[Notthemomma]

??????
“Palatka is an old Florida logging town on the St. Johns river — and near enough Jacksonville for big city problems to seep into the local community. Indeed, the thinly-inhabited wooded rural acreage around Palatka is well-suited to marijuana grow operations and small meth labs.”

Not even close. Never a logging town, but there was an old cypress mill for processing of lumber, and Georgia Pacific has a pulp, paper, and plywood operation there that employs many people; the river has long been used for transportation of people and goods. And suitable for MJ and Meth? It’s heavily swampy along the river and heavily farmed nearby, and the locals don’t take kindly to strangers doing strange things in strange places.

[Georgia Girl 2]

Yeh, the main thing in Palatka is the pulp mill. My dad used to work for Honeywell and they had the controls there. My Dad used to go down there occasionally for maintenance and service calls. In summer I rode down there a couple of times.

Its rural redneck. Probably thick with grow operations now. So is the Gainesville area and Melrose. Melrose sensamilla used to be the best weed around. 😉

[Rockingham]

Call it the forest products business, or call it logging as a matter of brute simplicity, but Palatka has near always made much of its living on logging and timber.

As the county chamber of commerce explains " . . . Palatka and the surrounding area's prosperity was largely due to the use of the St. Johns River and its tributaries. Citrus and timber were shipped worldwide from Palatka . . . " As it happened, citrus and tourism shifted south as Florida developed, leaving timber and light manufacturing. Georgia-Pacific is Palatka's largest private employer today.

My knowledge of the local criminal element in Palatka and environs comes from the attorney I helped get elected as a Republican state representative some years ago. As he explained, the locals worried about keeping drugs out of their schools and away from their kids and were much less concerned with those who supplied illegal substances to the Jacksonville market.

In the attorney's telling, his nominal Democratic opponent's references to the Fourth Amendment and "rural privacy" reflected the concerns of the local marijuana and meth business. His business cards and declared income as a "timber broker" were partly legitimate but were likely also a cover and a way to explain illicit earnings to the IRS. Since law abiding locals knew the game, the GOP attorney expected to win easily -- and did.