The history of Watersound.

Every other town in this series can be dated to a single decision. Seaside begins with an inheritance in 1978. Rosemary Beach begins with a 107-acre purchase. Alys Beach begins with a family buying land in 1979 and waiting a quarter century. Grayton begins with a homestead and a hand-drawn plat. Watersound does not work that way. It is not a town that was founded; it is a brand that was extended — applied over twenty-five years to a gated beach village, an inland golf community, a family neighborhood three miles north of the water, a retirement town in the next county, and, most recently, a shopping street with a pavilion at the end of it.

That makes Watersound the odd entry on this list, and the most revealing. The other four towns are arguments about urban form. This one is an argument about land — about what happens when a single company owns so much of a coastline that it can afford to develop it slowly, in pieces, in whatever order the market rewards. The company is The St. Joe Company, and to understand Watersound you have to start with a paper mill.

01 — Before the nameA million acres and a paper mill

In 1923, Alfred I. du Pont began buying Florida land. The Panhandle was cheap, cut-over, and largely worthless to anyone without a fifty-year time horizon, and du Pont — and after him his brother-in-law Edward Ball, who ran the du Pont testamentary trust for forty-six years — had exactly that. By 1936 the trust had incorporated the St. Joe Paper Company and started building a mill at Port St. Joe. At its peak the company held more than a million acres of Florida, making it the second-largest private landowner in the state.

For sixty years, that land was a supply chain. Pine went to the mill; the mill made linerboard; the linerboard made boxes. The beach was an externality. The stretch of coast that is now the eastern end of 30A — the dunes, the scrub, the two coastal dune lakes — sat on the balance sheet as timberland, valued at a few dollars an acre, for the entire period during which Robert Davis was drawing Seaside and the Stephens family was quietly assembling Alys Beach.

Then the business ended. St. Joe sold the paper mill in 1996 for $390 million; the new owners closed it permanently in 1998. What remained was the thing the mill had existed to feed: the land.

02 — 1997The year a land company became a developer

In January 1997, after a national search, the St. Joe board hired Peter S. Rummell as chief executive. Rummell was not a paper man. He had started in real estate in 1971 developing Hilton Head and Amelia Island for Sea Pines, moved to Arvida in 1977, and most recently run the Disney Development Company — the operation that built Celebration, Florida, the other great American company town of the nineties. He arrived with a single idea: the Panhandle was not timberland, it was inventory, and it should be sold by the lot rather than by the ton.

The company acquired Arvida that same year and began what its filings would call, without irony, a regional “placemaking” effort. WaterColor came first, on Western Lake beside Grayton Beach, opening in 2000. Watersound was second — and it is worth noticing that the two names are siblings by design. St. Joe was not naming villages after the families who settled them or the plants that grew there. It was building a product line.

03 — 2001Robert A.M. Stern behind a gate

The company's own annual report for 2002 describes the place with a developer's flatness that is, in its way, more revealing than any brochure: “WaterSound Beach is located in Walton County, Florida, approximately three miles east of WaterColor. WaterSound Beach is situated on approximately 256 acres and includes over one mile of beachfront on the Gulf of Mexico. This community is currently planned to include approximately 499 units.”

Two hundred and fifty-six acres, a mile of beach, and a number. The first forty-four homesites closed in 2001 at an average price of $320,000. In 2002 another sixty-four closed at an average of $400,000, a figure inflated by two Gulf-front lots that went for an average of $1,237,500 apiece and two lots on the peninsula at $730,000. By the end of 2002, one hundred and eight homesites had closed and eighty-one beachfront multi-family units were under construction. The place sold out its first phases into the fastest coastal market in modern Florida history, four years before that market collapsed.

The town plan came from Robert A.M. Stern — a choice that separates Watersound from its neighbors as sharply as the gate does. Seaside, Rosemary Beach, and Alys Beach were all planned by Duany Plater-Zyberk, the firm that wrote New Urbanism's rulebook, and all three are built around the DPZ obsession: the public street as the fundamental unit of a town. Stern is a different kind of traditionalist — a classicist of buildings more than of streets, and the architect Disney had used for the Yacht Club and the Casting Center. What he gave Watersound Beach was not a grid with a square at its center but a plan of paths, dune walkovers, and clearings, laid through the topography rather than over it.

The reference set moved north, too. Rosemary Beach looks to the Dutch West Indies; Alys Beach to Bermuda and Antigua; Seaside to the vernacular of the Florida Panhandle itself. Watersound Beach looks to Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard: weathered cedar shingles, standing-seam metal roofs, shell-encrusted stone, houses lifted on piers and left to gray. On a road otherwise committed to white stucco and Caribbean pastel, it reads as a deliberate act of contrast — New England set down on the Gulf.

04 — The groundCamp Creek Lake and a state park next door

Watersound Beach sits on genuinely rare ground, and the plan is organized around that fact more than around any street. Camp Creek Lake, a coastal dune lake, lies inside the community. Deer Lake State Park — roughly 1,920 acres of dune, scrub, and its own dune lake — presses against the western boundary.

Coastal dune lakes are among the world's rarest landforms. Walton County counts fifteen named ones along its twenty-six miles of coast, and the type occurs in only a handful of places on Earth: Madagascar, Australia, New Zealand, the Oregon coast, and here. Like Western Lake at Grayton, Camp Creek Lake occasionally breaches the dune line after heavy rain and drains tea-dark fresh water across the sand into the Gulf.

The design response was the boardwalk. Rather than cut streets to the water, Watersound Beach threads dozens of elevated walkways and pedestrian bridges through the dune field, so that the dunes stay intact and the walk to the beach becomes the community's signature experience. It is the most persuasive thing about the place, and the most quietly radical: on a coast where the standard move is to level the dune and put the best houses on top of it, Watersound Beach left the landform in charge of the plan.

05 — The gateWhat Watersound Beach is not

It is also the only community in this series you cannot walk into. Seaside's central square is a public amphitheater. Rosemary Beach's Western Green hosts a farmers market anyone can attend. Alys Beach, for all its formality, opens its amphitheater and its streets to visitors. Watersound Beach has a twenty-four-hour manned gatehouse, and access to the beach club, the pools, the putting course, and that celebrated boardwalk system belongs to owners, renters, and members.

This is not a moral failure; it is a different product. But it has a consequence that matters for anyone trying to understand the road: for its first two decades, Watersound had no public life at all. It contributed houses, tax base, and rental inventory to 30A and nothing that a visitor could attend. The story of the next twenty years is, in large part, the story of that gap being filled — three miles inland, on the other side of a highway.

The planned towns of 30A were built around a square and then filled in. Watersound was built around a gate, a golf course, and a grocery store, and only afterward went looking for a square.

06 — 2002The 1,440 acres nobody could see yet

While the beach village was closing lots, St. Joe was entitling something much larger behind it. The same 2002 annual report records a second project, confusingly called simply “WaterSound”: about 1,440 acres east of the beach village with frontage on Lake Powell, preliminarily designed for roughly 1,020 residential units and a golf course. On October 8, 2002, the Walton County Commission voted to transmit a comprehensive plan amendment for it to the state, with a Development of Regional Impact review expected to run twelve to eighteen months after that.

Lake Powell is worth pausing on. At roughly 800 acres it is the largest coastal dune lake in North America — and by most accounts in the world — straddling the Walton–Bay county line. Everything St. Joe would later brand as Watersound Origins, Watersound Origins West, and Watersound Camp Creek descends from that 2002 entitlement and that lake frontage. The paperwork was filed before the first Nantucket shingle had weathered.

Then the market broke. The 2008 crash hit Northwest Florida coastal land harder than almost anywhere in the country; Rummell departed St. Joe that year, and the company spent the next several years writing down land rather than platting it. The inland Watersound sat entitled and empty for more than a decade — which is why a place that begins in 2001 feels, on the ground, like a place that begins in 2015.

07 — Golf firstFairways before front porches

One detail says more about Watersound's development logic than any master plan: the golf came first. Camp Creek Golf Course, a Tom Fazio design master-planned for thirty-six holes, opened its first eighteen for play in May 2001 — four miles east of WaterColor and within half a mile of a Watersound that barely existed. Shark's Tooth, a Greg Norman course laid along the shore of Lake Powell, followed in 2002.

In a New Urbanist town, the amenity follows the residents: you build the square, the houses fill in, the market and the bandstand come because there are people to use them. In a land-company town, the amenity is the reason the land becomes worth building on. St. Joe built two championship courses into raw pine and then sold the ground around them — a sequence closer to Hilton Head, where Rummell started, than to anything DPZ ever drew.

08 — 2010The company moves in

In 2010, St. Joe did something few developers ever do: it moved in. The company relocated its corporate headquarters from Jacksonville — where it had built a 140,000-square-foot office tower only seven years earlier — to a modest complex off U.S. 98 at Watersound, a few miles from the land it was trying to sell. Around the same period it donated roughly 4,000 acres for the relocated Panama City–Bay County International Airport, which opened in 2010 and put a jet-capable field twenty-five minutes from 30A.

The headquarters move mattered more than its square footage. It made Watersound the company's address as well as its product, and it announced that the Panhandle build-out was not a portfolio position to be liquidated but the whole business. (The offices moved again in 2020, to Beckrich Office Park in Panama City Beach, where St. Joe is headquartered today — but the name stayed on the land.)

09 — 2014–2015Watersound Origins, and a different customer

The inland tract finally opened as Watersound Origins. A community trail was dedicated with a ribbon-cutting on October 31, 2014, and model homes were being toured through 2015. The pitch was the opposite of the beach village's: not a Gulf-front second home behind a gate, but an attainable primary residence three miles north of the water, in a neighborhood of front porches, pine woods, and shared amenities, with a Village Commons pool and fitness center that every homeowner joins automatically.

Origins got its own golf, too — a ten-hole par-3 short course designed by Davis Love III, unusual enough in an era of championship layouts to function as a statement of intent: this is a neighborhood course, playable in an hour, walkable from the houses. The trail system eventually stitched Origins toward Panama City Beach, and residents got dock access on Lake Powell.

It worked, and then it kept working. By the end of 2025 the Origins family had grown to include Watersound Origins West, entitled and planned for more than 3,200 homesites on its own — larger, in raw unit count, than Seaside, Rosemary Beach, Alys Beach, and Watersound Beach put together.

10 — 2020–2022A Publix, and then a pavilion

On February 24, 2020 — three weeks before the pandemic closed the beaches — St. Joe announced Watersound Town Center: a walkable, open-air lifestyle center at the intersection of U.S. 98 and North Watersound Parkway, anchored by a 48,000-square-foot Publix with a pharmacy, deli, bakery, and liquor store, and master-planned for roughly 200,000 additional square feet of leasable commercial space.

The grocery store was the headline and the pavilion was the point. A covered open-air event pavilion went up at the center of the site, and it started working before the retail did: a Saturday farmers market opened under it in September 2021, more than a year before the Publix finally opened its doors in late 2022. Origins Main Street filled in behind it — Starbucks, local shops, restaurants, second-floor offices — through 2023 and 2024. By December 31, 2025 the Town Center held about 149,000 net leasable square feet and was 98 percent leased.

What the pavilion produced is the thing Watersound had never had. The First Friday concert series, the Flutterby arts festival, the fall block party, and Porchfest on the lawns and porches of Origins next door all run on ground that is open to anyone who drives up. Twenty years after the gate went in at the beach, the east end of the corridor finally got a public room — not on the Gulf, but on a highway, in front of a grocery store.

11 — 2019–2022Margaritaville, and the scale problem

In December 2019, St. Joe announced a joint venture with Minto Communities to build Latitude Margaritaville Watersound: a Jimmy Buffett-branded active-adult community of roughly 3,700 homes, on the Bay County side near West Bay. Ground broke in 2020; the thousandth home sold in 2022.

It is not on 30A, it is not walkable to any beach, and it has nothing architecturally to do with Nantucket shingles or with the porches of Origins. But it carries the name, and it is by unit count the largest single thing ever built under it. Anyone who arrives on 30A expecting “Watersound” to denote a place, the way Seaside or Grayton denotes a place, runs aground here. The word denotes a portfolio.

12 — 2021–2024Camp Creek, an inn, and a third course

The last decade filled in the middle. Watersound Camp Creek, a gated enclave of 262 large homesites along the Fazio course, sold all twenty-three lots in its first offering in February 2021. The Watersound Club — the membership organization that now ties the beach club, the golf, and the amenities together — opened a new complex there: an 11,000-square-foot wellness center, eight lighted tennis courts, eight pickleball courts, and a resort pool with a waterslide and lazy river.

Camp Creek Inn, seventy-five rooms in three stories over the golf course, opened in July 2023 — the fifth hotel St. Joe opened that year. The Sporting Preserve, a twelve-stand sporting clays course, followed in June 2024, and The Third, a third golf course, opened that November. The company's hotel roster on this stretch now runs from the sixty-seven-room WaterColor Inn and the fifty-five-room Pearl at Rosemary Beach down to the Watersound Inn, which has eleven rooms.

13 — The nameWhy it is spelled two ways

Older signs, deeds, and SEC filings render it “WaterSound,” with the internal capital — a piece of turn-of-the-millennium branding that matched WaterColor and WaterSound West Beach. Current St. Joe materials write it “Watersound,” one word, one capital, usually with a registered trademark symbol attached. Both are correct depending on the decade, and you will see both within a mile of each other on the ground. This site uses the modern form.

The neighborhoods that carry it now include Watersound Beach and Watersound West Beach on 30A itself; Watersound Origins, Watersound Origins West, and Watersound Camp Creek inland; Watersound Town Center on U.S. 98; the Watersound Club and Watersound Inn; and Latitude Margaritaville Watersound in the next county. There is no mayor, no municipal boundary, and no single architectural code binding them — only a developer, a membership, and a word.

14 — What you can seeReading Watersound from the road

Driving east on 30A, Watersound Beach announces itself as a gap: a long stretch of protected dune where the road runs beside Deer Lake State Park, then a gatehouse and a glimpse of gray shingle above the scrub. You are not getting in, and that is the point — note it and keep going. Three miles north on U.S. 98, at the Origins entrance, Watersound Town Center is the opposite: surface parking, a Publix, a main street of shopfronts, and a pavilion with a lawn in front of it where, on the right Friday, several hundred people are sitting in folding chairs listening to a band.

Those two scenes are twenty years and three miles apart, and they are the same development. If you want to understand what changed in Florida coastal real estate between 2001 and 2025 — from gate-and-golf exclusivity toward walkable, year-round, grocery-anchored town-making for people who actually live here — you can see the whole argument by driving between them.

15 — CodaThe company town

The other four places in this series were made by people who wanted to make a town and had to find the land. Watersound was made by a company that had the land and spent twenty-five years working out what to make. That is why it resists the format of these histories: there is no founding, no charter, no single plan you can hold up and argue with.

But it would be a mistake to read that as an absence of ideas. Stern gave the beach village a real one — let the dune line dictate the plan — and the boardwalks through those dunes are as considered as anything DPZ drew down the road. Origins gave the corridor something none of the coded towns ever managed: houses that working families in Walton County could actually buy. And the pavilion at the Town Center, a covered slab on a highway frontage, has quietly become one of the busiest public gathering places on the east end of 30A, doing the job Seaside's amphitheater does, without the amphitheater.

Seaside argued that a town could be designed. Grayton demonstrated that a town could just happen. Watersound is the third case, and the one most likely to define what the rest of this coast becomes: a town assembled by a landowner, one phase at a time, over a quarter century, arriving at a public square only after it had already sold most of the houses.

Further readingOn this site

• The Watersound events calendar — First Friday concerts, Flutterby, Porchfest, and what else is on at the Pavilion this week.
• The Pavilion at Watersound Town Center — the venue guide, with parking and seating notes.
• The history of Seaside — the 1981 town that started all of this, eight miles west.
• The history of Alys Beach — the all-white Bermudian town two miles east, and the closest thing on 30A to Watersound's opposite.
• The history of Grayton Beach — the 1890 village nobody planned.
• All histories — the full series on the towns of 30A.

SourcesPrimary references for this article

• The St. Joe Company — Form 10-K for fiscal year 2002 (SEC EDGAR). Primary source for WaterSound Beach's 256 acres, one-plus mile of beachfront, and ~499 planned units; the 108 homesites closed and 46 multi-family contracts pending as of December 31, 2002; the 44 homesites closed in 2001 at an average $320,000 and 64 in 2002 at an average $400,000, including two Gulf-front lots averaging $1,237,500; the separate ~1,440-acre “WaterSound” project on Lake Powell planned for ~1,020 units and the October 8, 2002 comprehensive plan amendment transmittal; the May 2001 opening of the Tom Fazio–designed Camp Creek Golf Course; the 4,000-acre airport land donation; and the January 2003 Sacred Heart hospital opening on donated land.
• The St. Joe Company — Form 10-K filings, 2021 through 2025 (SEC EDGAR). Sources for the Watersound Club structure and facilities; The Third golf course (opened November 2024) and The Sporting Preserve (June 2024, twelve stands); the hotel roster and room counts (Camp Creek Inn 75, WaterColor Inn 67, The Pearl 55, Watersound Inn 11); Watersound Town Center net leasable area and occupancy (~149,000 sq ft, 98% leased at December 31, 2025); Watersound Origins West's 3,221 planned homesites; the ~3,700-home Latitude Margaritaville Watersound joint venture; and the company's Beckrich Office Park headquarters.
• The St. Joe Company — Wikipedia and Company Histories — The St. Joe Company. Sources for the 1923 du Pont land purchases, the 1936 incorporation of St. Joe Paper, the peak holdings of more than a million acres, the $390 million 1996 mill sale and 1998 closure, the January 1997 hiring of Peter Rummell and the Arvida acquisition, the 2003 Jacksonville headquarters, Rummell's 2008 departure, and the 2010 headquarters relocation to Watersound.
• Peter Rummell — Wikipedia and Edward Ball — Wikipedia. Sources for Rummell's Sea Pines, Arvida, and Disney Development background, and for Ball's forty-six years running the du Pont trust.
• Scenic Sotheby's International Realty — Watersound Beach. Source for the Robert A.M. Stern master plan, the Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard references, the weathered cedar shingle and standing-seam vernacular, the 24-hour gated entrance, Camp Creek Lake, Puttering Park, and the elevated boardwalks and pedestrian bridges.
• SoWal — WaterSound Beach. Source for the GateHouse and Beach Club amenities, the 7,000-square-foot zero-entry pool, the dozens of dune boardwalks, Camp Creek Lake as a coastal dune lake, and the 1,920-acre Deer Lake State Park on the western border.
• 30A.com — WaterSound communities. Source for the relationship between Watersound Beach, Watersound West Beach, Watersound Origins, and Watersound Camp Creek, the Beach Club membership structure, and the Origins amenity package including Lake Powell dock access.
• Walton County — Coastal Dune Lakes and Florida State Parks — Lake Powell at Camp Helen. Sources for the fifteen named dune lakes, their global rarity, the intermittent outfalls, and Lake Powell as the largest coastal dune lake in North America at roughly 800 acres.
• Business Wire — St. Joe announces Watersound Town Center (February 24, 2020) and SoWal — Publix and more commercial coming to Watersound Town Center. Sources for the 48,000-square-foot Publix, the ~200,000 additional square feet of planned leasable space, the U.S. 98 and North Watersound Parkway location, the covered event pavilion, and the farmers market that began under it in September 2021.
• Business Wire — Watersound Town Center tenant openings (September 2022) and Business Wire — New tenant openings at Watersound Town Center (June 2024). Sources for the Publix opening in late 2022 and the Origins Main Street retail build-out through 2024.
• Panama City Beach — New Watersound trail in the Origins community. Source for the October 31, 2014 trail ribbon-cutting and Watersound Origins as St. Joe's then-newest community.
• GolfPass — Origins Golf Club and Top 100 Golf Courses — Shark's Tooth. Sources for the ten-hole par-3 Davis Love III short course at Origins and the 2002 opening of the Greg Norman–designed Shark's Tooth on Lake Powell.
• Business Wire — All 23 homesites sold in the first Watersound Camp Creek offering (February 2021) and Business Wire — Commencement of Watersound Camp Creek (March 2020). Sources for the 262 custom homesites and the first-offering sellout.
• Business Wire — Camp Creek Inn opens (July 2023). Source for the 75-room inn, its status as St. Joe's fifth hotel opening of 2023, and the adjacent 11,000-square-foot wellness center, eight tennis and eight pickleball courts, and resort pool complex.
• Business Wire — Minto and St. Joe begin Latitude Margaritaville Watersound (December 2019). Source for the joint venture, the groundbreaking, and the active-adult concept.

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