What Google Gets Wrong about Lanark Village Florida
Would you like to be misinformed about Lanark Village? Just do an internet search and you likely will be. Here are some common misconceptions I’d like to correct.
No, we are not in Scotland. But when I searched for Lanark Village online this morning (April 2024), AI generated a mixture of truths and falsehoods about this Forgotten Coast neighborhood.
“The community began as part of a promotion plan by the Georgia, Florida and Alabama Railroad and became a popular resort for people in nearby counties. The Lanark Springs Resort included a two-story hotel. In 1820, about 400 families arrived in Lanark Village, bringing skills in cotton weaving, carpentry, blacksmithing, and shoemaking.”
The first two sentences are mostly true; the third can be found elsewhere on the internet and refers to the Lanark Village in Scotland, not Florida. There were no blacksmiths or shoemakers here in 1820. That was before the resort known as Lanak-by-the-Gulf was even built, and there was nothing here but trees.
Google suggested other questions a researcher might want to ask, such as “Is Lanark Village a good place to live?” When I clicked through I got this blurb from neighborhoodscout.com as an answer:
“The Lanark Village neighborhood has a higher percentage of children living in poverty (85.6%) than found in 99.6% of all U.S. neighborhoods...“
What the…?
That does not sound like a good place to live. But Lanark Village is a great place to live for reasons I’ve waxed poetic about elsewhere.
A reader seeing only the neighborhood scout website might imagine Lanark as poverty-stricken and run-down. That’s just not the reality.
Almost half of the houses in the village are second homes used seasonally by their owners, a fact that doesn’t exactly scream poverty. And the Census Bureau, which generates information about income levels in various locations, reports financial information about those owners in their primary hometowns, not in the figures for Lanark.
There’s nothing wrong with being poor; I proudly call Lanark Village ideal for beach bums on a budget. But these statistics are misleading.
Related to that, another commonly believed, but inaccurate bit of internet information involves our status as a retirement community. Although it is a wonderful place to retire, and most of us who live here are retired, Lanark Village is not technically a retirement village. You wouldn’t know that by reading the Digital Commons website, which says:
“Today, the former officers' family quarters that remain standing in the vicinity of Parker Street are being used as housing in Lanark Village Retirement Community.”
That’s not our name anymore.
That misunderstanding is easy to make and probably inconsequential to those of us who live here. But another piece of internet fiction is more harmful to our reputation.
If you’d read a certain Tallahassee Democrat article in the wake of Hurricane Michael, you might imagine that Lanark Village is at particular risk from hurricanes. The story reported that “Given the geography of Lanark Village, ground-level houses didn't stand much of a chance…Franklin County Property Appraiser Rhonda Skipper estimated that nearly every home in Lanark that sat on the ground was rendered uninhabitable. Those that weren't suffered catastrophic damage.”
Give me a break, clickbait. As Ms. Skipper is a Franklin County native, I believe her words must have been taken out of context.
She most likely said that any waterfront ground-level home in Lanark suffered. Most of the Village did not.
The Lanark Village boundaries have been variously and loosely described depending on the source. Most of us think of it as consisting of the old barracks, what I call Lanark proper, along with the state streets on one side of the barracks and going down to the old Putnal Station on the other.
That includes water-front houses across Highway 98 from Lanark proper and other nearby developments. To be fair, the ground-level ones on that thin strip of land facing the Sound are at high risk of being damaged or destroyed in a bad storm as was brutally demonstrated by Hurricane Michael.
But the cottages in Lanark proper were unscathed because Lanark Village has some unique protections from hurricane destruction. The barracks are solidly built, a quarter mile from the coast, far enough above sea level to earn an X flood zone designation, and shielded somewhat by sand bars and barrier islands in the sound.
No Florida community is completely safe from hurricanes, but Lanark is in no way excessively vulnerable, either. Don’t let the hype stop you from acquiring your coastal vacation or retirement home.
Lanark Village Florida is quaint, quiet, and quintessentially Old Florida. It’s not “…a neighbourhood bristling with boutiques” as described by slaterhogg.com.uk. Again, that’s the Scottish version; the spelling of “neighborhood” may have tipped you off.
