Back in 1991, I had the privilege of fishing on Dead Lakes along the Chipola River with local angler Andy Amann. I’d heard a lot of rumors about Dead Lakes. That the fishing was great, the fishing was terrible, over-management had ruined the lake, good management had improved it…….you know the kind of stories that swirl. So, one morning early, I met Andy in Wewahitchka for a day on the lake.
Sunrise was a future memory as I headed west on Highway 20. Behind me, Tallahassee's lights smudged the horizon with a burnt-copper glow; ahead, a predawn lightning storm silhouetted thunderheads against the stars.
At 5:30, we launched Andy's boat at a privately-owned fish camp. The sun was still 30 minutes or more from rising, but the lake already shimmered with mother-of-pearl colors. Birdsong provided an accompaniment to the gurgle of water past the hull.
Lordy, Dead Lakes was pretty early that
morning (it’s only one lake, despite the plurality of its name). The light came in from the east all opalescent pink and orange. The water was so glassy calm that the sunrise reflected back to the sky in perfect detail. In the midst of all this light, the dead cypresses stood black and still. It was an eerie sort of beauty, one entirely different from an early morning on most other lakes.
At a distance of most of a century, it’s hard to know who did what to whom. But after a lot of reading, this is what I think I know about Dead Lakes.
Historically, it was never a lake in the common sense of the word. It was really just a wide place in the Chipola River, what biologists call a cypress lowhead. At times of drought, the only water was in the river itself, and the Dead Lakes portion of the floodplain was dry. During high water the river would spread out to fill the floodplain, creating the lake.
From 1936 until 1951, the agency that today is the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission operated a fish hatchery on Dead Lakes. At about the same time, Dead Lakes became part of the Florida Parks System.
Then starting in the early 1950s, the US Army Corps of Engineers built a series of dams on the Apalachicola/Chattahoochee/Flint river system. The dam immediately above the Chipola-Apalachicola confluence is the Jim Woodruff, which created Lake Seminole. When the Corps of Engineers closed the floodgates on the Woodruff dam at Chattahoochee, the downstream flow in the Apalachicola—and thus the Chipola—was severely reduced. The water in Dead Lake fell. At the same time, north Florida experienced one of its periodic droughts. The two events combined to drastically lower the water level in Dead Lakes.
Then in 1957 Cecil G. Costin, Jr., a state representative from Port St. Joe, introduced a bill to create the Dead Lakes Water Management District. Soon after, the District built a dam across the Chipola River to maintain a constant water level in the lake.
The fishing public didn’t like what the dam did to the fisheries on Dead Lakes, and biological evidence supported the idea that the dam was perhaps not the best thing that could have happened to the lake. After years of environmental and safety concerns, as well as declines in fish populations and water quality, in 1987 the dam was removed and the lake was allowed to return to its original state.
Then in 2003, Dead Lakes was removed from the state park system and now is being managed as a Gulf County Park. This is a fact I can verify, and it made me curious. Why would a state recreation area be essentially downgraded to a county park? Who actually owns it? And what happened to Dead Lakes after I was there? One of the reasons I became a writer was so I had an excuse to chase questions like this one.
I started by searching the Gulf County Property Appraiser’s website and found that Dead Lakes is owned by the Trustees of the Internal Improvement Trust Fund (TIITF), which is an entity responsible for managing state-owned lands in Florida. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection supports TIITF, and the Acquisition and Restoration Council (ARC) oversees it. I followed this rabbit trail back one more step and found that ARC evaluates, selects, and ranks potential land acquisition projects for the Florida Forever Priority list.
Since I wasn’t familiar with Florida Forever, this seemed like a good time to read up on it. It was established by the Florida Legislature in 2001, replacing the Preservation 2000 program. It’s called a “willing seller” program, which means that the owner of a property must be willing to sell their land to the program; Florida Forever does not condemn land or force landowners to sell. The program’s goals include water resource protection, preservation of cultural resources, increased public access to outdoor recreation, and the restoration of public lands. All of this means that Dead Lakes will be protected property, well, forever.
There’s good news and bad news in all of this. The good news: Florida Forever is crucially important to the preservation of our state’s unique and fragile habitats. Between 2001 and March 2025, the program has acquired more than 907,000 acres of land for recreational, environmental and preservation purposes. It’s gotten a lot of support from state leaders, even at times when state revenues to support it have declined.
Florida Forever is facing some challenges, though, most of them financial. The program is very competitive, and far more projects apply for funding than Florida Forever is able to support. While the popularity of the program is exciting from a conservation standpoint, the lack of funding to support all the worthy projects that apply is discouraging.
We have a lot of areas like Dead Lakes that should be protected, and Florida Forever is doing good work taking care of them. Here’s hoping the program will continue to have enough funding to keep preserving our unique habitats for the future.
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