The Primrose and the Fishing Museum
Near Destin, Florida
Just here at the foot of the bridge, on Stahlman Avenue, sits the Destin History and Fishing Museum, and inside it rests a wooden boat that is essentially the town's beating heart preserved on dry land. Her name is the Primrose. She was built in the year nineteen twenty five and is said to be the oldest surviving seine fishing boat.
A seine boat was the workhorse of old Destin, the vessel from which crews spread those great encircling nets to trap whole schools of fish at once. The Primrose was the last seine boat ever built in Destin, and the first of her kind to carry a motor, and by local lore she brought in more mullet than any other boat in the fleet. She worked these waters from nineteen twenty five all the way to nineteen sixty eight, and later she was set on land so the public could see her.
The museum around her holds vintage photographs, antique rods and reels, fish mounts, and even an old reel said to have belonged to the writer Ernest Hemingway. It is a small place, but it tells the whole arc of Destin in one room, from a lone captain with a net to a harbor full of charter boats.
