The Mullet Men
How a Fish Fed Pioneer Florida
A single well-placed net could take more fish than any hook-and-line fisherman could match.
Long before anyone called it Florida, a fish was already feeding the people who lived along its coasts. The Calusa wove nets from palm fiber and fished the shallow waters of the Gulf, where striped mullet ran in dense schools. A Spanish chronicler writing around 1570 described a “great fishery of mullet” there. For centuries afterward the same fish fed Florida’s coastal families, and the people who built their lives around it became known as mullet men.
A Fish Built for Abundance
Striped mullet is a grazer, feeding on algae and organic matter rather than chasing prey, and it is not a fish that fights hard on a hook. What made it matter was how reliably abundant it was. Mullet move in huge schools, living in rivers and brackish estuaries before moving to saltwater each fall in what fishing families call the mullet run. A single well-placed net could take far more fish than any hook-and-line fisherman could match. According to historian Michelle Zacks, mullet was for generations the lowest-cost, highest-volume commercial food fish produced in the state.
Ranchos and Salt Fish
Zacks’s 2013 dissertation describes Cuban fishermen visiting Florida’s southwest coast to harvest mullet since at least the late 1600s, working seasonal camps called ranchos. They worked first alongside Calusa fishermen and, from the late 1700s, alongside Creek and Yamasee people who had moved to the southern Gulf coast. Her account describes crews of Indigenous, European and African descent, and a trade that sent salted fish to Cuba. Demand rose around Lent, when Spanish Catholic traditions favored fish over meat.
Before refrigeration, fishermen split the fish and salted it into barrels, or smoked it. Either method turned a fish that spoiled quickly in Florida’s heat into food that could reach inland communities. A 2025 Flamingo Magazine account describes seasonal seine yards in places such as Wakulla County, where crews lived on site for six to eight weeks each fall hauling nets and packing barrels onto trains at depots such as Sopchoppy. Barrels were often bartered rather than sold, traded to South Georgia farmers for crops like sweet potatoes.
New Families, New Towns
Beginning in the 1880s, fishing families arrived from Carteret County, North Carolina, which had its own long mullet-fishing tradition. In historian David Cecelski’s account, Billy Fulford and two brothers left Carteret County in the early 1880s, tried Cedar Key and Perico Island, and settled at Hunter’s Point on Sarasota Bay, the village that grew into Cortez.
Cecelski also describes John C. Lewis, born in Beaufort in 1847, who settled at Punta Gorda around 1886 and built a fish company with fellow North Carolinian Lorenzo T. Blocksom. When the railroad reached Punta Gorda it brought the area’s first ice plants, so fishermen could ship fresh, iced mullet instead of relying only on salting.
The End of an Era
In the 1970s, according to Zacks, federal and state officials encouraged an export market for mullet roe, and buyers in Japan, Taiwan and Europe paid high prices for it. A fish once considered too cheap to bother with became a valuable commodity.
In November 1994 Florida voters approved Amendment 3, a citizens’ initiative titled “Limiting Marine Net Fishing.” Effective July 1, 1995, it banned gill nets and other entangling nets in state waters and limited other nets in nearshore and inshore waters to 500 square feet of mesh. Mullet fishing continued on a much smaller scale. Zacks reports that West Coast landings averaged about 24 million pounds a year from 1950 to 1994 and about 7 million pounds a year from 1995 to 2011. For communities like Cortez, where mullet had supported generations of the same families, the amendment ended a way of working that had defined them.
Quick Facts
The fish
Striped mullet (Mugil cephalus), also called black or jumping mullet
Earliest harvesters
The Calusa, who made nets from palm fiber
Early Cuban trade
Cuban fishermen at southwest Florida ranchos by at least the late 1600s, per Zacks
Later crews
Creek and Yamasee people from the late 1700s; people of African descent also described at the ranchos
Preservation
Splitting and salting into barrels, or smoking
Migrant families
From Carteret County, North Carolina, beginning in the 1880s
Cortez origin
Hunter’s Point on Sarasota Bay, settled by Carteret County families
Ice plants
Came with the railroad to Punta Gorda, around 1886
Roe boom
Export market encouraged from the 1970s
Net amendment
Approved November 1994; effective July 1, 1995
Did You Know?
- Mullet are known for leaping clear of the water, which earned them the name jumping mullet.
- Barrels of salt mullet were often traded to South Georgia farmers for sweet potatoes.
- Roadside smoked-mullet stands became a familiar sight on Florida’s Gulf coast in the twentieth century.
Vocabulary
Rancho: a seasonal fishing camp on the coast.
Seine: a long net pulled around a school of fish.
Roe: the eggs of a fish, sold as a delicacy.
Discussion Questions
1. Why did mullet suit net fishing and salt preservation so well?
2. How can a voter-approved law change a community’s way of life, and who decides what is worth preserving?
Related Articles
- FLH-0085 — The Fishing Ranchos
- FLH-0086 — The Watermen of the Ten Thousand Islands
- FLH-0095 — Living From the Lagoon
- FLH-0096 — The Watermen of Sebastian
Sources
Zacks, Michelle Honora. From Table to Trash: The Rise and Fall of Mullet Fishing in Southwest Florida. University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, 2013 (first chapters examined only).
Cecelski, David. Account of the Carteret County migration to Florida (cited via secondary description; not independently examined).
Earll, R. Edward. “The Mullet Fishery.” In The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States, vol. II. Government Printing Office, 1887 (cited via secondary description).
Copyright © 2026 Wm. E. McMullen II. All rights reserved. Published by Florida Learning Hub.