Gulf Coast Breeze Archive

The Gulf Coast Breeze was published in Crawfordville from 1897 through approximately 1928. The newspaper’s first editor and publisher was R. Don McLeod. Later editors were Herbert S. Moore (ca. 1915) and C.K. Allen (ca. 1920). The masthead of the Gulf Coast Breeze proclaimed “For the People.” As was typical of most Florida newspapers in this period, it maintained a Democratic affiliation.

Crawfordville was and remains the seat of government in rural Wakulla County, located approximately twenty miles south of the capital of Tallahassee. The town’s population during this period hovered at about two hundred; the population of the county grew from three to seven thousand during the time of the paper’s existence.

The first issue of the Gulf Coast Breeze contained a rousing smorgasbord of local and international items. Reporting covered the everyday and the curious. Among the curious: the taking of a prodigiously large gopher turtle at more than fifty pounds and a local minister’s wife almost crushed à la Anna Karenina by a local train. International news, as well, covered the ordinary and occasionally the extraordinary, e.g., a jingoist editorial inveighing against the Ottoman Turks during the First World War.