Efforts are getting underway to restore Locklin Lake, "the heart of Milton."

Before there was a city of Milton, before there was a Santa Rosa County and before there was a state of Florida, there was Locklin Lake.

It wasn't called Locklin Lake then, of course, it most likely didn't have a name at all. Sometime between 1828 and 1830 a man named Benjamin Jernigan built a dam at the confluence of two streams so that he could operate a saw mill. A mill town grew up around the lake and in 1844, after lopping off a few letters, the city of Milton was born.

"It's where Milton began. It's definitely a significant spot in the history of Milton," said former mayor Wes Meiss. "It all began right there. That's the heart of Milton."

These days the heart of Milton is in serious need of a transplant. Once pristine, it is now full of silt and overgrown with weeds. City officials, who have tried before to save Locklin Lake, say they are once again committed to doing what it takes to return it to its former glory. According to Public Works Director Joe Cook, that could cost somewhere in the vicinity of $5 million.

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The city received a $500,000 appropriation from the state of Florida this year and with a $500,000 match of its own intends to embark on the first step toward restoration of the water body. The engineering firm of First Line Coastal has been hired to devise a strategy and Cook said a meeting between the city and engineers will be held in the next week or so.

He predicted the engineering work could require the expenditure of the entire $1 million so far set aside.

"They need a new study, new mapping," Cook said. "It's going to be a costly process."

The history of Locklin Lake

The original dam built by Jernigan allowed him to operate a saw mill and exploit the abundant available timber. Jernigan sold the sawmill well in advance of the Civil War and died in 1847, according to a history compiled by University of West Florida researchers Nathan Woolsey and Brian Rucker.

According to the history, the saw mill operation was moved down stream to the Blackwater River in the 1850s and the mill — on what would become Locklin Lake — was utilized as a grist mill that ground corn for the Amos plantation, which was located where Milton High School stands today.

Many area mills were burned during the Civil War either by Union troops or Confederates seeking to prevent them from falling into the hands of the enemy, the history said. There has been evidence uncovered, however, that indicates Jernigan's Mill may have been spared that fate.

According to Woolsey and Rucker, the mill on Locklin Lake was rebuilt after the war and operated until the 1880s as both a gristmill and sawmill.

Allen Lake or Locklin Lake? What's in a name?

Burt Locklin grew up on Locklin Lake in the 1950s after his father purchased land there. He presently owns eight acres on the water that includes a good portion of the since-renovated dam that created the lake.

Walking around his property, the 85-year-old can point to an area just east of the dam site as the location of a skating rink. To the west lies the spot where an 18-hole carpet golf course had once resided next to a concession stand that sold hot dogs and cold drinks.

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Across the lake, there had been a swimming beach, and Locklin recalled paying a quarter to swim all day and being able to open his eyes underwater and see further than he was able to travel while holding his breath.

"That's how clear the water was," he said.

The park was the brainchild of R.J. Allen, according to the UWF researchers. It was built in 1935 and called Yupon Park. The lake at that time was known as Allen Lake.

Allen replaced the original dam with a concrete dam in 1944 or, according to Woolsey and Rucker, "at least covered the existing dam with a shell of concrete."

Allen sold the park to Burton L. Locklin, Sr. in the early 1950s, according to the history. Locklin Sr. was an educator by trade, according to his son, and worked as principal at Jay High School. The park closed in the early 1980s.

The younger Burt Locklin chuckles when he hears the body of water on which he still resides called Locklin Lake. He says he doesn't know when or why people started calling it that.

"Every time I read it I say, 'That's not the name,'" he said.

Locklin says he's not a huge fan of having something named after him, but he had an uncle who liked such accolades. He suspects maybe that uncle had a hand in getting the Locklin moniker attached to Locklin Lake.

"He got a street named for him," he said. "I said 'crap.'"

Locklin still maintains a semblance of his highly-prized privacy on the land he owns, though he's had students attempt to use the dam as a short cut to the high school and once had to stop a woman trying to drive across the grass covered structure, which is clearly not constructed to facilitate vehicle traffic.

He remembered a time when the area around the lake was free of residential development.

"You could look up there and couldn't see houses," he said, pointing across the water of Locklin Lake.

Meiss, the former mayor, said he grew up on Locklin Lake.

"We canoed and fished," said Meiss, who is in his 40s. "We never swam in it. People don't swim there any more because they're not sure of the quality of the water."

He called the lake "a victim of development in the 20th Century."

"Milton grew up, for all intents and purposes, along the lake. Homes were built with septic tanks and the lake caught a lot of Milton's storm water," he said.

Victim of development

Cook, the public works director, described the lake as "kind of a holding basin. A holding pond for part of the city and some of the county." Fertilizer from the yards of homes along the lake have also contributed to the pollution, according to Locklin.

"It's a fact. Where human beings go, pollution goes," he said.

The paving of Dogwood Drive was another major contributor of silt to the waterway, Cook said. Anderson Columbia, the company that built the roadway, paid a hefty fine for its failure to prevent runoff into the lake.

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Milton Attorney Ken Brooks lives on the lake and has been active in a lake front homeowners association. He said there are several reasons why residents of the area are concerned about the condition of Locklin Lake.

First among those is the fear of declining property values. As silt continues to flow into the lake it only becomes shallower. There is also concern that a thriving fish population and abundant wildlife around the lake will be negatively impacted by declining conditions.

"All of our owners are environmental buffs," Brooks said. "This lake runs into the Blackwater River, and the worse things get here it could end up creating problems downstream."

In order for the lake to be restored to its pre-development state, Brooks said homeowners believe it will have to be drained so that the years worth of silt build-up, along with the vegetation growth it has brought, can be removed.

Before that can happen, according to Cook, the city wants to install Vortex chambers, huge underground catch basins that capture trash and sediments as they are swept off of yards and roadways by storm water.

Homeowners will be called upon to stabilize the banks of the lake before it can be dredged, Cook said. "They're going to have to service those slopes before we take on dredging the lake."

Meiss, who served as Milton's mayor from 2014-18, said renovating Locklin Lake has been on the city's to do list for years. During his term the city was looking, he said, at "a three-phase project, that has been sort of phased out."

Another effort to restore the lake, in 2008, began with work to shore up the dam. Locklin recalled allowing contractor trucks to use his property to get down to the dam and said that though no one has approached him yet, he would be open to doing that again.

"I would assume they would have to get my permission," he said. "I'm not worried about that. If they need easements, I'm not worried about that."

The work to replace the dam in 2008 came to a sudden halt when work crews uncovered wood believed to have been remains of the sawmill Jernigan had constructed back in the early 1800s.

The finding got the city and its engineer of record at the time, Baskerville-Donovan, in trouble. The state Department of Environmental Protection said the city had failed to meet permit conditions requiring it to immediately cease work in the event historic documents were located on the construction site, according to reports in the local newspaper.

John Phillips, a UWF archeologist was called in to assess the findings. It was ultimately decided to simply cover the discovered wood back over with concrete.

But the hoopla over the findings ended the city's last best effort to dredge the lake, Cook said.

"The historical stuff took all the money," he said.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Milton wants to return Locklin Lake to former pristine state