How Cedar Key Got Its Name

The name on the water

Cedar Key is named for a tree it no longer mills, on an island it no longer settles. The chain of keys off Levy County took its name from a single species and a single island: Atsena Otie Key. In the Creek language, Atsena Otie means cedar island. That island became the nucleus of the first organised settlement in the Cedar Keys in 1843, when Augustus Steele bought the military structures there for $227, along with title to its 167 acres.

The name was a description before it was a memorial. The cedars grew thick enough to define a place, and then to define an economy.

The wood the world wrote with

The milling began almost immediately after the war. The Eberhard Faber mill set up in 1865, cutting red cedar slats for pencils. By 1886, seventeen sawmills at Cedar Key were turning out nearly half a million board feet a week. That is not a small number. That is a town working at a pace its current population of 756 people would find hard to picture.

Cedar Key supplied the wood the world wrote with. Both the Eberhard Faber mill and the Eagle Pencil Company cut pencil slats here. The Eagle Pencil Company site stood on Way Key at 3rd and G Streets, where the slats and the pencil boxes were made. The cedar went into the hands of schoolchildren and clerks and poets, shipped out from a port that was, for a moment, indispensable.

Then the storm came. The 1896 hurricane and fire damaged both mills so badly that they closed soon after. The town did not recover its purpose. It did not recover its size.

What survived

Atsena Otie Key, the first settled island, kept more than thirty-five houses on its high ground through the storm surge that locals still call the tidal wave. The houses survived. The industry did not. The island is now mostly empty, which is a different kind of survival.

The current town is smaller than its history. The census numbers say so plainly. There are 819 housing units in Cedar Key, and 450 of them are vacant. That is more than half. A further 269 units are held for seasonal or recreational use. The town is not a ruin, but it is not a boomtown either. It is a place where the housing stock exceeds the population by a wide margin, and where the median age is 68.4 years.

The people who do live here are educated and stable. The bachelor's degree rate runs at 49.7 percent. The unemployment rate is 4.2 percent. The median household income is $69,226, and the median home value is $331,100. The median gross rent is $918. Numbers like these describe a place that has settled into itself, quieter than its founding, more deliberate.

The name today

The cedars are gone from the commercial ledger, but the name persists on charts, mail, and the town's one reliable festival. Each October, the Cedar Key Seafood Festival, run by the Lions Club, draws more than 100 arts and crafts exhibits, live music, and a Saturday parade at 11am. There is clam chowder, oysters, and smoked mullet dip. It is also the rare chance to reach Seahorse Key, a historic island three miles out that is otherwise closed to the public.

That festival is not about pencils. It is about oysters and boats and a day out on the water. But the name on the event, and on the town, is still the cedar's.

We do not write with those slats anymore. The mills are gone, the storm passed, and the island named for the tree is mostly uninhabited. But the name stayed, and the town that carries it is still here, smaller than its history, and still worth the trip.