JOE BOB CLARK is one of Esto’s most successful sons, having moved all the way down to Bonifay, the county seat, and become a prosperous insurance and real estate agent.
Even as a kid I was aware that Joe Bob was an important man. People from Esto who had a problem went to Joe to get it solved. Several times when I was in school in Bonifay he helped and encouraged me — especially the day I turned 16 and thought I just had to have my driver’s license that day. When I was a senior in high school, few things seemed bigger than getting invited to the weekly lunch of the Kiwanis Club, to which all of the businessmen belonged. A boy from Esto could feel way out of his league at the Kiwanis lunch, but Joe was always there, welcoming me in, introducing me around. We kept in touch through the years.
In retirement, Joe has come full circle. He still lives on a hilltop just north of Bonifay, but he returns often to Esto, just 12 miles up the road. He also has taken on the role of caretaker of our neighbors who have gone on to the great beyond. He makes it his personal mission to keep the grass cut and the graves tidy in the Esto cemetery.
My mother is buried in that cemetery. And my grandmother and Uncle John, too. So is nearly everyone else I grew up loving in our little town.
But not my father. Cottontop, as they called him, lived hard and died young, when I had just turned 4. He was buried up the road at Lee’s Chapel, where many people from Esto had been buried before we had a cemetery of our own. The cemetery at Lee’s Chapel didn’t get the care that Joe lavished on Esto’s dead, though, and my father’s grave was in bad shape. I’d found through the years that the best way to deal with the absence of my father was not to think about it too much, and that was how I dealt with his grave, too.
One day I raised the subject with Joe Bob. What did he think about moving my father’s grave to Esto?
“Well, I sure wouldn’t want my people buried up there,” he said. And then he went out and found a local funeral home that would dig up my father’s grave and rebury his casket in Esto.
In the end, I couldn’t do it. I found the prospect unearthed too many memories I’d learned to forget. It’s enough for me to have Joe Bob in the Esto cemetery, cutting the grass, taking care of people in Esto, just as he’s always done.
ESTO, Fla. — This Florida Panhandle hamlet is reviving the legend of Two-Toed Tom, a notorious bull alligator who some folks say fell in love with a sawmill whistle after being chased from Alabama, the Associated Press reports.
Esto’s 210 residents are planning to hold what they hope will become an annual celebration of food, entertainment and story swapping about the giant swamp lizard, said Marrielle Blount, a town council member who is chairman of the Two-Toed Tom Festival.
“He’s a colorful character,” said E. W. “Judge” Carswell, a retired newspaper reporter and former chairman of the Florida Folklife Council. “I think he’s a lot more colorful than the Loch Ness monster.”
Interest in “Old Two-Toe” or “Old Tom,” as he also is known, was stirred up by Carswell’s publication of a book on Holmes County history titled Holmesteading.
The author, who grew up in Esto but now lives in nearby Chipley, where he once served as mayor and municipal judge, devoted a chapter to the Two-Toed Tom legend. In it he declared that for some 60 years nothing had been heard from the Alabama refugee who used to bellow in response to the steam-powered mill whistle.
“People called me and said, ‘You done away with old Two-Toe. He’s not gone. He’s still around,'” Carswell laughed.
That point may be open to debate, but there’s no question the legend lives.
“I’ve been hearing about this story ever since I was 10 years old,” said Ralph Dupree, a town councilman born in 1912. “He was a bad fella. He killed sheep and goats in Alabama. He like to have done away with a woman’s baby in a cotton patch.”
Dupree claims he saw Two-Toe many times after the gator took up residence in Sand Hammock Lake between Esto and its sister town, Noma, both just south of the Alabama line. He insisted he could tell it was Two-Toe because he saw the partly amputated paw.
The gator, who supposedly lost three toes from his left front paw to a steep trap, had been a legend in Alabama long before he crossed the state line. The story, at least up to that point, received a measure of immortality in Carl Carmer’s book Stars Fell on Alabama.
According to Carmer’s account, the huge red-eyed gator — the worst kind — terrorized South Alabama before being chased into Florida by a posse of lynch-mad men.
Floridians take a kinder view of Two Toe, some insisting he wasn’t actually from Alabama but simply had defected.
The gator first attracted attention south of the border with his bellowing response to the Alabama-Florida Lumber Co’s whistle at its Noma mill. The bellowing was most frequent in the spring when gators’ thoughts are said to turn to romance, Carswell said.
“I figure he was mad at that whistle or in love with it, I don’t know which,” he said.
In his book, Carswell wrote that some shots at Two-Toe “shattered off the gator’s thick hide much as dried peas would after being tossed onto a tin roof.” Dupree recalled he used to watch the big gator chase and eat snakes, frogs and turtles.
“Sand Hammock swamp was in my grandfather’s pasture,” former Esto resident Charley Wamble wrote to a town official. “I have seen Two-Toed Tom’s tracks and seen other alligators in that swamp. Granddad was always missing hogs and young cows.”
Carswell acknowledges the legend probably is a composite, with Two-Toe being blamed for the misdeeds of any and all gators in the area.
“This is the legend of Two-Toed Tom they are celebrating, you know,” said Carswell, putting the emphasis on “legend.”
VIMEO | E. W. Carswell talks about Holmesteading, his history of Holmes County, in an interview with Florida Public Radio.
By AL BURT
The Miami Herald
ELBA WILSON CARSWELL, a dignified gentleman who dresses and speaks with coat-and-tie formality, tries not to forget that he began as a dirt farmer. He grew up on a farm that was close to Esto and he never got over it.
Except for the fact that he was forced to wear kneepants until age 16 — one way that oldtimers yoked the young and callow to inferior status — he felt himself from the very beginning to have been among the blessed ones.
The Carswell home place actually was halfway between Canebrake and Utopia — as he renamed Esto and Noma in his columns and books — but for him the spiritual location was Utopia.
A hundred years or so ago, the area had been part of Alabama, but a border correction returned it and the Carswell farm to Holmes County, Florida. He expressed gratitude that the shift had saved him from “those awful Alabama winters.”
To Carswell, the flavor and feel of life in Florida’s Panhandle were satisfyingly sweet. He and the land seemed star-crossed, perfectly blended. He never doubted its essential goodness, and tended to view contrary evidence as aberrant.
He settled in Chipley, only a half hour from Utopia, and accepted as his mission the celebration of Panhandle folk culture.
“We are rooted better than most of Florida and we change more slowly. We like it that way,” he said. As a public servant, historian, teacher, farmer, journalist, businessman and naturalist, his focus never wavered.
To travel here from South Florida, you must cover 550 miles in distance and about 50 years in attitudes. It is a journey that spans the state in many ways. Each end of Florida tends to feel a bit sorry for the other. Each looks at the other as through binoculars, and considers the view exotic. There is less understanding and appreciation than there should be, but it is not Carswell’s fault.
His work constructs a subtle case for respecting local differences. For example, there is his story about the time, near the end of the 19th century, when a well-meaning newcomer from Indiana migrated to the Panhandle. Because he found the area had only piney woods rooter hogs, coarse kin of the rangy razorback, the Indianan decided to introduce the more plump, high-toned Berkshire and Poland China breeds. He held a hog show to make his point.
But to his dismay, local judges were not impressed. All the prizes went to the piney woods rooters. It was a question of standards. They explained to him, as to a child, that a hog was no good in the Panhandle of that day unless it could run faster than the thieving Carpetbaggers and Scalawags. A Carpetbagger was a Yankee who moved South to exploit local naivete, and a Scalawag was an opportunistic local who aped the Carpetbaggers.
E. W. Carswell
“Used to be they’d come in here from Ohio or someplace but now they go to South Florida first, stay awhile, get crowded out or priced out, and then they move up here looking for elbow room,” said Carswell.
He recalls a young college-trained minister who accepted a post at a church happily steeped in minor sin and bitterly resistant to meddling ministers, especially outsiders. Observers gave the new man little chance. But a year later, he remained, apparently without jeopardy. One astonished observer inquired how. “We didn’t really want any preacher at all,” an oldtime member revealed. “And he’s about as close to being no preacher as we could get.”
In his books — he has written nine, five of them collections of newspaper columns — Carswell mourns the passing of his heritage. His tales of home remedies, determined mules, lighterd (resin-filled pine wood), lye soap, moonshine, the curing of warts, dog days, chitlins are a quiet romanticism of comfortable days past. Weather, religion, food and the land then so dominated the encapsuled life on a farm that the smothering limitations of it went unrecognized.
Peripheral vision of other cultural and moral influences, and the distressing self-awareness they brought, came later and forever shattered what had been a wonderful cocoon.
Carswell creates nostalgia for that time, preserves the remnants of those days, gathers them up as nourishing identity that permits the Panhandle an appreciation of what went into the forming of its blood and bone and beliefs.
Carswell has become a Panhandle institution. He endures, year after year, trying to renew the familiar while time erodes it.
He has been mayor and municipal judge in Chipley, and has served in almost every other significant local civic office. He has been chairman of the Florida Board of Parks and Historic Memorials, a member of the Florida Folklife Council, was awarded the Florida Bicentennial Patriot’s Medal.
The Judge, as his friends call him, recognized the value of roots long before it became faddish. His hope is that the Panhandle will respect and learn from its origins, that it will remember the planting of crops by the moon, the homes with wide front porches and working foreplaces, the firebrand preachers, the mayhaw trees and the rooter hogs.
For him, this was home, and it was near Utopia. In Florida, he is a gentleman Cracker who has made a difference.
Jewel Wells was Esto's postmaster from 1965 to 1985.
By JIM REISLER
The Dothan Eagle
OF ALL THE SIGNS — and there are several — one stands out. “No soliciting or loitering,” it reads.
It’s hardly necessary because with the possible exception of “a few who like to stand around in the corner and gossip,” the crowds at the Esto Post Office, according to Postmaster Jewel Wells, are sparse.
There are a few others who frequent the building — during the summer, northerners on their way to the beaches buy stamps and deposit some letters — but generally “just normal folks,” the locals in this small crossroads village of 210.
Small wonder. As the kind of town that people pass through on their way to somewhere else, Esto — with its one store, two gas stations and cafe compacted onto six streets — is small town mid-America personified.
Similarly, the operation at the post office — a 75-year-old brick building along Highway 79 and virtually the only gathering place in the area — “runs real smoothly,” Mrs. Wells says.
In fact, nothing much ever happens in Esto. The only kind of law enforcement here is supplied by Holmes County sheriff’s deputies who occasionally make the evening rounds. There is both a railroad and a town council, but most of the people here travel for their shopping either the 12 miles south to Bonifay or the 10 miles north to Hartford.
“We’re just a small place” — officially a Bonifay substation, says Mrs. Wells. There was a time when the post office was across the street, but a switch back to its current location was made last year — a move that had been made before.
While it’s a handsome building outside, the interior differs from most any other post office you may have seen. Stark red brick walls on two sides and a bulletin board border three sides of the building now, blocking out most of the evidence — freezers, a few old Coke bottles and a wall clock — that a grocery was ever here. There is no phone.
It is in this atmosphere that Mrs. Wells, one of the few female postmasters in Florida, has operated since taking office on June 1, 1964. A former housewife, it is the only job she has ever had.
On a cold, overcast afternoon here recently, Mrs. Wells spoke of her career as the Esto postmaster. Despite long days and no heat, she “makes out like everybody likes me.”
Two other female postmasters in the state come to her mind. One — a name from many years ago — she recalls because “I remember reading about her once when she was kidnapped,” she says. Ironically, the other she knows of — Mary Alice Skipper — runs the post office down the road in Noma.
In the meantime, Mrs. Wells continues in her present capacity, walking from her house directly across the road and having “no complaints.”
It couldn’t be said any better than that.
VIMEO | Getting the mail and talking politics at the post office
The Esto Herald 