Cedar Key Historical Society Museum reopens a year after Helene

CEDAR KEY, Fla. — Cedar Key is a piece of old Florida. Home to spectacular sunsets and resilient residents like Anna White Hodges. 

This is what recovery looks like one year after Hurricane Helene’s arrival.

“With Helene it was so serious,” said White Hodges, Executive Director of the Cedar Key Historical Society Museum.

As the storm moved north through the Gulf into the Big Bend region in late September 2024, waves covered the island.

“Outside the building — eight feet,” said White Hodges.

The reinforced historical building took in four.

Volunteers moved the artifacts but lost everything else.

In their recovery, they found new ways to share the story of the island.

The museum shows remnants of the people who fished the island shores before colonizers arrived.

And it tells the Civil War story with a model of the USS Fort Henry, part of the Union’s naval blockade off Cedar Key.

“The union was going after blockade runners. And that’s when they got too close to the shoreline. And that’s when the militia, the southern militia, they shot at them,” said White Hodges.

A wooden tombstone marked the grave of a Union soldier from the gunboat.

Today, the peaceful waters are the subject of aquaculture at the museum, where the town stands now.

The residents of this small island rebuilt this space.

And, in turn, have become part of its history.