In all honesty, it had the look of a highly stylized miniature Mount Vernon with a covered veranda, eight slender columns, a cupula designed as a large rooftop lantern, white paint, dark shutters, low hedges, quintessential clapboard and other architectural elements mirroring the design of the original Surf Club up the beach and speaking perfectly the pattern language still in use today on North Cat Cay, 250 nautical miles Southeast of Ponte Vedra.
This was the Innlet and the Innlet Apartments at the lower end of the beach.
There wasn’t a pool, or a golf course, or tennis courts, but those amenities were right at hand. The Surf Club’s patio was reimagined in Bermuda turf in the Innlet’s broad rectangular courtyard lined with guestrooms with the cocktail lounge set like a gem facing the beach, feeling every bit like the sea-foam type room it emulated. This was a thoroughly modern attraction with a nod perhaps to that original cleverly designed Colonial Oil Company gas station found in Springfield over in Jacksonville near the old Bakery District, but with a newly defined mission and purpose entirely. The only service station in Ponte Vedra in 1971 was up next to the fire station at the corner of Miranda and the Boulevard.
The Innlet and the Surf Club acted much like bookends at the two poles of Ponte Vedra Boulevard with the Innlet serving as the southern gateway along this stretch of A1A. As a whole, PV was a fleet. An association of like-minded, independent property owners clustered together in several distinct neighborhoods. There was Up around the Circle, Over on San Juan, Around Christ Church, Up on Pablo, and Down the Boulevard, among others. The loop around the Whatley place was the community pearl.
The colonial-modern style of the Innlet and the Innlet Apartments was the contribution of Frank Rogers. It was marketed as “one of Florida’s nicest, small year-around seaside resorts directly on the Atlantic Ocean, halfway between Jacksonville and St. Augustine on Highway A1A with its wonderful beach.” It was operated “on the European plan only” and was managed by Stockton Rogers. The promotional brochure was printed in robin egg blue.
By 1971, this resort at the eastern end of Corona Road, originally Palm Valley Road, had been mothballed by the PV fleet. It was advertised as “having rooms and apartments available with or without air conditioning, where guests could dress in their rooms to go bathing and where cribs and cots were available for children and nurses.” Senior managers of the plants in Springfield and their families in San Marco had been regular visitors since the beginning. But now, the complex sat isolated from the rest of the community, waiting for the nap to be over.
Farther south, A1A was an arrow-straight road down past Mickler’s Landing, the old Coast Guard station near midway, a boat launch or two, excentric houses and equally interesting people who lived privately, and beyond that, dune, after dune, after dune, after dune, before arriving at the stop sign at Vilano Beach near the T“n”T motel that sat on stilts offering weekly rates.
There was Ponte Vedra Beach and there was South Ponte Vedra Beach. Beyond the Innlet began the upper stretches of South Ponte Vedra. The residents there would define South PV as being farther down, and those farther down defined it as being even farther than that. In the early ’70s no one actually knew for sure where South Ponte Vedra started and where it ended, but just about everyone was in agreement it was in the general vicinity of where the saboteurs came ashore. West of the road was absolute wilderness from Corona Road down to Mickler’s Landing and beyond. This wilderness included the flint veins that Derick Woolverton showed me and where we successfully hunted arrowheads many times.
At this point, Jimbo’s Dad had only shared his bold idea with family and a few close friends. I remember sitting in the living room at Dad’s newly built 556 with Muriel Harrison, John Veal, Mr. Sears and a few others as Jimmy explained the maps and laid out the drawings. Kids were welcome to watch as long as we paid attention and didn’t interrupt. The only way to fully pay attention was to listen. The adults would ask the questions.
Anything below Corona Road was outside PV proper and the barrier on the beach at the Innlet let everyone know where this place of all places began and where it ended. The barrier was formidable. Large pilings the diameter of telephone poles, because they were, in fact, telephone poles, smeared with thick black layers of creosote had been driven in the ground with a piledriver. “Beach closed to automobile traffic.” The pilings had been reinforced with horizonal boards attached with large 30 penny nails driven deep. Metal strapping reinforced these two-inch thick boards with attached metal grading and fencing material added for strength. Where the pilings reached the tide marks, layers of barnacles increasingly encrusted the lower halves. Stumps of previous footings worn by the tides poked up like cypress knees and were top-rounded by the ocean’s action.
Beyond the pilings and extending out into deep water at low tide, were iron railroad rails welded in place using angle iron supports, all heavily rusted, weather worn and shiny when wet. Barnacles made the entire structure dangerous to be near and swimming out and around the end would simply be reckless. Large sections of metal ship cabling, thick rope sections and old wrecked shrimp boat netting were all tangled around the railings having endured who knows how many storms and tide changes.
Finding a way through the barrier was a challenge but not impossible. The goal was to do it safely. Jimbo could climb through with ease, and I followed his lead. Sure enough, the path avoided jagged edges and steered clear of exposed nails. Once on the other side and looking back, it sure beat having to walk back up to the Boulevard, around the Innlet and back down to the beach just to go explore the dunes beyond that first huge house there with the screened porches all around that never seemed to be occupied. We’d then cross the road and head down into the woods and back up towards Corona Road, climbing through the remnants of collapsed gator nests mixed with mounds of rusted beer cans deposited out of necessity over the decades because there was no other place to put them.
When we would step on the piles of the rusted cans, they would disintegrate under the weight of our sneakers sinking us sometimes up to our waists. We nicknamed the area tin can alley. Tetanus was not yet in our vocabulary, at least not until Mrs. Bowers heard about our adventures and mentioned it to her husband.
Word of our ruck sacking garnished an immediate advisory from Roy Landrum on the dangers of moccasins, just as Mr. McCormick has advised us not to drag our legs while sitting on the tailgate of his pickup as he traveled the two-track dirt road cutting across the open grass at the ranch.
“Rattlesnakes are real, boys,” he said sternly. Roy warned us of wild boar, and we were reminded that exploring the dunes, and especially beyond the beer cans, could go very wrong, very fast, and there wouldn’t be much anyone could do about it because no one would know where we were. “Quicksand pits are real, boys.”
All these warnings flashed in my mind one day when I looked down, and for the life of me, couldn’t recall the color sequencing of the mid-section of the snake I was seeing moving through the debris between my feet. If I could have seen the head I would have known for sure what type it was, and while the thought of catching a king snake and presenting it in a jar to my classmates on Monday morning was exhilarating, that thought was quickly quelled by the reality of another thought: a coral snake grabbing the soft flesh between my thumb and forefinger and holding on tight. This was enough to start me heading to the safely of the Corona Road asphalt. “Red touch yellow, kill a fellow. Red touch black, friend of Jake.” Remember the words.
The Innlet was mothballed in sections. First the southern part of the courtyard, then the main lobby, and finally the northern courtyard. Both the two-story buildings of the Innlet Apartments and the two flat-story buildings, and some of the beach apartments were occupied for a while with long-term leases. But one by one, as the leases expired with no renewals, the apartments were vacated.
A controlled burn by the PV Volunteer Fire Department took down the old staff quarters at Corona Road and the Boulevard. The heart of pine construction created an intense blaze that was managed by the department as a training exercise.
The resort stood for several more years as if someone had simply locked the door and walked away. The lobby, the terrazzo floors, the wood paneling, the ratan furniture, the dining chairs, all untouched. Looking in one of the office windows, stacks of papers and accounting slips could be seen as well as a large safe with the door standing open as if to signal “there is absolutely nothing of value here worth cracking.” The awning frames were still in place and the color palette of the interior was still intact. The front desk and bellman stand could be seen from the courtyard windows.
The PV bulkhead that runs the length of the beach from below the Innlet north connecting the two ends acted as a route to the Club just wide enough for a stroller. It was the concrete divide between the properties and the beach. We could begin on that bulkhead and walk north all the way to the Club without ever touching sand or turf. The only obstacles were the nefarious sandspurs laying across the path waiting on bare feet.
There were no sidewalks on the Boulevard, no mailboxes or home mail delivery. All of our mail was picked up from Box 235 in the Post Office lobby next to The Store across from the Surf Club. Mr. Herburg was postmaster then, and his son Jim was a classmate, and they had a huge, abundantly producing, grapefruit tree in the back yard of their house in the Valley.
The Innlet slowly decorporated throughout the ’70s, surging briefly, receding again, before finally being dismantled entirely, clearing the way for the site to finally regain the footing it so rightly deserved. The Lodge, in those days referred to the little one room camp-cottage near our favorite camping spot by the pond on the property at the far end of Neck Road where the adults would remind us regularly to stay away from the Indian mounds.
Now, the Lodge is reimagined so successfully on the spot where Frank Rogers first modelled the Stockton Springfield style with San Marco bricks and Ortega pine, that helped defined the smartly casual and charming environment of this place of all places, Ponte Vedra Beach.
