Twillingate
Twillingate is a fictional small town in the Florida panhandle, first seen in the book Rocinante.
Jackie Archer wrote in a letter to her parents "I don’t know if you’ve got a map that will show Twillingate on it; we can’t find it on any map that we have with us. It’s a little town on the Gulf Coast, not too far from Tallahassee."Roc2-7
Downtown consisted of five stores in 1971. "The biggest of which was a wooden, two-story general store, set up several feet off the ground on pilings, as were most of the buildings in Twillingate. In front of the general store was a gas pump — the old-fashioned kind, hand pumped, with a glass top... There was what appeared to be a dry-goods store, an unpainted garage-appearing building that also had a hand-powered gas pump, a building that appeared to be a small market, and another building that had a sign on it: Post Office, Twillingate, Florida. The few signs on the fronts of the building didn’t give much indication of what went on in them."Roc2-6
The Cowgill family owned the planation that qualified as the wealthy side of town and owned most of the surrounding land, including the airstrip that allowed hunting parties to fly in for quail. The plantation raised corn, shade tobacco and worked some trees for turpentine. There was also a sawmill on the plantation.
Paul and his wife Bessie Thibodaux ran the very old fashioned Rhinelander Switchboard phone system until with later help, it was upgraded to dial.
Brother Erasmus and Ethylene Green served the predominantly black Twillingate Bethel Church while the Rev. and Elsie Sprague worked the predominantly white Baptist Church. They were not rivals exactly as evident during the communal church raising.
Jackie Archer and Mark Gravengood first arrived there in 1971 because of a strong thunderstorm and an accompanying tornado that gave them a scare and forced them to land, and ended up punching holes all the way through both wings of Rocinante. The tornado also took the entire roof off of the church pastored by Brother Erasmus.
One resident of town, a small boy named E.J. Seasprunk, was raised by Brother Erasmus and Ethylene. He earned a high school diploma despite no school bus coming within miles. He won admission to the US Air Force Academy and later served as the top scorer in the Gulf War.
In 1999, Mark and Jackie flew to revisit many of the locations in their trip from thirty years earlier and found Twillingate among the biggest changes for the worst. All their all friends were gone now. They had revisited at least once earlier.FtS28
Real World note
The town of Twillingate, Florida in the Spearfish Lake Tales universe is fictional.
There is a real Twillingate, a town of 2,500 people located on the Twillingate Islands which are located in Notre Dame Bay, off the northeastern shore of the island of Newfoundland in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. The
alternate (French) spelling is "Toulinquet".
The Wikipedia page is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twillingate.
