On May 1, 1840, John Love McKinnon, Jr., was born.
McKinnon, a Walton County native of the Eucheeanna area, wrote the first-ever history of the county in 1911, just a couple of years before his death in 1913. Most of what we know about the early Scotch-Irish settlers of the Emerald Coast comes from his inkwell. His book, The History of Walton County, is one of the few histories of the area.
McKinnon was born just a couple of years after the end of the Creek Indian Crisis of 1837, which had consumed the Emerald Coast area with lead and fire. His father, John McKinnon, Sr., was a giant of a man at 6’6 who’d help to bring his and other Scotch-Irish families to the area of the Eucheeanna valley. He grew up listening to stories about the ‘taming of the frontier’ that his father and other men had accomplished before his birth at great cost.
He’d be the first person to write down the tale of Yuchi leader Sam Story and his people’s decision to leave the Emerald Coast for the peninsula – a key piece of local myth that explained, in a polite way, why there were no more Native Americans in Walton County at the turn of the century when 100 years before, Aboriginal people were the only ones living on the Emerald Coast.
McKinnon attended the Knox Hill School before the Civil War broke out in April of 1861. He would join the Walton Guards under Captain Billie McPherson and march to Camp Walton, where he and other militiamen would do the amateur excavations of the Fort Walton Beach Temple Mound. After a year, McKinnon and other members of the 3rd Florida Infantry marched to Kentucky under General Braxton Bragg’s flag of the Confederate Army of the Tennessee.
After two years of heavy fighting in which he saw many of his friends killed, McKinnon was captured at the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee. The 24-year-old officer was marched to Sandusky, Ohio, where he was put on a ferry to Johnson’s Island, just north of the city. There, he and other rebel officers were interned through the cold winter that claimed several of their lives.
After the war, McKinnon was released and traveled back home to Florida. He would spend the rest of his life in Walton County and stay active in various Confederate groups for the rest of his life.
Pro Communi Bono
St. Francis De Sales, Ora Pro Nobis!
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