Lumber, schooners and a phone booth
The Carrabelle Chamber of Commerce dates the city to December 24, 1881. Before the Civil War it was a small fishing village, cut off from the rest of Franklin County by the lack of bridges and paved roads. Afterward it became a lumber town, shipping wood from the surrounding forest and turpentine by schooner out of the natural deep water port on the Carrabelle River.
The town's most photographed landmark is much smaller. In the early 1960s the police phone hung in a call box bolted to a building at U.S. 98 and Tallahassee Street, and people kept using it for unauthorized long distance calls. On March 10, 1963, telephone man Johnnie Mirabella and deputy Curly Messer moved an old phone booth to U.S. 98 and put the police phone inside, so officers could stay dry while answering it.
The booth has been shot at, knocked over by a pickup truck and damaged by Hurricane Kate, and one tourist tried to load it into his car and take it home to Tennessee. It has appeared on Ripley's Believe It or Not, The Today Show and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. A replica stands on U.S. 98 across from the chamber and visitor center, and the chamber invites you to stop for a photo.
Camp Gordon Johnston
The bigger story is the beach. Camp Carrabelle opened in September 1942 and was later named Camp Gordon Johnston. According to the Camp Gordon Johnston World War II Museum, it used a 20 mile stretch of coast from Alligator Point west, including St. George and Dog Islands, about 165,000 acres in all, to train amphibious soldiers for the D-Day invasion. Around 10,000 troops lived there at a time, and a quarter of a million men trained there before it closed in June 1946.
Later the camp trained harbor craft and amphibious truck companies for the Pacific, and from March 1944 it held German and Italian prisoners of war. The museum sits across U.S. 98 from Carrabelle Beach, with more than 4,000 square feet of vehicles, uniforms, documents and photographs. Admission is free, and donations are welcome.
