The Crevasse House

Just finished reading Black Cloud, The Great Hurricane of 1928 , a book about the 1928 Hurricane that hit West Palm.  My Grandmother was there visiting family and lived through it.  She was about 14 at the time and recalls going to a big tent full of corpses to look for her sister's body.   The sister  turned up a day or so later very much alive.  She never talked about the storm itself.  I think I understand better why Grandmother would scream whenever lightening struck close to the house.


My Dad recalls a hurricane that came through when the family lived in Crystal River during the mid 1930s.  By the time they decided to leave, the road was flooded deeper than their car's running boards.  He remembers watching his Father walking out in front of the car with a flashlight in the driving rain making sure the road was still there as his Mother drove the car behind him.


By 1965, when we lived in Cedar Key and one came through, Dad packed us up and sent us to Gainesville to stay at Grandmother's house.  He had planned that we'd stay on the island but asked the landlord how well the old house that we rented held up in "the last one."  Cedar Key ain't that far from Crystal River.   The old timer said that it held up really well.  The storm took off part of the roof but didn't hurt it a bit.  Somehow that convinced Dad that we should sit this one out inland.  When Dad called him the day after the storm and learned that the house was fine, he asked how far the water had come up during the storm.  The the landlord said that it barely got into the back yard.  The house was two blocks from the water.  Two blocks,  two houses and a trailer park from the water.


That old house was built in the 1880s right after the big hurricane that tore up everything from Cedar Key to past Virginia. It came up the Gulf of Mexico and was so strong that the low pressure drew the water away from the East side of the Gulf around Cedar Key.  Eye witnesses said there was nothing but mud all the way to the horizon.  The water made a dome out in the Gulf and as the winds got closer, they pushed that dome of water over the little islands and miles inland.  It left Florida around Jacksonville and then went up through Washington DC taking the gutters off the White House as it went.

The Crevasse family was one of the big local names at the time and the house we lived in had been built by one of them not too long after that big storm passed.  We don't know which Crevasse built it but some had been on Atsena Oatie Key and they relocated to the “high ground” of Cedar Key after that storm destroyed their house. They used lumber from the destroyed house to build the new one. The one we lived in might have been the one they built.  It was on the National Register of Historic Places some years after we moved out. This is it around 1995 or 1996; thirty years after we left.

The small room at the far left was the kitchen.  It was built as a detached building because you don't want the heat of a wood stove in your house during most of the year in Florida.  Fire was also a huge concern.  The section behind the goofy looking guy in the hat was a screen porch when we lived there.  You had to cross the screen porch to get to the kitchen.



The porch was built over the well and Mother would have to crawl up under the porch to reset the pump whenever it would decide to trip.  She couldn't do laundry unless the tide was in because there wouldn't be enough water in the well.  The hallway had a panel in the wall that Dad would remove every now and then.  It concealed a staircase that led to the attic.  You cannot imagine how cool that house was to a trio of four to seven year old boys.


Its gone now.  It got in the way of a condominium development.  About seven years ago my brother happened to be at Cedar Key and saw it taken apart and sitting on two house moving trucks.  We emailed people, asked residents, talked to realtors and everybody we could think of to see where they took it and almost nobody even remembered the place.  Even a lady who owned it once had no idea where it went.  The Cedar Key Historical Society never even bothered to answer my email.  Finally, this past weekend, we got on a boat to go see the lighthouse and the skipper of the pontoon boat knew our Dad and knew where the house went.

The house sits up on stilts about 4 or 5 blocks from where it was built.  Its been totally rebuilt.  The porches are gone.  They raised the roof and the  attic is now a bona-fide second floor.  Even the kitchen is attached now.  So the house is still there.  Reincarnated but still there.   The condos weren't its doom.  They actually saved it.   Funny thing is, they never did build those condos.  The economy tanked about the time they moved the house and the lot just sits there vacant.  While writing this, I stumbled on a 2005 article from the Cedar Key News.  The last paragraph shows how close it came to being demolished.  http://cedarkeynews.com/All/2369.html