right on either side; which I did, and it was. The spikes, he said, would be on either side along the edges, where workmen would have tossed them when the rails and ties were taken up. With a bucket and a shovel, I set out one day to find them. Relic hunting in winter is always safer than during the spring and summer.
Palmettos grow in dense, mounded clumps. But in between each individual plant cluster, there are often sandy dirt paths that small animals, like armadillos and rabbits, use regularly. Getting on these paths and sticking to them makes it easy to slip into and around the thickets without much effort. There were no trees, no large bushes, just low running mounds of wind-blown palmetto downs. There were no wooden ties or rails, but the topography was clearly recognizable. Zigzagging through the palmettos, I found sandy dirt spots and would dig around a bit with my shovel, thinking I should have brought a hoe instead. The first find was an oddly angular iron bracket plate used to help secure the rails to the ties. The first spike I spotted was actually a surface find, and it sat in the dirt on the west edge of the railbed about 20 yards into the palmetto patch. It was as if someone had dropped it there the day before. Fifty years, at least, had passed since it was last used.
Within an hour, I had a bucket of seven. Riding a bicycle with a bucket of seven railroad spikes and a shovel can be challenging, but it’s not impossible. The ad I had thumbtacked on the bulletin board at the Post Office didn’t receive the attention I had hoped, but I did eventually sell six of the spikes a few years later to Mr. Speed for three dollars apiece. Doug Speed, Sr., who lived on the Boulevard and helped revive Scouting at Troop 277, and who spoke at my Eagle ceremony years later, mentioning the spikes, said he knew a deal when he saw one.
I kept the first spike I found for myself, and I still have it today. Its engineering is basic but remarkably effective. It’s in this utility, and the fact that only a limited number of these rail-pins ever existed along this stretch of track in the first place, that makes it special. Many are still out there, yet to surface, but the majority never will. In its own small, seemingly insignificant way, this piece of steel is still very much a part of the history of this smartly casual place of all places, Ponte Vedra Beach.
