Photo by Scott Holstein

Preserving the Southern Lifestyle

Osceola Lodge in Lynn Haven Has Provided Respite for Generations

By David Vest

Timeless is the word that springs to mind with your first glimpse of the Osceola Lodge.

A formal walkway rises from Anderson Bayou, framed by a symmetry of leafy magnolias, tropical palms and soaring oaks. A statue of a child and a porpoise at play sits amid floating lily pads so thick you imagine you might be able to walk across. At the top of the walk, craggy chunks of limestone from Econfina Creek guide you up the steps to a wide, welcoming front porch.

Enter the front door and you notice first the mural over the fireplace in the main hall. William R. Rose, an internationally acclaimed artist, painted the Seminole village scene in 1926, just after he arrived in the new boomtown called Lynn Haven. His other Florida landscapes surround the room.

Climb the twin stairways or visit the other first-floor rooms and you’ll see walls of wide-planked cypress, brought across the state from the shores of the St. Johns River. You’ll also find symmetry: For every living or storage space and architectural detail on the left, there is an identical match on the right.

The two halves flow toward a second-floor landing above the main hall, where a wide window awaits. There, you can view as in a reflection the tree-lined walkway, the lush lily pads and the placid bayou — completing the circle that the builders envisioned.

James L. Brusstar and Louis Forrest La Roche launched the lodge in 1922, based on Creole plantation homes in the West Indies. The surrounding property was platted for development as Bay Park Manor. But it remained a place apart, as it always has been. Local lore says Osceola, a leader of the Seminole Indians during the Second Seminole War, once took refuge there.

Brusstar was a commercial contractor in New York, and La Roche had made his fortune through his company, which paved the big city’s streets.

Through hunting and fishing adventures, they hoped other industrial barons would find Bay County the perfect place to build new factories and create jobs.

Lynn Haven historian Lyn Hindsman, who has documented the lodge’s life, says publicity promised tarpon tournaments where a trophy catch might weigh 800 pounds. Alligators, deer, bobcats, geese and ducks awaited sportsmen in the North Bay woods. Waterfowl and succulent oysters as large as dinner plates lay waiting in the waters.

Through the Great Depression and World War II, the lodge changed hands often, and pieces of the property went up for sale. When local men were desperate for jobs, La Roche paid them to keep the lodge’s fireplace burning to fight off mildew.

In the 1940s and ’50s, a New Orleans influence took root, Hindsman says. Louisiana oilman Reese Carter and his wife, Hertha, created Osceola Lodge Inc. for land sales, but they kept the lodge and its grounds as their private residence.

By the early 1960s, the family that would take the lodge into the 21st century had arrived. Gordon Ingham Atwater of New Orleans was a petroleum geologist who had risen to global recognition in the new oil and gas boom. His wife, Emogene Chapman Atwater, was a world traveler as well.

After their only child, Mimi, died of a brain aneurysm at age 29, Emogene Atwater’s travels increased — perhaps in search of solace. The Atwaters made the lodge their haven, and a photo of the main hall during their time shows the room much as it appears today.

In 1978, the Atwaters’ niece inherited the lodge and continued their New Orleans traditions. Sylvia Calo was more like a daughter, only a year younger than the daughter they had lost. She fell in love with the lodge when she first saw it in 1956, and she and her husband, Joseph, spent their honeymoon there in 1958.

“When you drive up, there’s such a sense of relaxation there,” says Calo, who now lives in a retirement community. “Everything that was ever replaced in that house was top quality. Everyone that has been there tried to save the architecture.”

Over three decades, the Calos’ children — son Joseph Jr., daughter Cassandra and twin daughters Carolyn (“Cricket”) and Marilyn — made their own memories. When Sylvia Calo decided to subdivide for development, they refused to let anyone tear the old lodge down.

It now is the centerpiece of a gated community called Osceola Point that has echoes of City Park and Audubon Park in New Orleans. New homes reflect the lodge’s distinctive Southern style, and street names are Rue Bocage, Rue La Roche and Rue Esplanade.

This year, a new chapter began when Sylvia Calo put the lodge up for sale. Jay and Amy Moody, who lived just across the bayou in Lynn Haven, discovered it on panamacitymls.com, and they’re eagerly anticipating their first Christmas there.

Jay Moody is a CPA, and Amy is a math teacher. Their children — Jake, 12, Kyle, 10, and Lauren, 8 — have found the home and land to be a treasure trove of 1920s patent-medicine bottles and other cool things to collect.

“I always wanted for an old house like this to be home,” Amy Moody says. “I told my husband this is like it would be in heaven.”

They’re mindful, though, of their place in the chain of earthly events dating back to 1922 and well before.

“We’re just the caretakers for the time present,” Moody said. We don’t own the house. It owns us.”