Down By The Riverside

Before there was a "Scenic Highway 30-A" or an tourist-friendly "Emerald Coast," there was only the backbreaking labor of timbering, the slow chugging of paddle-driven riverboats, hardscrabble living in Walton County's small villages, and subsistence farming and fishing along the waterways of the Choctawhatchee River. "Down By The Riverside," features the lives and times of the tough-skinned, hard-working pioneers who occupied the banks of the Choctawhatchee River - in their own words. These pioneers relied upon its waters for transportation, commerce, and daily life for centuries. Before them, the "River of the Choctaw" (the literal rendering of "Choctawhatchee") did the same for the local tribe by the same name and generations of aboriginal peoples before them. The Choctawhatchee is an irreplaceable natural resource, and so are the people and stories that have populated its bottomlands and basin.