Today’s Emerald Coast History Article is brought to you by the folks at Okaloosa Gas District.
On June 3, 1915, Governor Park Trammell signed a bill to create a new county in Florida, Okaloosa County.
Though it was Governor Trammell’s pen that brought the County into the world, it was State Senator William Mapoles who did the heavy lifting.
The County was incorporated that year and hosted its first County Commission meeting in the town of Milligan, west of Crestview. The next couple of years would see fighting back and forth between the main population centers of the area: Baker, Crestview, and Laurel Hill, to become the political center of the county (and all of the business that went along with it).
Eventually, the county of fewer than 10,000 souls would pick Crestview. The Hub City would win in a runoff against Baker – thanks to the help of the Laurel Hill and small south County contingent that wanted their county seat as close as possible to themselves.
Mapoles owned the largest newspaper in the area, The Laurel Hill News, and was the son of another newspaper owner. By 1915, he’d moved his operation from Laurel Hill to Crestview to take advantage of its central location in a bid to become the publisher of record in the area.
When he wasn’t running the printing press, Mapoles spent much of the first half of the 20th century as a representative for the area in Tallahassee as a State Senator.
The successful 1915 effort wasn’t Mapoles’ first attempt to create a new county in the Panhandle. In 1913’s legislative session, Mapoles filed a bill that would have created “Yellow River” County. Later in the same session, the bill was amended so that a new county would have been called “Wilson County” after the President of the United States at that time, Woodrow Wilson. The bill passed the house under then Representative Mapoles, but failed to make it past the bulwark foisted on the State Senate floor by interests from Santa Rosa County
Though this bill passed and became law – there were plenty of more… questionable bills that arrived to the Senate Floor under his signature, including a shoe quality law and a convent inspection law.
After about 25 years of complete dominance over Okaloosa County, William Mapoles would meet his match with the arrival of a new newspaper publisher at the Valparaiso Star. The new man in town, Robert Lee Fulton Sikes, know to his friends as Bob would quickly eclipse Mapoles: first in the state legislature and then on the campaign trail to take up the position as representative in Congress in 1936.
Sikes would write in his autobiography that in the state legislature, “our cooperation would be minimal. Our competing newspapers were our livelihood and this situation sometimes overshadowed our legislative responsibilities.”
Mapoles legacy is Okaloosa County. In 2017, the state legislature named the US-90 Bridge over the Yellow River after the man who created the county. His argument that the rapidly growing county needed a government of its own proved prescient as well. Thanks to his rival, Bob Sikes’s, success in the US Congress, securing several Department of War installations for research and development in the World War II years, Okaloosa County’s population rapidly expanded. 110 years later the population has grown from around 10,000 to around 230,000.
The County provides hundreds of miles of roads and their maintenance, water and sewer systems, law enforcement and emergency medical services, planning nand zoning and airport terminals – thanks to the foresight Mapoles provided.
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