Tarpon Springs, Fla., is fondly known as ‘Little Greece’

If you’re looking for a village that exudes “Old Florida” charm, Tarpon Springs is a welcoming community. It’s located on the Gulf Coast side of the state near Tampa and St. Petersburg.

 

Today, about 26,675 people live in Tarpon Springs, and up to 25% of the population has descended from Greek immigrants. (The city has the highest per capita concentration of Greek Americans in the United States.)

An influx of Greek “skin divers” who arrived in the mid-1900s to harvest the sponges that grow on the ocean floor is the reason why Tarpon Springs also became known as the “Sponge Capital of the World.”

 

Visitors can experience the epicenter of Tarpon Springs’ “Little Greece” heritage by strolling Dodecanese Boulevard to listen to the music, interact with the merchants and observe the activity aboard the wooden, working dive boats that tie up in the Anclote River at the “Sponge Docks,” less than a mile from the Gulf of Mexico.

 

(Practice saying the street name. “Dodecanese” is typically pronounced “doh-dek-uh-NEEZ.” It’s a Greek word, referring to the “twelve islands” that constitute the Dodecanese Archipelago in the Aegean Sea near Turkey.)

 

How the “sponge industry” came to be in Tarpon Springs is a fascinating story.

A key player was Greek businessman John Michael Cocoris (shown above), who arrived in Tarpon Springs by way of New York City in 1896 to partner with John King Cheyney (shown below) of Philadelphia, Pa. They set their sights on harvesting the sponges that were plentiful just offshore from Tarpon Springs.

 

Early American sponge fishermen would typically venture out in small boats. Operating in fairly shallow water, they would use long poles with hooks at the end to snag and snatch sponges from the ocean floor.

Cocoris knew a better way. He began recruiting Greek sponge divers by the hundreds from the Dodecanese Islands. 

Many came from Kalymnos, which had gained the reputation as “Sponge Divers’ Island.”

(The history of sponge diving in Greece was mentioned in the writings of Homer and Aristotle. Plato referred to sponges as articles commonly used in bathing.)

The Kalymnos divers (sans swim trunks) learned to hold their breath for up to 5 minutes and were capable of reaching depths up to 100 feet. 

They used hand-held cutting tools to carefully prune the sponges, allowing the primitive marine invertebrates to regenerate.

By the 1930s, the annual value of the sponge harvest from Tarpon Springs reached approximately $3 million, surpassing competitors like Key West.

Into the 1930s, Cocoris began to outfit his sponge divers with thick rubberized suits with bronze helmets and breastplates. They were connected to air hoses. 

The new technology allowed the sponge divers to operate for extended periods of time at depths up to 125 feet.

The first Tarpon Springs diver to wear one of the bulky diver suits (weighing between 170 and 200 pounds) was Demetrios Kavasilos. He descended for 10 minutes and returned with a full bag of high-quality sponges. He exclaimed that the “Gulf beds held enough sponges to supply the world.”

The copper helmet typically weighed between 38-55 pounds, and the breastplate weighed about 18 pounds. 

Heavy boots (about 12 pounds each) helped keep the divers upright and stable on the sea floor. Additional lead weight belts or shoulder weights were added to ensure the diver can descend.

Some divers got in trouble when they tried to “extend the limits of the equipment,” which often resulted in them experiencing “decompression illnesses.”

Commercial sponge diving is still practiced in Tarpon Springs, employing professional Scuba divers. 

Tourists can view traditional sponge diving demonstrations aboard the excursion boats that operate on the Anclote River.

Atlantic Hotel anchored Morehead’s early tourism industry

Following the destruction of the “old” Atlantic Hotel in Beaufort due to the Hurricane of 1879, an investment group was quickly formed – known as the Morehead City Hotel Company.

A subsidiary of the Atlantic and North Carolina Railroad, the new enterprise was dedicated to building a “new and improved” Atlantic Hotel…but relocated to Morehead City, which was deemed “a safer place” than Beaufort – less likely to be struck by a major storm in the future.

Another factor: The railroad tracks ended in Morehead City. Travelers going on to Beaufort had to ferry across the Newport River. Sometimes, weather complicated things.

Why not eliminate “the complication” by building a new hotel adjacent to the railroad line? Then, as now, the railroad ran down the center of Morehead City. 

Passengers could step off the train right onto a covered platform and enter the hotel. How convenient.

The new hotel, constructed in the “exuberant Victorian” style of architecture, opened on June 21, 1880. It immediately became “coastal North Carolina’s premier resort destination.” 

The three-story wooden structure faced Arendell Street, between 3rd and 4th streets.

 

 

It was written: “Every door, window and piazza of the huge hotel (233 rooms) opens to the water; from the front or railroad side can be seen the pretty shore opposite where the village of Beaufort makes a pleasing picture, with its old-time houses and church spires….”

Featuring modern conveniences such as gas lighting and running water, the hotel included its own barber shop, telegraph office, lounge, billiard room and “ten pin” alley. The facility offered expansive covered porches along the front, and boardwalks at the back along Bogue Sound.

The ballroom and main dining room seated 300. It had a high-vaulted glass roof and large windows opening to the water. From a second-floor balcony called the “Buzzard’s Roost,” older hotel guests could observe activity below. Dancing would be followed by midnight suppers and moonlit sails on Bogue Sound.

 

Excursion boats took guests to view the Cape Lookout Lighthouse and to see the wild horses at Shackleford Banks. Visitors also went to the seashore for a “surf-bath.”

Many guests made long visits; some stayed for the entire summer season (typically June through October).

In 1884, Richard Beverly Raney (shown below) of Raleigh signed an eight-year lease to manage the Atlantic Hotel. He was the proprietor of the Yarborough House, a popular Raleigh hotel. Raney marketed Morehead City and the Atlantic Hotel as the “Summer Capital of North Carolina.”

 

The heyday of the Atlantic Hotel lasted into the 20th century, but Morehead City’s tourism industry dried up during the World War I years and afterward because of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. (More than 500 million people – about a third of the world’s population at the time – became infected by the virus through April 1920.)

It wasn’t until 1921 that the “old crowd” began to come back to the hotel for summer vacations, but a “return to normalcy” was thwarted by the arrival of hard economic times during the Great Depression.

Tragically, on April 15, 1933, fishermen noticed smoke coming from the resort. 

Fire departments from five other communities responded to help the Morehead City firefighters. Trucks came from Newport, New Bern, Kinston, Washington and Greenville.

The hotel’s heart pine construction made it vulnerable to the flame and in little more than an hour, the building was reduced to ruins.

The hotel had not yet opened for the summer season and was unoccupied.

The hotel was never rebuilt. Many of the regular hotel guests began to build their own family cottages along the shore, and the tourism landscape began to change once more.

Beaufort’s grand hotel re-emerges as ‘tourist destination’

Once Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox (Va.) Court House on April 9, 1865, to effectively end the Civil War, communities throughout the South began to pick up the pieces and restart their economies.

 

Carteret County was no exception. The center of commerce was Beaufort, and the heirs of Josiah Solomon Pender renovated the Atlantic Hotel, which had looked like a “giant haunted house,” wrote the late Virginia Pou “Sammy” Doughton (shown below).

The grand hotel had been trashed by Yankee soldiers in 1862…but then was miraculously revived as a Union hospital. It was scrubbed from top to bottom by the Sisters of Mercy, a contingent of nine Catholic nuns who came from New York City to nurse injured and ill soldiers back to health.

The Atlantic Hotel reopened in June 1866, “and almost immediately recaptured its former reputation as the social headquarters of North Carolina during the summer season,” Doughton said.

The Pender family sold the 100-room hotel in 1874 to Capt. Robert Davidson Graham (shown below), a Charlotte attorney. (His father was William Alexander Graham, a U.S. Senator from North Carolina, who went on to serve as North Carolina’s governor.)

 

Doughton said that Capt. Graham arranged for “excursion trains from Charlotte to Morehead City” via the Atlantic and North Carolina Railroad. 

Guests boarded sailboats for the last leg of the trip to Beaufort…“a wonderful relief from the hot cinders of the rail ride.”

 “Salt air breathed deeply was supposed to relieve any type of illness, mental or physical. The hotel stayed full,” Doughton wrote.

By 1879, the hotel had been refurbished, and every room freshly painted, by the new proprietor, Dr. George Kendrick Bagby, a surgical dentist in Beaufort.

The Atlantic Hotel’s amenities included “a bar with the best wines, cigars and liquor, a billiard room and 10-pin alley, amusements for children, croquet on the lawn” and nightly dances.

North Carolina Gov. Thomas Jordan Jarvis and his wife, Mary Woodson Jarvis, were guests in the hotel during August 1879.

The three-story hotel was at 100% occupancy on Aug. 17, 1879, when a storm was detected approaching Beaufort. Surf watchmen reportedly sent word to the hotel manager urging him to evacuate the hotel.

He declined, convincing Gov. Jarvis and the vacationers that Beaufort hadn’t had a major storm in more than 20 years, and “there was nothing to worry about. Guests went to bed that night without a care in the world,” Doughton wrote.

Two local men stepped up. Henry Congleton sounded the alarm about 3 a.m. on Aug. 18. He and Capt. Palmer Davis helped get people out, as an 8-foot surge overwhelmed the hotel. Davis grabbed as many children as he could carry.

Hurricane-force winds were reported to be in the range of 138 to 165 miles per hour (the equivalent of Category 4 and 5 in today’s grading system). The Jarvises were on the second floor and barely got out before the hotel collapsed.

 

“The good people of Beaufort went to their attics and found clothing for 150 destitute refugees,” Doughton said. 

“Gov. Jarvis was given a sailor suit that had been used in the War of 1812; his elegant wife seemed happy for a calico wrapper, the equivalent of today’s housecoat.”

Congleton perished trying to rescue people, as did guests John Dunn and John Daves Hughes, both of New Bern. They were believed to be the only three fatalities from the Hurricane of 1879.

Gov. Jarvis expressed his sympathy and hailed their heroism. He gave Capt. Davis a special citation.

(Capt. Davis, a native of Davis Shore in Down East Carteret County, was the well-known pilot of the mailboat that shuttled between Beaufort and Morehead City.)

Beaufort’s Atlantic Hotel transitions to Civil War hospital

When Union soldiers overwhelmed the Confederate troops at Fort Macon on Bogue Banks in April 1862, Beaufort prepared for an extended period of “Union occupation.”

Sure enough, the Northern boys quickly misbehaved. They helped themselves to the provisions stocked at the exquisite Atlantic Hotel, emptying the wine cellar and draining the liquor cabinet.

They ransacked and trashed the majestic hotel, turning it into ruins. What a shame.

The grand and luxurious 100-room lodging facility was built overlooking Taylors Creek in Beaufort, between Pollock and Marsh streets, in the early 1850s. 

 

It became the “favorite place to stay” for traveling man Josiah Solomon Pender of Tarboro in Edgecombe County.

Born in 1819, Pender was a poet, artist and successful jeweler who visited Beaufort frequently. He acquired three steamships and became Capt. Pender for the purpose of “carrying on trade between the ports of Beaufort, New Bern, Bermuda and New York City.”

Pender bought the Atlantic Hotel in 1856, and the property became his base of operations. 

The late Hugh B. Johnston Jr., a noted historian from Wilson, N.C., wrote: “When it appeared that a civil war was imminent, Pender (at age 42) raised and completely outfitted at his own expense a company” – about 50 militiamen known as the Beaufort Harbor Guards.

“On April 11, 1861, the day before the historic attack on Fort Sumter, S.C., they marched without official orders upon the unsuspecting federal officer at Fort Macon…and replaced the Stars and Stripes with an improvised flag showing a green pine tree with a coiled rattlesnake at its foot,” Johnston said.

 

North Carolina Gov. John W. Ellis wanted a “more experienced fighting team” in charge at Fort Macon, so he immediately ordered the “Goldsboro Rifles” unit to relieve Pender from his command.

“Josiah Pender involved himself and his ships in something that would prove far more advantageous to the Confederate war effort, the running of the blockade then being implemented in Carolina waters by the Union navy,” Johnston said. 

“He transferred his family and his base of operations to Hamilton on the island of Bermuda.”

Meanwhile, what was left of Pender’s Atlantic Hotel in Beaufort became Hammond General Hospital, named for Dr. William Alexander Hammond, U.S. Surgeon General, who served under President Abraham Lincoln.

 

Union Gen. John Gray Foster brought in nine Catholic nuns from the Sisters of Mercy at St. Catherine’s Convent, Manhattan, N.Y., to provide nursing and spiritual care. They arrived in July 1862 to treat “200 wounded and sick soldiers.”

 

Conditions were deplorable. The place was filthy with no medicine or bandages. One straw broom stood lonely in the cleaning supplies closet.

Writing for Our State magazine in August 2014, the late Philip Gerard said that Mother Mary Madeline Toban sent her tally of needed supplies and equipment “directly to Gen. Foster, with an ultimatum: If the supplies are not forthcoming, she will take her eight sisters and return to New York.”

“A short time later,” Gerard said, “a small miracle steamed into Beaufort Harbor – a vessel loaded with food, medical supplies, cleaning tools and kitchen equipment.”

Military historian Grant Gerlich said: “When the Civil War broke out, both sides were woefully unprepared for the flood of wounded and dying from the battlefields. Unsanitary conditions took their toll; infection and disease claimed the lives of many of the injured and infirmed.”

“The only trained nurses were women of religious orders. They cared for Union and Confederate soldiers alike, officers and enlisted men, rich and poor, no matter their religion or heritage.”

“Motivated by love of God, they compassionately cared for the sick and prepared the dying for eternity.”