Admission Fees - $5.00 per vehicle for up to 8 people
Pedestrians, Bicyclists, Extra Passengers, Passengers In Vehicles With Holder of Annual Individual Entrance Permit, Members of Organized Groups - Admission Fee $1.00
Economically Disadvantaged Fee (Up to 8 people) - $2.50
Bus Tour Fee (40+ people) - $40.00
Bus Tour Fee (less than 40 people; per person) - $1.00
Permits
Annual Family Entrance (Up to 8 People) - $80.00
Annual Individual Entrance - $40.00
Camping Fees
Campsites all year - $22.00
Cabins all year - $60.00
Senior/Disabled Citizen camping (must be Florida resident, over 65 years or 100% disabled) - $11.00
Primitive and youth camping / per person - $4.00
Overnight parking fee (self-contained camping rigs only) limited to 1 night only when no campsite vacancies - $8.00
Dump station, per unit, non-registered camper - $6.00
Shower fee / per person, primitive camper - $6.00
RV water filling station / per unit, non-registered camper - $5.00
Commercial Photography Fees
Still photography during park hours - $50.00
After park hours - $80.00
Annual Permit (Includes after-hours use) - $400.00 Motion Pictures & TV Production: 1-10 hours - $500.00
Over 10 hours - $1000.00
Pavilions
Lake and Clay Gully per day (holds 40 people) - $30.00
South (holds 111 people) and Log (holds 60 people) per day - $60.00
Daily Equestrian Fees (must provide own horse and proof of negative Coggins)
Individual - $6.00
Family / per vehicle (4 person maximum) - $14.00
Daily Concession Tours
Airboat & Tram Tours - Adult - $8.00
Children 6 thru12 - $4.00 (Children 5 & under free in adult´s lap)
Daily Concession Rental Fees
Canoe rental: 0-2 hrs - $15.00; 2-4 hrs - $25.00; 4hrs-close - $40.00
Kayak rental: ½ day - $25.00; Full day - $45.00
Bicycle rental: 0-2hrs - $10.00; 2-4hrs - $20.00; 4hrs-close - $25.00
Short History of the Park
A place in park history
Oscar Manigo helped turn a 'jungle' into a treasure
By Bill Hutchinson
His voice is a raspy whisper, and the eyes above his regal cheekbones are cloudy with age, but at 85, Oscar Manigo still rules his family with the wave of a hand.
He has memories to share. Even if they fade in mid-sentence, he will tell them his way.
Oscar Manigo was just 18, a South Carolina farm boy with no work and no prospects in the Depression year of 1936, when he signed up to join the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the dozens of federal programs developed by President Franklin Roosevelt to give people jobs.
At the start of '37, Oscar Manigo found himself in Sarasota or, rather, in the woods to the east of town, among a group of 200 or so young men from all over the country whose job it was to build Myakka River State Park.
Like most of them, Manigo had never been away from home before. Like all of them, he was black.
SP-4, his group, was one of the CCC's Negro units, as they were called then -- actually negro units, without the capital N, or colored units, or just "colored boys," in the words of the local citizens who objected bitterly to the presence of SP-4 in Sarasota.
Myakka River State Park almost didn't get built because of what the Sarasota Tribune described as "a rumble of protest ... which swept the length of Sarasota's decidedly long Main Street."
But that is not Oscar Manigo's story.
By the time he came to Sarasota in January of '37, the protests were over, resolved in part by the CCC's agreement to move the SP-4 camp to the far side of the Myakka River.
He was living in "a jungle," as he recalls the Myakka woods.
The unfamiliar wildlife fascinated him, but scared him a little, too, he admitted not long ago, presiding over Saturday lunch at his kitchen table.
The wild hogs would come right at you sometimes, he said. The rattlers were 10 feet long and came out of nowhere. Wild dogs were strong enough to push a man down and tear out his throat.
For company, Manigo told a visitor, he adopted a chicken that used to wander over from a neighboring farm.
"The park," interrupted his daughter JoAnn, gently. "He wants to know about the park."
"I'm telling him about the park," said Oscar Manigo, raising a bony hand for silence.
JoAnn Manigo, 60, lowered her eyes apologetically and let her father talk.
No swimming
The snakes in the Myakka woods were big, plentiful and mean, he remembers that.
Following a hurricane in September 1935, rain had been heavier than normal along the Florida Gulf Coast. The wet fed the insect population, which in turn fed the snakes.
By the time Oscar Manigo came to Myakka in January 1937, the woods were full of diamondbacks and blacks and coppers so big "you were lucky if they were only the size of your arm."
The CCC had been in Myakka since late 1934, and a lot had been done in those two years.
The perimeter of the park, more than 40 square miles, was fenced off. The main road from S.R. 72, then called Sugar Bowl Road, was cleared of its top layers of brush. Two bridges were built crossing the river, and a dam erected to hold back flooding into the upper lake.
Cabins had been built for the corps bosses out of pine logs from a forest near Arcadia, with fireplaces cut from limestone out of the park.
A visitors' picnic pavilion was up, ringed with hand-made tables that remain the bane of the present-day park ranger's existence: 200 pounds of log and asphalt joinings that have to be hauled up to higher ground whenever the river starts to rise.
Just off the main road were four barracks for the corpsmen, each big enough to accommodate 70 metal cots.
One of the first things Oscar Manigo had to do was assist in the relocation of the barracks so that tourist cabins could be built in their place.
He helped build those cabins, he said in a 1984 interview with Myakka Park Ranger Paula Benshoff.
If that memory has faded now, he still remembers the hard work and long days, beginning with a 5:30 a.m. bugle call and ending at 4 when trucks brought the men back from the field to the mess hall for dinner.
They planted thousands of pines to supplement the palmetto and cabbage palms.
They cleared wide alleyways through the forest as protection against wildfire, usually grubbing up the roots by hand with a hoe.
They fought the daily battle against new growth in the wet seasons, and during the dry months netted up the fish from the river and relocated them to safe waters in the lake.
"When you got finished at the end of the day you knew you been working," Manigo remembered.
Manigo stayed at Myakka for 20 months -- earning the standard $30 a week, most of which the government sent home to his family -- but most corpsmen came on for six-month tours of duty. With each wave of newcomers, Manigo and the other long-timers would have to explain about the snakes. And the 'gators.
"People come in and think the river a swimming pool," he recalled recently. "You have to tell them, man, this ain't no swimming pool."
Community uproar
Oscar Manigo came to the Myakka with the fifth wave of CCC recruits. Only the first group, in 1934, was white.
By federal order, all 1,300 CCC camps in the United States were segregated. Of Florida's 86 camps, 13 were all black and two were so-called Seminole camps for Native Americans.
Historical documents suggest that negro and indian workers -- both lower-case "colored" in the vernacular of the day -- were sometimes brought into the all-white camps as short-term labor for especially difficult jobs.
In January 1935, the public learned about the presence of some black men at the Myakka camp when two were killed in a truck accident near Bee Ridge Road.
Seven months later, just after dawn on the morning of Aug. 17, the CCC moved its white corps out of Myakka and replaced it with a group of black men who, newspapers reported, had been denied a place in a camp on the east coast because of community protest.
The arrival of a 50-man black advance team for the new all-Negro SP-4 camp was more than white Sarasota could accept.
"Officials and laymen, including hunters and anglers, gathered in groups on street corners, discussing a potential condition which was declared damaging," reported the Sarasota Tribune on Sunday, Aug. 18.
"While a few Sarasotans can see no reason why the camp shouldn't be black -- and say so plainly -- the great majority fear the change will do incalculable harm," the paper said the following Tuesday.
On Thursday, a mass meeting at the old Golf Street Auditorium demonstrated overwhelming community opposition to the Negro CCC, which the Tribune predicted would cause Myakka State Park to "suffer a color metamorphosis, becoming as black as the ace of spades."
Letters to the editor warned that white folks would never use facilities built by blacks.
The CCC -- whose charter specified that community acceptance would determine the locations of Negro and Seminole camps -- pulled its black corpsman out and closed down the Myakka operation on Aug. 25.
Without help from the CCC, there would be no park, which was seen as a potential economic boon to the growing city -- worth as much as $100,000 a year in Depression-era dollars, according to newspaper estimates.
Some of Sarasota's leading citizens began to speak up in support of the CCC's return, including those representing the estate of Bertha Palmer, whose former cattle land made up a huge chunk of the proposed park.
On Aug. 26, the Tribune reported "considerable reversal of sentiment among the merchants" regarding the black CCC.
A week later, a hurricane without a name -- they were not christened in 1935 -- struck the Florida Keys, killing more than 1,000 (including 225 CCC corpsmen) and doing $5 million in damage up the coast as far as Sarasota.
CCC units throughout Florida, white and black and Seminole, were deployed for the relief effort, emerging as heroes in the communities they served.
On Sept. 15, 1935, the CCC agreed to move its SP-4 camp three miles east of the Myakka River, adding a body of water to the separation between the black corpsmen and their white neighbors.
On Oct. 1, the all-black SP-4 unit moved into its new quarters at Myakka River State Park, where it stayed until the job was done in 1941.
Finding a home
Oscar Manigo remained in the Civilian Conservation Corps until 1938, when he joined the Navy and moved to Washington with his bride, Irma Perdue, a Clearwater girl he met on the steps of the Baptist church in Overtown, near where the Newtown community center now stands.
The young men of the SP-4 unit found a comfortable welcome in Sarasota County's large and flourishing black community.
Part of the state survey team laying out the new town of Sarasota in the 1880s, a black man named Lewis Colson had recognized the potential in what was then already a substantial local black population -- ranch hands and farm workers mostly -- and developed the residential and commercial areas of Overtown as an all-black community.
During the building boom of the 1920s, black construction workers poured into the Sarasota area. By the end of the '30s, blacks made up a quarter of Sarasota County's 16,000 residents. Developers, black and white, extended Overtown into Newtown to the north, adding hundreds of homes.
"Overtown, Newtown -- people get it all messed up now," says Irma Manigo over lunch at her kitchen table.
When she met Oscar 65 years ago, it was the Overtown church where the SP-4 men would come for services on Sunday.
On Saturday nights, trucks would bring corpsmen into town for dances, chaperoned by camp officers, all of whom were white.
Sometimes, the officers would wait out the evening in downtown clubs and other places where the races mixed. But by and large, blacks and whites occupied separate worlds in the most fundamental sense.
Oscar arrived only two years after the CCC uproar died down, and Irma was in Sarasota at the time, yet neither Manigo remembers hearing anything about community resistance to the all-black corps.
In Oscar Manigo's world, mention of the CCC and the park evokes only the grinning recollections of a young man who was able to seize a place for himself in a world full of snakes.
He and Irma moved back to Sarasota with their five children after his honorable discharge from the Navy in 1959.
He got a job at what is now called Sun City Chevrolet, doing a little bit of everything, from running an all-night towing service to training and looking after the security dogs that roamed the parking lot at night.
He kept that job for 35 years, eventually buying his white-sided house in a tidy neighborhood not far from the Newtown Community Center, where some people nowadays will steal from your car if you don't lock it up, warns daughter JoAnn.
She looks in on Oscar and Irma on the weekends. Two sons died, including one as a soldier in the Vietnam War, but there is a surviving son in Chicago, grandchildren, great-grandchildren.
Daughter Helen Walker recently moved back home to look after her parents.
Irma has been ill recently, although she can still wear a turban like a duchess.
It's been years since any of them has been out to Myakka. Oscar and Irma used to take the girls out there, when they were kids, but that was a long time ago.
The last time Oscar went out there was with a friend from the service 30 to 35 years ago, he says. The friend brought his young daughter along for a boat ride and at one point encouraged her to wade in, causing Oscar to warn, one last time, that the river "ain't no swimming pool."
He doesn't fish and doesn't care anything about birds, and for years his back has been too bad to even think about taking a walk for pleasure.
His pleasure is in his memories, which surround him at the family table.
"I felt like I was building a park for people to enjoy, and in the meantime I was making a living," he told Paula Benshoff in 1984 -- a quote featured in an exhibit at the national CCC Museum in Sebring.
Now, he holds in his long hands a plaque given to him 10 years ago commemorating his service to the park he helped build.
"You were like the king of the jungle out there," he says.
