Shalimar

Stand at the water's edge on Garniers Bayou and the Port Dixie plan looks absurd, which is exactly why it is worth knowing about.

The bayou is a sheltered arm off the western end of Choctawhatchee Bay. Sheltered is the operative word: it is shallow, it is narrow, and the only route to the Gulf from any of it runs the length of the bay and out through the pass at Destin, which in 1931 was a shifting cut of uncertain depth that had only existed for a couple of years. Any serious cargo vessel would have had to negotiate all of that before it got anywhere near a wharf.

The promoters were undeterred. A harbour and terminal company was chartered, a railroad was drawn onto the plan, and lots were marketed. Then the Depression removed the capital and the whole thing evaporated.

It is a useful corrective to the way Florida history is usually told. The Panhandle in the 1920s was full of confident schemes, and most of them ended in a plat map and nothing else. What actually built this coast was not private enterprise at all; it was a federal decision to turn a national forest into a bombing range.

There is no monument and nothing to photograph. The evidence is simply that a town of seven hundred people occupies ground that somebody once expected to carry a railway.

The houses Clifford Meigs put up in the 1940s were built for a specific customer: an Air Force officer posted to Eglin, wanting a decent family house within a short drive of the gate, in a place where none existed.

That is still what Shalimar is. Drive the residential streets and the pattern is obvious — modest mid-century houses on generous lots, a lot of them extended and updated, running down towards the water on the bayou side. Many are occupied by retired officers who were posted here once, liked it, and came back. Others turn over every two or three years as families arrive on orders and leave on the next set.

The result is a town with an unusual demographic profile for a place its size: high proportion of veterans, high proportion of people who have lived somewhere else recently, and a rate of engineering and technical employment that has nothing to do with tourism.

For a visitor this is the interesting part. Almost every American beach destination presents itself as a holiday and conceals the economy underneath. Here the economy is the point and the holiday is a side effect, and driving through Shalimar for five minutes makes that visible in a way that a brochure cannot.