History

Joe Whitehead was quoted several years ago as saying when Englewood was still a fishing village in 1930’s, the commercial fishermen equipped their boats with smudge pots to keep the mosquitoes away.
Whitehead used an old dutch oven with lightered pine cut into strips and green mangrove leaves to make the smoke.

“You’d fish for 10 minutes until the mosquitoes got bad, then step into the smudge for a few minutes, and you were good for another 10 or 25 minutes. In the morning when it got daylight, it would look like the boats all over the bay were on fire.

He also said that as a boy he used to take oysters from Lemon Bay. They were so large, the liquor drained from only 30 of them would fill a quart jar. He sold them for 50 cents a quart.