Leonard Destin, the Fisherman Who Named a Village

The town you are driving through carries one man's name, and he arrived here by boat. Leonard Destin was born in the early eighteen hundreds in the waterfront town of New London, Connecticut, into a New England family of whalers and fishermen. Sometime in the middle of the eighteen forties, he sailed south along the Gulf Coast and reached the remote Gulf shore of the Florida Panhandle, east of Pensacola.

What he found astonished him. The waters off this shore held an almost unbelievable abundance of fish, close to land and easy to reach. Rather than keep moving, he stopped.

He built a fish camp at Moreno Point and set to work. He married, and the couple settled at the camp and built a New England styled cottage to raise a large family. Captain Destin and his crews gathered fish using seine boats, rowing out with heavily weighted nets that they threw in a circle to surround an entire school.

The catch was held in underwater pens, then carried by schooner to be sold in Pensacola. He and his descendants worked the pass to the open Gulf, a passage that became known as Destin's East Pass. For decades the family fished these waters, and the settlement that grew up around the camp took the captain's name.

Leonard Destin is long gone, but the dynasty he founded kept fishing here for generations, and the names of the old families, Destin, Marler, Melvin, are still stitched into the harbor, the bridges, and the fishing rodeo. When people call this the world's luckiest fishing village, they are describing something a Connecticut sea captain recognized more than a century and a half ago, the moment he first dropped a net into the calm green water that never seemed to run empty.