The Original Caxambas Kid: Part One

In the July 6-12 edition of The Coastal Breeze News, we profiled Chester Pettit, who grew up at his father's fish camp in the Caxambas settlement on the south end of Marco Island during the 1950s and 1960s. Pettit considers himself the Caxambas Kid, and that’s no disrespect to the original Caxambas Kid, Preston Sawyer, who was born at Caxambas on August 31, 1901, some 22 years before the birth of Collier County.

Many of the famous names of Marco Island history were settling in Caxambas about the time Sawyer came forth from the womb. It was the year Marco Island's greatest heroine, Tommie Barfield - then Tommie Stephens - arrived in Caxambas as a child with her family. Her future husband, James Barfield, was already established in Caxambas, having arrived 10 years earlier. By 1904, Barfield built the general store in Caxambas and became its first postmaster. Another Caxambas pioneer, Frederick Ludlow, was working a pineapple plantation there at the time. And the Burnham Clam Cannery, which brought Caxambas its heyday from 1904-1929, was still three years from opening its doors.

Sawyer shared many of his stories with Maria Stone in 1987, who transcribed them and published them as an oral history titled Caxambas Kid, The Life & Times of the Famous Fishing Guide Preston Sawyer.The Coastal Breeze News has been given permission to quote from Sawyer's book as part of our Collier County Centennial Series. Sawyer passed in 1990 at 88. 

One of Sawyer’s early memories is of his mother telling him about the first words he spoke as a child in Caxambas.

“Mama-Snooks,” Preston Sawyer said. Sawyer said he got his first nickname because of an old Indian man who would come to Caxambas and trade an entire deer for $1. He said the Indian’s name was Snooks. Evidently, when Sawyer would see Snooks coming he’d shout out, "Mama-Snooks.” Sawyer said Snooks became his first nickname. Eventually, he was called The Kid, and finally the Caxambas Kid.

Sawyer had vivid memories of the 1910 hurricane’s impact on Caxambas.

“It blowed and blowed for about three or four days from the northeast,” Sawyer said, “there was water in every one of them houses down there. We would have all drowned if we had stayed in that low place, but we all went up on the hill at the end of the island. Before we got up that hill we were wading almost waist deep in water.”

Sawyer estimated the hurricane’s winds at 130 mph.

“I’ll remember that hurricane all my life,” Sawyer said, “poor old Caxambas had blown away. That little village of my early childhood was all tore up or plumb gone.”

Sawyer recalled three pineapple plantations in Caxambas during his childhood.

“One was owned by Ludlow, one by Barfield,” Sawyer said, "and one was on Horr’s Island, one mile from Caxambas.”

But Sawyer's family relied on fishing, clamming, and hunting for their livelihood. Sawyer learned the lay of the land and sea from his father, Richard, who was a charter fisherman working out of the Marco Hotel, owned by W.D. "Captain Bill" Collier. Captain Bill is a large figure in the history of Marco Island but was not related to the county’s namesake, Barron Collier.

“He’d say, ‘Learn these points well, and you ain’t never gonna be lost,'” Sawyer said of his father.

Sawyer said he had a photographic memory.

“I learned those islands by heart,” Sawyer recalled as an 85-year-old, “I could go around them now, blindfolded.”

He recalled the ravenous mosquitoes of the day.

“Sometimes those mosquitoes were so bad,” Sawyer said, "that we had to go up to land and get out of the boat and cover our bodies with mud or they’d eat us up.”

In addition to the Burnham Clam Cannery in Caxambas, many locals dug clams by hand.

“We used to go down there and camp on those islands down around Pavilion Key,” Sawyer said. “We’d dig clams by hand and camp out there. A good clam digger could dig 30 bushels on the low tide. I did 10, 12, 15 bushels on the low tide. I was about 16 then.”

By the time Sawyer was a teenager there were two clam factories operating on Marco Island. Burnham’s was on the south end, at Caxambas. Doxsee’s opened in 1910 and was located on the north side of what is now known as Old Marco but then was known simply as Marco. Sawyer sold his hand-dug clams to the clam boats.

"That was our day’s work,” Sawyer said. "We waited till the clam boat left the factory. They’d come down, usually before sundown the next day. We loaded ‘em on the boat, and they hauled ‘em to the factory. We were paid by the bushel.”

Collier revolutionized local clam digging in 1908 when he invented a clam dredging machine. According to Florida's Last Frontier, by Charlton W. Tebeau, Collier was the “guiding genius of Marco until the early twenties of this century. He observed that digging clams by hand limited the work to relatively shallow water, calm weather and low tides, whereas the clams were found in water up to twelve feet deep.”

Sawyer said the clam dredge didn’t put the hand diggers out of business. But Sawyer himself went to work on the clam dredge.

“The hand diggers were still down there digging clams when the dredge was working,” Sawyer said. “The first time I ever worked on the dredge I was getting a $1.50 a day, $7.50 a week and board. The old dredge was 110’ long, 30' wide, and then it had a well in it. We had an old engine that they call a 36-horse engine, called a moose engine. It ran on gasoline, and you could run ‘em off of kerosene, too. A full crew would be nine, including the cook. You had to have an engineer take care of the engine. We had plenty to eat.”

Of course one of the things they had to eat was clams. He recalls Collier, a revered figure in the Marco community, visiting the dredge one day.

“One time I asked Bill Collier,” Sawyer recalled, "‘Why can’t we get some butter on this barge?’  He said, ‘Butter on the clams? I’ll send you some butter.’”

Sawyer said he tired of eating clams, but there was a meal on the barge he found less appealing.

“I got tired of clams down there,” he said, "but I was more tired of the corned beef. Sometimes I’d get the crew together and we’d throw cases of it overboard.”

He said life on the dredge was a tough one.

“We never had time to have any fun,” he lamented. “The dredge men were just hard-working men. Whenever they made a dollar they spent it."

Sawyer worked on the dredge and in the clam factory from age 16 to 33.

“Not every day,” he said, “but on and off. I’d quit because I’d get tired and quit. I’d go back and fish with my dad. I’d get tired of fishing and I’d go back to the dredge again.”

Sawyer was running the dredge in 1918, during WWI.

“I was running the dredge, I was 17,” he said. "The war didn’t affect that dredge. A lot of the boys had to go to war. I was working for Doxsee Company then. I got $200 a month. That was a big pay.”

Sawyer later worked on a boat that’s famous in Marco history, the schooner Eureka.

“The boat hauled freight from factories to Key West to put on the Mallory Steamer to go to New York,” Sawyer said. "New York was the sales office for all the clam products to be shipped all over the world after they’d canned ‘em, steamed ‘em, made chowder and littleneck clams and all that stuff. There were 48 salesmen on the road selling that product. I was the first mate on that boat under Jack Collier, W.D. Collier’s brother.”

Sawyer remembers Prohibition, from 1920-1933, when the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages in the United States were illegal.

“There were guys doing bootleg kegs,” Sawyer said. “The first whiskey that was hauled to Ft. Myers went aground here at Gordon’s Pass in Naples. Some men come down there and asked us to come up there and raise this here boat. We brought the old schooner, Eureka, up there. We took a chain to haul it and a rope to pull it off the bar. They’d already taken all the whiskey off it by then.”

Sawyer said the biggest effect WWI had on the clammers was at the dinner table.

“We didn’t have too much to eat,” he said. “Things were rationed. We were lucky to have clams and fish. The main thing is we were short of shortening, stuff like that. We had more cornmeal than flour. We were very short of flour. We’d have fish, birds, and different kinds of corn, stuff you’d buy at the store.”

Sawyer said a clam boat, the Clara, sunk in front of the modern-day Snook Inn.

“Her graveyard is right down there at Marco Island,” Sawyer said, “right down there where that Snook Inn is down there. That’s where she landed.”

Sawyer said Collier had a fleet of boats.

“He owned the Falcon, the Eureka, the Speedway, and the Australia,” Sawyer said. "He had a bunch of boats. He’s the feller that I got my pay from when I was worth $7 a day."

Look for Part Two of “Preston Sawyer, the Original Caxambas Kid” in next week’s edition of the Coastal Breeze News. Sawyer talks about meeting John Gomez of Panther Key, who was purportedly a cabin boy on Gasparilla’s pirate ship, deals with the infamous Edgar Watson and experiences the 1926 and 1935 Hurricanes, and more.