Saint Andrews State Park: Guns in the Dunes

At the far eastern end of the beach, where the land meets the pass into Saint Andrew Bay, sits one of Florida's most beloved state parks. Saint Andrews State Park covers more than one thousand acres of dunes, pine, marsh, and shoreline, and it did not start out as a place for vacations. During the Second World War this was a military reservation.

In nineteen forty two, with German submarines prowling the Gulf of Mexico, the War Department chose this point overlooking the new pass for a temporary harbor defense installation. Crews emplaced two large one hundred and fifty five millimeter guns among the dunes just west of the jetties, ready to guard the entrance to the bay and the shipyards inside it. The site was active only from nineteen forty three into nineteen forty four, and no enemy vessel ever tested it.

After the war the land was released, and in nineteen fifty one it opened as a public park. Today the two long rock jetties that frame the pass shelter a calm, shallow lagoon that locals affectionately call the kiddie pool, and those same rocks act as an artificial reef, drawing fish and snorkelers to what many consider the best underwater viewing on this coast.