Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Apalachicola, FL

Apalachicola is a small Gulf Coast city and the county seat of Franklin County, sitting at the mouth of the Apalachicola River where it empties into Apalachicola Bay.

The site began as a British-era cotton trading post called Cottonton; the town was incorporated as West Point in 1827 and renamed Apalachicola in 1831.

The name Apalachicola comes from the Indigenous people of the area and is usually translated as 'people on the other side' - a reference to those living across the river.

In the early 1800s Apalachicola was the third-largest port on the Gulf of Mexico, surpassed only by New Orleans and Mobile, as steamboats carried cotton down the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint river system to its docks.

Before the Civil War, Apalachicola was the sixth-largest town in Florida, with 1,906 residents, a racetrack, an opera house and its own newspaper.

Apalachicola is where Dr. John Gorrie, who arrived as a young physician in 1833, invented a machine to make ice - on May 6, 1851 he received the first U.S. patent for mechanical refrigeration, and a replica of his machine is displayed at the John Gorrie Museum State Park.

Gorrie was a one-man civic institution in Apalachicola, at various times serving as the town's mayor, postmaster, city treasurer, council member and bank director, and helping found Trinity Episcopal Church.

Apalachicola Bay was long one of the most productive oyster grounds on Earth, historically supplying about 90% of all oysters sold in Florida and roughly 10% of the entire United States oyster harvest.

After the bay's oyster reefs collapsed, Florida's wildlife commission voted to shut down Apalachicola Bay's wild oyster harvest in 2020; regulators moved to lift the shutdown in 2025.

Every year on the first weekend of November, Apalachicola hosts the Florida Seafood Festival, one of the oldest seafood festivals in Florida, drawing thousands of visitors to the little town.