Tag: Cortez centennial

CORTEZ – There is less fishing and more preservation in Cortez these days, but the success of an expanding museum complex and environmental preserve is bittersweet.

“We’ve got the Florida Maritime Museum, we’ve got the FISH Preserve, the festival is going strong, and we still have a community where we meet at the post office and stop and talk,” said Linda Molto, organizer of the Cortez Commercial Fishing Festival and co-author of “Cortez – Then and Now” with Cortez Village Historical Society (CVHS) founder Mary Fulford Green.

“But the museum developments are almost saying the real thing is over,” she said.

CVHS, founded in 1984, was reorganized last year by Green and a dozen other Cortezians to work on establishing two more museums in the historic complex, the Family Life Museum and the Military Museum.

CVHS was instrumental in having Cortez village established as a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places and as a historic neighborhood in the Manatee County comprehensive plan, as well as in restoring the Cortez Rural Graded School as the Florida Maritime Museum at Cortez and purchasing and moving the historic Bratton store to the complex.

The museum, operated by Manatee County, seems to be distancing itself from CVHS, said Green, who is disappointed that the county will not allow CVHS to open its Family Life Museum in the Bratton store as planned; the two-story store would require the installation of an elevator, destroying part of the store, if it was open to the public, according to the county.

Florida Institute for Saltwater Heritage (FISH) board members also have said they feel a widening division between the museum and FISH, dating back to the unauthorized sale of a historic shrimp boat donated for preservation to the museum in 2010 by the Tupin/Fannon family.

FISH board member Plum Taylor said that because of the fiasco, her family had second thoughts about donating a skiff to the museum that was owned by her late husband, Alcee Taylor. His boat was installed at the museum earlier this month, on loan only.

FISH secretary Joe Kane said the growing schism in Cortez is a spiritual and mental one.

“We need to get the feeling that we are part of the museum and the museum is part of us,” he said.

Saved

The museum complex consists of several buildings on the eastern edge of the village, and other historic acquisitions scattered throughout the village.

Florida Maritime Museum at Cortez

The museum is the core of the historical preservation efforts in Cortez. Housed in the 1912 schoolhouse, it marks the eastern entrance to Cortez village at 119^th Street and Cortez Road.

The Cortez Rural Graded School was built in 1912 and operated until 1961, when it was leased to an art school. Artist Robert Sailors, a master weaver, bought the building in 1974 and used it as his home and studio until his death in 1998. The following year, Manatee County purchased the property, then restored the building and opened it in 2006 as a museum.

This year marks the 100th birthday of the red brick 1912 Cortez Rural Graded School, which is now the Florida Maritime Museum at Cortez.

The school operated until 1961, when it was leased to an art school. Artist Robert Sailors bought the building in 1974 for his home and studio.

With help from the Cortez Village Historical Society, Manatee County purchased the property in 1999, restored the building and opened it in 2006 as a museum.

It has always been at the heart of the community, the site of fish fries, musical events, fishermen’s union meetings, local elections, even a contentious meeting last year on what to do about coyotes preying on village pets.

On Oct. 25, 1921, it saved villagers from a Category 3 hurricane with 115 mile-per-hour winds.

Doris Green was 6 years old when the storm hit. She recalled in her book, “Fog’s Comin’ In,” that she saw houses and boats floating by their Cortez home, which had been the village’s first 1895 one-room schoolhouse, now a residence at 12016 45th Ave. W.

The family piled into a skiff just before their house floated off its pine pier foundation and made it to the schoolhouse, where several neighbors were docked.

When the storm was over, nothing was left on the Cortez waterfront but pilings and the Albion Inn, part of which has been relocated to the schoolhouse museum complex.

To this day, villagers hold the schoolhouse to be the safest place to ride out a storm.

Other Cortez natives who attended the school also have vivid memories.

“My first grade class at Cortez Elementary School was small, five boys and one girl,” said Sam Bell, president of the Cortez Village Historical Society. “Our teacher was Miss Mae McCloud. Weather permitting, every Wednesday after school, she would load us in her little 1935 Chevy coupe with a rumble seat. She would drive us over the old wooden bridge to the drug store in Bradenton Beach and buy each of us a nickel ice cream cone. They don’t make ’em like that anymore. God bless her.”

Musician Richard Culbreath remembers daydreaming during class while gazing out the giant windows that overlook what is now the FISH Preserve.

Retired commercial fisherman Blue Fulford has a memory of being whipped at school, then again at home, for walking through a puddle with his shoes on.

“Everybody’s daddy had the right to whip you,” recalled Mark Taylor, who attended the school, as did his father.

When Taylor was a student, the schoolhouse was used as an auditorium and the classes were in World War II-style barracks. He recalled boys setting the nearby palmetto bushes on fire to chase the rattlesnakes out, then shooting the rattlesnakes with shotguns so they could play baseball in the schoolyard.

Green recalled classmates finding something else in the palmetto bushes – a load of moonshine.

“It was kind of a tough place to grow up, but it was a wonderful place to grow up,” Taylor said. “You can’t take away those memories.”

Pillsbury Boatshop

North of the museum is the 1907 Asa Harmon Pillsbury Boatshop, relocated from the Snead Island Boatworks in 2007.

The boatworks was operated by Edward Pillsbury and his son, Asa Pillsbury, who earned notoriety for his craftsmanship in building small skiffs and runabouts used for fishing off Cortez.

When the property was sold to E.E. Bishop in the late 1930s, the Pillsbury family loaded the boatshop onto a truck bed and moved it to their home three miles away, where they used it as a machine shop to service the Pillsbury dredging company’s equipment.

When the Pillsbury family subdivided its property in 2003, one of the new property lines was drawn through the boatshop. Rather than see it torn down, Albert Pillsbury donated the building to Manatee County.

Bratton store

The Bratton store, also known as the Burton store, was built in the 1890s by William C. Bratton at Hunter’s Point, the original name of Cortez.

The building served as a general store, steamboat wharf and U.S. Post Office. The original P.O. Box 1 is used today by Star Fish Co., the oldest continuous business in Cortez.

L.J.C. Bratton added hotel rooms onto the store in 1900, calling it the Albion Inn, after his son. The Edneys of North Carolina purchased the store and hotel in 1910, and gave it to their daughter, Bessie, and her husband, Joe Guthrie, who expanded the complex to a 24-room hotel. The Guthrie’s daughter, Elizabeth, became postmistress at age 18.

The building was the only one on the Cortez waterfront to survive the hurricane of 1921.

The inn closed in 1974 and the property was sold to the U.S. Coast Guard.

CVHS and the Organized Fishermen of Florida (OFF)  raised $12,000 through strawberry shortcake sales and other fundraisers, and saved the store from demolition in 1991. The store was moved from its site near the new Coast Guard station to the east side of the museum in 2006.

Behind the store is a historic cistern, used for drinking water in the early days of Cortez.

The store’s front porch is the venue for the monthly Music on the Porch series and the annual Cortez Folk Music Festival.

FISH Preserve

East of the Bratton store is the 95-acre FISH Preserve, where hikers and kayakers can follow a trail of mangroves along Sarasota Bay, known as the “kitchen” to residents whose parents and grandparents five generations back relied on it for food.

The preserve is a permanent buffer between the village and ever-encroaching coastal Florida development, but is threatened from within by a property owner who owns a parcel in the middle of the preserve and plans to build a home there.

Monroe Cottage

The 66-year-old Monroe cottage, once at 304 Church St. in Bradenton Beach, was moved across the Cortez bridge to the FISH Preserve in 2011.

CVHS plans to renovate the cottage and create the Cortez Family Life Museum, which will feature household objects, birth and death records and photographs and videotaped memories of Cortez residents.

Wilkerson house

On the northern border of the FISH Preserve is a house restored as a boat shop, where volunteer boatbuilders make wooden boats mostly by hand on commission, with proceeds to FISH.

Harris house

John Banyas, owner of N.E. Taylor Boat Works, donated the 92-year-old Harris house, once at 4521 120th St. W. in Cortez, to FISH last year. It was relocated to the FISH Preserve and is used for storage.

Fishermen’s Hall

The former Church of God, 4511 124^th St. W., has been renamed Fishermen’s Hall by FISH, which is renovating the historic one-room building as an event venue. It serves as a meeting place for the FISH board of directors. Rev. Kenneth Gill, former pastor of Longboat Island Chapel, asked earlier this month to rent the building on Sundays for church services.

Cortez Community Center

A former volunteer fire station, the community center is used as a shop for volunteer boat builders and as a meeting room and classroom for the Turner Maritime Challenge Program, a youth program established with a bequest from Jay K. Turner. The program is currently suspended while its curriculum is being revised.

Fishermen’s memorial

In front of Star Fish Co., on the west side of the village, is the fishermen’s memorial, honoring Cortez commercial fishermen lost at sea: Don Akins, Joey Clavier, William “Billy” Elliott, Paul Kight, Kevin Kurtice, Frank Lilquist, Michael “Bugsy” Moran, Dale “Murph” Murphy, Mark Rankin, Bobby Thompson, Lynn L. Tupin, Frank “Billy” Tyne Jr., Warren “Bud” Wilson and Craig “Dutch” Lutz.

On a nearby plaque, Cortez veterans lost during wartime are remembered: James C. Coarsey, Leroy R. Wilson, Warren A. Bell, James M. Campbell and William H. Posey.

Net camp

A historic net camp has been preserved on stilts in Sarasota Bay just offshore of the Cortez docks, where fishermen once spread cotton nets out to dry. The invention of monofilament nets made the practice obsolete.

Jail

Privately owned, the one-room Cortez jail is made of tabby, a mixture of lime and shells, and remains on its original site at 4415 124^th St. Court.

The only person ever to be officially incarcerated in the jail, was Jap Thigpen, a fighter and drinker whose wife, Bessie, broke him out of the jail with an axe one night, afraid he would freeze, Green said. To her credit, she had first asked permission to take him home and return him the next day, but was refused. The next morning, she delivered him back to the jail, as promised.

Like the 1912 schoolhouse, it was built 100 years ago this year, six months after Cortez was incorporated.

Related coverage

A century of Cortez

Snapshots of Cortez

The village that mullet built

Climate change in Cortez

Last in a series of three

CORTEZ – If the state would lift the 1995 ban on gill nets, hearts would leap and boats would launch in the commercial fishing village of Cortez.

But there’s no time to waste daydreaming.

After they woke up from the knockout punch that ended their livelihoods 17 years ago, villagers rolled up their sleeves and got to work, just like they did after the hurricane of 1921, the Great Depression, and the catastrophic red tides of 1947 and 1953 that killed all the fish.

“On Friday, we went to work. On Monday morning, we woke up and said, ‘What are we gonna do? ’ ” said Kathe Fannon, a former commercial fisherman.

They’ve done a variety of things to survive without leaving the water behind.

Some fishermen diversified into grouper and stone crab, said John Stevely, board member of the Florida Institute for Saltwater Heritage (FISH) and one of the founders of the Cortez Commercial Fishing Festival.

“It’s a tribute to the integrity and hardworking nature of the community” that they are still fishing, he said.

Seth Cripe, one of a new generation of fishermen, is putting a different twist on a staple crop, producing bottarga, or mullet roe, for domestic shipment to his California winery. Cortez fish houses have been shipping roe to Asia for years.

Fannon gives eco-tours of Sarasota Bay and Palma Sola Bay; her daughter, a fifth generation native, has recently joined her business as a boat captain on her own boat. Her husband, Mike Fannon, is a boatbuilder and one of the last handful of shrimpers in Cortez.

Kim Ibasfalean, who gave Fannon her start in the charter business, also gives boat tours, based across the Intracoastal Waterway from Cortez in Bradenton Beach. Her husband, Mark Ibasfalean, builds docks and makes films about marine life with his brother, Bryan Ibasfalean, who also is a stone crabber.

Former commercial fisherman Mark Taylor rakes the beaches on Anna Maria Island for Manatee County, as close as he can get to the water without being on a boat.

A member of Taylor’s family is renting out cottages in the village to vacationers.

“I’m glad to see it’s somebody local doing it. Ever since the net ban, it’s made the slow transition to a tourist community,” he said, adding that he can’t afford to buy a house in his home town of Cortez. “It kind of breaks my heart. Now it’s a boutique community. It’s not the same. You can’t be mad at people for liking it for what it is, but it saddens me. I don’t think it would have happened if we’d have kept fishing.”

Karen Bell, office manager for A.P. Bell, one of two remaining commercial fish houses in Cortez – the other is Cortez Bait and Seafood – also has branched out into rentals.

To some degree, Cortez is protected from the destructive effect that large, multi-bedroom vacation rentals are having on Anna Maria Island just across the Cortez bridge, because Cortez village is a historic district, Stevely said.

“The historical overlay will keep the flavor,” he said, adding that Manatee County allows zoning nonconformities so that the few remaining fishermen can keep crab traps, boats and gear in their yards. “That has allowed for the preservation of the working waterfront nature of the community.”

The village’s vision plan, adopted by FISH in 2001, does not allow condos or multiple housing on a single lot, said artist Linda Molto, who heads the Cortez Commercial Fishing Festival.

“It said in 50 years, we want it to look like it does now,” she said.

But while Cortez hasn’t lost its historic homes, the change in usage from residential to tourist rental is having a profound effect on the village, she said.

“It’s beginning to lose its sense of place,” she said, with most of the fishermen gone, people installing fences and locking doors, and no barefoot kids running down to the bay with fishing poles.

“It’s so great it attracts people here, then they get here and want to change it. Florida is beginning to look like everywhere else. In 20 years, maybe Cortez will too,” she said. “Is this the only way Florida can survive, to be a giant resort?”

Related coverage

A century of Cortez

Snapshots of Cortez

The village that mullet built

The future – a memory?

Second in a series of three

CORTEZ – The wind is screaming, the Gulf of Mexico is frosted with whitecaps, and it’s so cold the pelicans aren’t even bothering to trail the bouncing mullet boat just offshore.

But there they are, a couple of guys in yellow oilers and white boots, with leathery skin and hands tough as nails, making a living the old, hard way.

Cortez commercial fishermen are determined to follow in the wake of their great-great-great grandfathers, who settled Hunter’s Point from Carteret County, N.C. in the 1800s.

There are easier ways to make a living.

Commercial fishing is the third deadliest job in America after firefighters and loggers. Boat-battering storms and fish-killing pollution and red tide make it harder. Regulations have made it almost impossible.

Stop nets and gill nets are banned and longlines are heavily regulated. It takes a team of lawyers to interpret the constantly changing rules on closed seasons and fishing quotas and catch shares. Some fisheries, like bay scallops, are closed completely.

Yet, Cortez fishermen are keeping the last two of the village’s original five fish houses in business.

Staying afloat

At the A.P. Bell Fish Co., a fisherman tosses mullet fat with roe onto the conveyor belt from the dock, where the Bell fleet is moored, a dozen boats all with the name “Belle” in them, mostly named after women in the family of founder Aaron Parks Bell.

In the parking lot, stone crabbers are building their traps. Chainsaw Charlie carves a totem pole while his dog rests in the shade of the Fishermen’s Memorial, which honors Cortez veterans lost during wartime and Cortez commercial fishermen lost at sea – three of them, Michael “Bugsy” Moran, Dale “Murph” Murphy and Frank “Billy” Tyne Jr., were immortalized in the film, “The Perfect Storm.”

Cortez is just the way Bell’s office manager, Karen Bell, likes it, full of characters who leave crab traps piled in their back yards and nets hanging like sheer laundry on a clothesline.

The Bell fish house has survived because it has adapted to changes in the fishing industry, Bell said, by catering to Asian tastes for roe and adding offshore boats to its inshore fleet when deepwater grouper became popular with diners.

At the other end of the village’s waterfront, Cortez Bait and Seafood is staying afloat specializing in bait fish.

Both process stone crab, grouper and other fish, but mullet is the fish that built Cortez.

This year’s mullet season, now winding down, was a record-breaker, the peak of a seven-year cycle, some say, or the result of fish swimming south to escape polluted waters from the Gulf oil spill of 2010, others speculate.

Boats overflowed, and for a moment, it was almost like the old days.

A brief history of Cortez

Prehistoric times – Indian tribes fish local waters

1400s – Spaniards discover the area, ship dried fish to Cuba, the Bahamas

Late 1800s – Fulford, Guthrie and Jones families settle Hunter’s Point from Carteret County, N.C.

1895 – U.S. Post Office renames Hunter’s Point Cortez

Early 1900s – Nate Fulford installs four-horsepower engine on a skipjack, the beginning of the end of sailboat and poling fishing

1912 – Cortez village incorporated; Cortez Rural Graded School opens

1920s – Cortez rum runners smuggle Cuban rum and Bimini whiskey during Prohibition

1921 – Hurricane strikes, destroying most of Cortez waterfront and half-built bridge to Anna Maria Island

1922 – Wooden bridge to AMI finished

1930s – Mullet disappear for eight years; during the Great Depression, Cortezians share ham bones with neighbors to flavor soup and beans rather than take government handouts

1940s – Fish houses built; 65 men and women enlist to serve in World War II

1947 – Catastrophic red tide kills fish

Late 1940s – Fishermen’s co-op formed

1953 – Stop nets banned; red tide strikes again

1960s – Monofilament nets invented, replacing cotton nets; kicker boats with outboard motors replace inboard motors, allowing fishermen into shallower waters; fish houses build commercial freezers, making shipments to Asia possible

1967 – Organized Fishermen of Florida (OFF) founded to fight proposed commercial fishing ban

1970s – Bay scallops nearly disappear from Sarasota Bay; bales of marijuana, or “square grouper,” smuggled through Cortez

1980s- New fisheries develop – grouper, baitfish, mullet roe

1994 – Fight over state Constitutional amendment to ban gill nets

1995 – Gill net ban takes effect

2003 – “Out of Time,” movie starring Denzel Washington, filmed at Cortez docks

2009 – Shinedown’s hit music video, “Second Chance,” filmed at Cortez docks

2010 – Longlines heavily regulated; individual fishing quotas (IFQs) implemented

2012 – 100^th anniversary of village incorporation, 100^th anniversary of Cortez schoolhouse, 30^th anniversary of Cortez Commercial Fishing Festival

Good ol’ days

Thomas “Blue” Fulford learned to fish as a boy watching his uncle, Tink Fulford, who was known for being the hardest worker in five counties. He once poled a boat by hand 20 miles around Tarpon Key while everyone else was sleeping, looking for mullet.

Fulford misses seeing fishermen walking down to the docks carrying their paper sack lunches (fish and grits for breakfast, fish and grits for dinner, and leftovers for supper, he recalls). He misses the days when fishermen built their own boats, everyone went barefoot, no one locked their doors and none of the yards had fences.

“Everybody was kin,” said Fulford, president of the Organized Fishermen of Florida (OFF) for more than 20 years. “It was just heaven on earth.”

“I was never hungry even though it might be fried mullet six days a week” during the Depression, Mary Fulford Green said. “I was provided for as my father was a hard working fisherman. He had his own boat and crew when he was 14 years old.”

“A fisherman would walk down to the shore and would pass another fisherman coming in and the only thing they would say to each other is something like ‘oyt’ ” said Mark Taylor, whose grandfather, Alva Taylor, was one of the original settlers from Carteret County. “I said, ‘When I grow up, I’m going to say that,’ and I do.”

As a Cortez kid, Taylor shoveled fish, painted boat bottoms and started earning half shares, or wages, as a teenage crew member.

There was nothing like pulling against a net full of fish, and you could never get enough of it.

“You might fish night and day seven days a week, and what do you talk about when you’re not fishing? Fishing,” said Taylor, who treasures a photo showing him with a gill net full of mullet.

It’s not something the current generation will ever know.

The day the music died

“I was 45 when the net ban hit, in my prime. I had just hung a $10,000 net that had never been used,” said Taylor, former state director of OFF, which fought the gill net ban. I had a wholesale seafood trucking business, a purse seine boat and a gill net boat, and it just stopped cold. Suddenly, it was illegal.”

The battle between commercial net fishermen, who relied on fishing for their livelihoods, and recreational hook and line fishermen, who fished for fun, played itself out in the media.

OFF fought the ban in 1994, saying that recreational fishermen, among them, fisheries regulators, skewed estimates of fish stock to make it look like commercial fishermen were overfishing.

But voters, outraged at widely publicized photographs of dead dolphins and sea turtles supposedly killed by walls of gill nets, passed a state Constitutional amendment banning the nets.

“The net ban cut out a way of fishing and whether that was for the good or the bad, I’m not sure,” said Arnold “Soupy” Davis, still considered by natives as a newcomer to Cortez, having arrived in 1950. “But I totally disagree with how it was done. Having people believe in the ‘walls of death,’ that was an overexaggeration.”

“It was a brutal social conflict, hostile and dividing,” said J.B. Crawford, an author and Cortez commercial fisherman. “But the most bitter aspect was that commercial net fishermen mainly targeted mullet. The mullet is a vegetarian and does not bite a baited hook. The net ban protected fish not caught by hook and line, not targeted by sports fishermen.”

Some fishermen turned to cast nets to catch mullet, others started shrimping, trapping blue crabs and stone crabs or longlining grouper. Some became dock builders or dredge operators. Some went inland to work. Taylor joined the county parks staff, raking Anna Maria Island’s beaches.

Deja vu

Another ban, in 1953, had put a stop to stop nets, which were placed at bayous and partially enclosed waters to trap nearly all the fish behind the nets as the tide went out.

The method created a large amount of bycatch, or trash fish, which many fishermen saw as ecologically unsound and a waste of natural resources, Crawford said, adding that the issue pitted stop netters against seine net, gill net, and trammel net fishermen.

In 2010, déjà vu happened all over again.

Longline fishing gear was all but banned due to bycatch, with only eight longline permits issued in Manatee County, according to Glen “Rabbit” Brooks, president of the Gulf Fisherman’s Association, who fishes under some of the permits.

It started with one fisherman snagging a loggerhead sea turtle on a longline and ended with a limit of 62 longline permits for the entire Gulf of Mexico.

While some commercial fishermen say they love sea turtles, and others say they love them for dinner, most agree that fishermen are environmentalists by necessity – they must conserve fish or they risk their future livelihoods and those of their children.

That future may be doubtful.

Forecast: partly cloudy

In recent years, the fierce independence of many fishermen has kept them at odds with each other, making them unable to fight united opposition, Fulford said, adding that in the old days, people pulled together like a crew on a net.

“It’s not cohesive like it used to be,” he said.

The most recent example is another new regulation launched in 2010, the individual fishing quota (IFQ) for commercially caught grouper, which has both fans and foes in the fishing community.

Patterned after a red snapper IFQ, and the precursor to planned IFQs for more species, the plan gives fishermen flexibility to fish when weather and market conditions are favorable, eliminating “derby” fishing, or having to fish in any conditions just to beat the catch limit quota for a particular fishery, according to Brooks.

“I’m strictly against the way fisheries management is going now,” Davis said. “Catch shares benefit a few large fishermen at the expense of the majority of small fishermen. A handful are producing the majority of the commercial catch.

A lot of boats are tied up down there now that aren’t going out.”

Davis bemoans the trend toward more regulations.

“Fishing is almost an assembly line now. It’s taking away all the stuff that we got in it for. We got in it because it was one of the last things you could be independent in and you didn’t have a lot of controls,” said Davis, who, at 85, “can’t fish as hard as I used to, but I can still fish.”

“Now they tell you when you can go, where you can go, how much you can catch, and what hooks you can use,” he said. “You’re nothing but a human robot.”

Next week: Is the future just a memory?

Related coverage

A century of Cortez

Snapshots of Cortez

Climate change in Cortez

The future – a memory?

CORTEZ – Ask a Cortezian about their village, and stories fly like mullet being tossed into a boat cooler.

Here are some snapshots of the Cortez of yesterday – some fond, some funny, some frightening – told mostly in the words of the reminiscers, and, like all fish tales, mostly true.

Mark Taylor

Commercial fisherman, former state president of Organized Fishermen of Florida

I grew up on crews. When I was just a little fella, before I could earn half a share, I was with Uncle Joe Capo on dad’s boat. We would fish for days at a time and ice them down, and get a truck to come to the Skyway and we’d unload into the truck and they’d bring us ice. A guy we called Shorty was cooking on the boat – pompano, rice and tomato gravy. Uncle Joe was steering and I was down in the cabin. Shorty said you could eat the backbone of a pompano like potato chips. He fried it up. It was the finest kind, and I was eatin’ it. He couldn’t hardly hold himself from bustin’ as I spit it over the side of boat.

I remember milk being delivered in Hoods metal boxes. Selling mangos and guavas to the Yankees in Cortez Trailer Park; they either loved them or were allergic to them. We used to drink water out of jelly jars from the water tanks with wiggle worms floating in it. Before we had indoor plumbing I remember going to the Albion Inn and running through it and flushing all the toilets. Guys knocking down the walls of the (Cortez) bridge during construction to keep the bridge from being built. The mosquito control district spraying that yellow fog (DDT). Hearing on the (marine) radio, “Blue’s lost his leg.”

Thomas “Blue” Fulford

Commercial fisherman, Manatee County Agricultural Hall of Fame inductee

People used to pull together. When one hurt, they all hurt. It used to be a good place to grow up, but something has happened to the dear hearts and gentle people in my hometown. It ain’t like the good old days. People don’t work together like they used to. It’s not cohesive like it used to be. I couldn’t say exactly what happened, but the main thing was the net ban.

Carolyn Doig

Blue crabber, granddaughter of Cortez settler Vernon Mora

Everyone used to come out to the Friday night fish fries during mullet season at the volunteer fire station. Ol’ Man Coarsey from the post office always had his harmonica in his pocket. The menu was fried mullet, hush puppies, cole slaw, grits and sweet tea. The men would do the cooking, the women would make the desserts and the kids would clear the tables. After the net ban, we stopped doing them. There’s a lot of stuff we did that we can’t do anymore since the net ban.

Mary Fulford Green

Co-founder, Cortez Village Historical Society

When I was about eight, my Grandpa, Capt. Billy Fulford, asked me to go to the store for him. He had just one leg; that meant walking down the path to the store. When I returned I gave him the change and one dime was missing. He asked if I had bought candy. That would have been okay with him. I told him “No.” My mother wanted to prove that I was telling the truth. She left everything she was doing and walked back down the path and found the dime that had dropped in the grass. That was a wonderful lesson to learn – the value of truth. Today I do not lie. To me a white lie is a lie.

Mark Green

Mary Fulford Green’s son

I used to spend summers and school holidays in Cortez and loved going fishing with my grandfather, Tink Fulford. We didn’t fish on Sundays because almost everyone went to church, but Sunday night it was ok to go fishing. My grandmother insisted we go to the Church of Christ both Sunday morning and Sunday night. Grandpa Tink didn’t go to church on Sunday night and he wanted to leave as soon as possible but he wasn’t going to tell my grandmother we couldn’t go to church. We would have to run from the church building to the dock as soon as the service was over. Grandpa knew exactly what time we should be there and he would untie, start up the boat and take off from the dock as soon as he saw us getting close. We had to run and jump on as the boat was pulling off. I don’t think he would have left us if we missed the boat but he sure acted like it.

Richard Culbreath

Bandleader, Richard Culbreath Group, veteran

I remember getting electricity and running water to our house, our first icebox and later a refrigerator, our first washing machine with hand-cranked wringer and indoor plumbing and a bathroom with a toilet.

I think the one thing I have to put ahead of the rest is family. I grew up in two large families, the Julius Mora and James Culbreath families. I learned family values and traditions, including music, and have been able to carry that through life.

Sam Bell

Volunteer, Florida Maritime Museum at Cortez

My Dad would take me with him in his boat up to School Key (now Key Royale) to cut a red cedar tree to be used as our Christmas tree. The result would be the fragrant red cedar aroma in our little house throughout the Christmas season. I think most families in Cortez did this. I can’t remember anyone buying a spruce or pine. Indeed, my Dad would cut several to share with elderly neighbors who couldn’t get one on their own.

Richard “Chips” Shore

FISH board member, Clerk of Manatee County Circuit Court and Comptroller

My parents ate at the Albion Inn two or three times a month. As a child it was an adventurous trip especially in the back near the water and over towards Bell’s (A.P. Bell Fish Co.). There was always some activity going on and the food was second to none. Our favorite was the pompano (en papillott) done in brown bags.

Wyman Coarsey

Former Cortez postmaster, veteran

John Blackburn was a good teacher, but if you did something wrong, he’d make you cut off a branch from a palmetto bush and pull off the leaves to make your own switch. It worked, too. You’d never do that again.

Henry Clayton “Jap” Adams

Commercial fisherman, veteran

In 1940, Jap Adams swam out to the Regina, a sinking molasses barge off Bradenton Beach, and saved two crewmen from drowning in the storm that sank her. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II in Africa under Gen. George Patton.

He and his five brothers served in three service branches: Cleveland “Cubie” Adams, Clyde Dillard “Doc” Adams, Leon “Buddy” Adams, Willis Howard “Snooks” Adams and William Hugh “Man” Adams.

Four of his brothers who served in the Navy were separated because of the Sullivans, five Iowa brothers who were killed serving on the same ship in 1942.

Linda Molto

Artist, Cortez Commercial Fishing Festival coordinator

When I moved here in 1983, it was a sleepy little town. In the summertime, if one or two cars would go by it was a lot. It’s not like that now. People drive around and look.

You can’t blame them, because there are so few of these places left. They feel like it’s somehow a part of them. Word of mouth is telling people it’s a real place and not a tourist attraction. But you never know how long it’s going to last.

Related coverage

A century of Cortez

The village that mullet built

Climate change in Cortez

The future – a memory?

First in a series of three

The Cortez commercial fishing village celebrates three milestones this year – the 100th anniversary of its incorporation, the founding of its school 100 years ago, and the 30th Cortez Commercial Fishing Festival.

Despite escalating regulations and encroaching development, Cortezians are keeping their maritime heritage alive, supporting two busy fish houses.

They also are preserving their past in a growing museum complex and environmental preserve.

And, with a weather eye to changing times, they’re not putting all their fish into one basket, branching out into other ventures like caviar, ecotours and vacation rentals.

Here’s a look at one of the most unique communities in the state – Cortez, Florida.

CORTEZ – “Finest kind.”

They may be the most frequently spoken words in the fishing village of Cortez over the past 100 years, as in, “How’s the fishing?”

“Finest kind.”

“How’s that mullet smoked?”

“Finest kind.”

“How was the fishing festival this year?”

“Finest kind.”

It’s a quirky phrase, like just about everything and everyone in Cortez.

In Cortez, everybody who’s anybody has a nickname – Goose, Blue, Jap, Tink, Boogie, Gator, Snooks.

Even the village’s name is eccentric – the U.S. Postal Service named it for a Spanish explorer of the 15^th century whose first name was Hernando, but not the one who actually came ashore in nearby Bradenton, Hernando De Soto.

Like some of the creatures swimming near its shores, Cortez is an endangered species, a commercial fishing village fighting to stay that way come hell or high water.

Hell takes a couple of forms.

The village’s bayfront property has attracted a series of optimistic developers that residents have fended off like Hemingway’s old man trying to save his catch from the shark.

Once, a developer told Karen Bell, office manager of A.P. Bell Fish Co., that he wanted to build a series of shops along the waterfront in the style of a fishing village.

No thanks, it’s already a fishing village, she snapped, and by the way, there’s the road out of town.

Regulators are not as easily chased off, and have relegated much of the Cortez fishing industry to the history books with the net ban in 1995, the longline ban in 2010 and catch limits and size limits that recently landed one Cortez fisherman in jail for 30 days.

Then there is the high water – the hurricane of 1921 that destroyed nearly all the Cortez waterfront, a red tide that made the mullet disappear, storms that have claimed catches and boats and limbs and lives.

But Cortez stays afloat, and has for more than a century.

This year marks two centennials and a 30^th anniversary for the village – 100 years ago, the village was incorporated and the 1912 Cortez Rural Graded School opened its doors for the first class of barefooted fishermen’s children, and 30 years ago, villagers started the Cortez Commercial Fishing Festival.

How to speak Cortezian

Kitchen – Sarasota Bay, where the seafood comes from that feeds the village

Finest kind – the answer to just about any question: “How’s your day going?” “Finest kind.”

Wiggle worms – mosquito larvae, often found in rain barrel drinking water

Schoolhouse – the Florida Maritime Museum at Cortez, formerly the 1912 Cortez Rural Graded School

Oyt, hoyt – a fisherman’s greeting

Swamp cabbage – hearts of palm, a Southern delicacy

Co-hop – fishermen’s cooperative

Firehouse – Cortez Community Center, formerly a volunteer fire station

Bobbers – floating buoys attached to stone crab traps

Church of God – Fishermen’s Hall

Square grouper – floating bales of marijuana caught by fishermen-turned-smugglers

Burton store – the historic Bratton store

From village to city and back again

The village was incorporated on June 8, 1912, with S.J. Sanders serving as mayor, A. D. Millis, A.F. Taylor, A. Willis, J.E. Guthrie, W.C. Bratton, F.C. Rowell and W.T. Fulford as aldermen, A.M. Guthrie as clerk and L.G. Lewis as town marshal, according to Manatee County records. Descendants of the men still live in Cortez.

The city was dissolved on July 8, 1929 due to lack of operating funds after the Florida crash of 1926. The village is now part of Manatee County, but retains special code enforcement treatment to allow fishermen wide latitude in keeping boats, crab traps, nets and other gear – picturesque and not – on their property.

Schoolhouse turns museum

The same year, 1912, the Cortez Rural Graded School opened, taking the place of the one-room schoolhouse which still stands as a private home on 45^th Street.

It was the village’s refuge during the hurricane of 1921, before hurricanes had names, and later was a private home for an artist.

It is now the Florida Maritime Museum at Cortez, the hub of a growing historic park that includes four other historic buildings that have been relocated there, the Pillsbury Boatworks, the Bratton Store, the Monroe Cottage and the Harris House.

It’s a fishing festival, not a seafood festival

The Cortez Commercial Fishing Festival, started by villagers and still run by some of the original founders, is celebrating its 30^th anniversary the weekend of Feb. 18-19, proclaimed Fishing Festival Days by the Manatee County Commission.

While it serves up fresh, local seafood, don’t call it a seafood festival – it’s all about fishermen and how they feed the world.

True to the village’s sense of humor, this year’s theme is “Something’s fishy in Cortez.”

Proceeds from the festival’s $3 admission fee have paid for 95 waterfront acres on the eastern boundary of the village, which the not-for-profit Florida Institute for Saltwater Heritage (FISH) has turned into the FISH Preserve.

FISH hopes to complete the preserve by acquiring the remaining vacant lots on the preserve’s northern boundary, and one in the middle owned by a couple who have so far declined to sell.

The preserve, which features hiking and kayak trails, serves as a buffer zone between the village and development to the east.

Fighting the tide

Cortezians have had to struggle to keep their two remaining fish houses in business, A.P. Bell Fish Co. and Cortez Bait and Seafood, and to keep their way of life alive.

“They have been fighting the tide,” said John Stevely, FISH board member and one of the original Cortez Commercial Fishing Festival organizers. “It’s good to see that the village has soldiered on.”

Battles have been won on many fronts.

They beat a proposed marina developer who would have built 145-foot-long piers that would have blocked commercial fishing boats from coming into the docks.

They squelched a plan for a bridge to Anna Maria Island that would have had two 60-foot-high spans and encroached on four Cortez streets, closing businesses.

They successfully fought a condo developer whose plans would have walled off Sarasota Bay views and breezes from century-old cottages.

They beat another developer who wanted to raze the waterfront Cortez Trailer Park, displacing senior citizens who have lived there for decades.

To fortify themselves for future battles, they got the village listed on the National Register of Historic Places on March 16, 1995, the 128th birthday of Capt. Billy Fulford, the first pioneer to buy property in the village in 1887.

“It does take a village,” said Mary Fulford Green, Fulford’s 16th granddaughter, and the first redhead. “Cortez is certainly that village.”

Next week, commercial fishing and the best little festival in the South.

Related coverage

Snapshots of Cortez

The village that mullet built

Climate change in Cortez

The future – a memory?