Roger
on March 10, 2025
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From Florida Backroads - this lands squarely in ‘truth is stranger than fiction.” Tough to make this stuff up.
Bristol, Florida is the county seat of Liberty County, Florida. It is at the intersection of State Roads 20 and 12 about 50 miles west of Tallahassee and about 20 miles south of the Georgia state line.
This town of less than 1,000 people lies about 5 miles east of the Apalachicola River.
It is far east in Northwest Florida, so it could be considered to be near the border between Florabama and Florgia. These regional terms were invented by the late author Al Burt in his classic Florida book "Becalmed in the Mullet Latitudes".
As you might guess, Florabama is that portion of North Florida that borders Alabama; Florgia is the portion that borders Georgia.
This is grits, fried green tomato, and sweet tea country.
An old timer named Elvy Callaway got a lot of publicity a generation or two ago by claiming that the biblical Garden of Eden was in northern Liberty County. Elvy was a country lawyer and a Baptist preacher.
He said the evidence was that the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee River system has four heads, just like the river described in the Bible. He also said the area is rich in gopher wood, the same stuff that Noah used to build his ark.
Further evidence, said Elvy, was that the area from the Chattahoochee River south to Bristol contains 28 of the 30 varieties of trees mentioned in the Bible.
He believed that the Garden of Eden started about 4 miles north of Bristol and extended north into Georgia, and it was 25 miles wide in an east-west direction, and 35 miles long in the north-south direction.
The area of Callaway's Garden of Eden became a minor tourist attraction in the 1950s through the 1970s.
People visited it for the chance to see the birthplace of Adam and to look at the amazing variety of plants and trees in the area.
Dimension: 600 x 745
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