Editor's note:This column originally ran in 2014, when the future of the late Tom Gaskins' singular Cypress Knee Museum property was in question. As of last week, that question has been settled, as I learned in an email from a longtime supporter of the site, Harris Friedman: "I want to share the good news that the Cypress Knee Museum is protected from the bulldozer, as it is now under lease to Glades County," he wrote. "A group of citizens are organizing a local nonprofit to support the Cypress Knee Museum as a private-public partnership, and we want to begin some fundraising to clean the place up. Perhaps you might be interested in writing something on this, as previous articles you had written were so valuable. If so, please let me know." I told him, of course, I would, so count on a story from me once they build up some steam. In the meantime, here's a reminder of what we might have lost. 

Oh, to be a mid-20th-century motorist, tooling through Florida, urged on by those roadside ciphers, scribbled against the sky in hand-cut wooden letters nailed to dead trees.

They all led to a literal backwater about 50 miles east of Fort Myers on the headwaters of Fisheating Creek in blink-and-you'll-miss-it Palmdale. There, the late Tom Gaskins had come from Arcadia to settle (some said squat) during the Great Depression and carve out his idiosyncratic empire. It contained a home, a factory, a swamp tour and an entire museum dedicated to cypress knees — those gnarly growths that poke up from around the base of the wetland trees.

For five decades, Tom Gaskins' Cypress Knee Museum housed the world's largest (and only) collection of the trees' knobby upgrowths. Once upon a time, this was my very favorite roadside attraction: a stranger-than-fiction place so gloriously, freakily Florida it was almost too good to be true.

A Tom Gaskins story was a rite of passage for any journalist peering into the state's swampy soul. Tampa Bay Times' Jeff Klinkenberg, Bob Morris of the Orlando Sentinel, NPR's Jay Allison and myriad others wrapped their prose around Tom and his self-made world — and the wonder of the thing is that they were able to do so mostly without repeating themselves.

With subject matter like this, though, that was easy — there was more than enough to go around, starting with its founder, a self-described "crazy Florida Cracker entrepreneur" who prowled the swamp barefoot hunting knees to harvest.

He sold most of them, but the best ones made it into his museum, an open-air rectangular doughnut enclosing a pond where a live cypress towered over the roof. Murals of the swamp covered the walls; cases of knees lined the walkways, burnished to a golden gleam, though many visitors might not have realized that Gaskins' personal manufacturing process, for which he'd obtained U.S. Patent No. 2069580 in 1937, included the use of his tongue. Once he'd cut a knee and stripped off its bark, he'd lick it clean, lingually worrying off any clinging fiber as a mama cat would groom a kitten.

Like clouds, their shapes were open to interpretation, so Gaskins labeled them according to what he saw: "Bona Lisa," the brother of Mona Lisa, "Lady in an Evening Gown Dancing with a Two-Headed Monster from Another World" and "Lady Hippopotamus Wearing a Carmen Miranda Hat." He displayed knees resembling dancers' calves, knees that looked like dogs, bears or anteaters. There were court jester-shaped knees and knees in which Gaskins saw the faces of Joseph Stalin and FDR, both of whom he despised (he was an ardent, anti-government Libertarian before anyone was using that word).

To advertise his creations, Gaskins hammered up his handmade signs throughout south central Florida on byways and back roads where landowners weren't likely to complain. They're long-gone now, but behind the scrub oaks and the dog fennel, the old rock and block building is still there, only half-heartedly boarded up.

After Gaskins died in 1998, the state bought the building and property, as part of the Preservation 2000 land acquisition program managed by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Since then, there's been talk on and off of cleaning it up and reopening it. Glades County is trying to negotiate a lease agreement with the state, county manager Paul Carlisle told me, but nothing's final and the place remains weed-snarled and empty.

I'd first come when I was single and childless at the beginning of the last decade of the 20th century and I'd been drawn back at least once a year after that. I took my parents and Northern visitors to see it, and I took my firstborn there when he was still a toddler in a backpack a few years before Tom died. So when Roger, Nash and I were out that way the other day exploring, I couldn't resist stopping at the old place with my men.

We bushwhacked our way around back then stepped inside. The cases, still floored with the green sand that once anchored the knees, stood smudged and empty, some bashed in. The cypress tree still pushed up from the interior pond. But the old murals were gone, covered over with the kind of abstract graffiti you see on train cars and under bridges — huge stylized letter forms in lurid reds and oranges, the odd cartoon monstrosity, a few foul words. We crunched across the broken glass, stepped over stained rags and crumpled beer cans, looking for any trace of what the place once was before heading back outside.

And there it was, in plastic letters falling off curling plywood. It was an inscription he'd put up the year he'd opened the museum, one I'd dutifully transcribed on one of my first visits.

Most of the words were gone now, and the ones that remained askew, but we could pick out a few. "...a selfish reactionary, without any help, ever, from any city, county, state or federal government..."

Yeah, that sounded just like old Tom; I could almost hear him reading them, arms crossed, sleeves rolled up, a cocky half-grin on his sun-cured face.

So when we got back, I looked up the whole thing and found it as fitting an epitaph for Tom Gaskins and his world as the concrete block carcass of his museum now moldering on government soil:

"The cypress knee industry was started by and this museum was built by a selfish reactionary, without any help, ever, from any city, county, state or federal government. No RFC, NOLC, FHA, WPA, WBSOC. No price top, no price bottom, no subsidy, no labor union protection.

"What you see here can never be duplicated. Souvenirs of a time before civilization covered the United States."

Visit a Web page devoted to the Cypress Knee Museum in its heyday: http://kozmicdreams.com/tomgaskins.htm

Read the Florida archives blog about Gaskins and his museum: http://floridamemory.com/blog/tag/cypress-knee-museum

Hear a radio documentary about producer Jay Allison's chance meeting with Gaskins on a family trip through Florida: http://www.prx.org/pieces/53350-60-cypress-knees

1930s: Tom Gaskins moves his family from Arcadia to Palmdale and opens a cypress knee business. He lives on land he says he acquired with a handshake from Lykes Bros., a citrus, sugar and ranching company.

1951: Gaskins opens the Cypress Knee Museum. It gains fame as an eccentric, old-Florida attraction.

1993: Tom Jr. takes over the day-to-day operations of the museum and business from his father, who has Alzheimer's disease.

1998: Tom Gaskins dies; the state says his agreement with Lykes Bros. does, too

1999: Lykes. Bros sells the land the Gaskins family has lived on to the state as part of the Preservation 2000 program

2000: Tom Gaskins Jr. and family are told to leave the land; their home is moved to outside nearby Venus.2001-03: The museum building sits empty and is repeatedly vandalized. Tom Gaskins Jr. removes some of the knees; others are stolen.

2003: The state considers tearing down the building; Muse resident and Fisheating Creek Settlement Advisory Board member Harris Friedman begins trying to save it.

2004: Friedman and his nonprofit Floraglades Foundation propose a lease agreement and management plan for the building that might include creating a museum on the culture and ecology of the Fisheating Creek area. That hasn't yet happened, but the state hasn't demolished the building.