When Mitchell, who is known to no one as Charles Burrell Mitchell III, searched for land in 1973, he chose a neighborhood frequented by snakes, wading birds, and alligators. (For confirmation of the latter's appetite, just whistle for Mitchell's three-legged dog, Joshua.) Mitchell says he picked the murky spot because "I knew it was where I wanted to spend the rest of my life."
Yet another visionary leap. Or was he stoned out of his gourd?
At the time, Mitchell was an antiwar activist with his hair wound into a ponytail. He came from a conservative family; his father served as an executive at Ford Motor Co. Despite the family's frequent moves -- or maybe because of them -- Mitchell had developed a portable identity as a serious swimmer, gracefully and speedily overcoming the resistance of water to set state records in the freestyle butterfly.
In fact, a swimming scholarship brought him to Florida State University, where he won a Wilson Fellowship to study for his Ph.D. in American history at Yale University. His goal: to return to Tallahassee to teach American studies, which had been his major. He was supposed to spend the summer of 1973, before entering Yale, in New Haven, helping to edit the papers of abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
But a fateful meal at the old Sun Restaurant changed all that.
They were a bunch of kids -- some young professors, too -- and somehow they got to talking about buying themselves a big patch of land and working it like real pioneers: building roads, digging wells, pounding out houses. Mitchell, who had written his senior thesis on utopian communities, was absolutely enamored with the prospect. "For people involved in the environment and peace, the idea seemed like a very positive one," says Paul Elliot, then and now a biology professor at Florida State. "For a 20-year-old, Chuck had an amazing sense of knowing how he wanted to live." Farewell, New Haven. Howdy, Miccosukee Land Cooperative.
"Of course I was disappointed," says his father, Charles B. Mitchell Jr. "What father wouldn't be?" Indeed, Mitchell says his father did not talk to him for two and a half years. "It was real tough; we were very estranged," he recalls. His dad, who is known as Charlie, claims that Chuck is exaggerating. "I guess it seemed like a long time to Chuck," adds Chuck's mother, Polly, diplomatically. Responds Chuck, "My father just doesn't want to admit how pissed off I made him."
No one wins when a family splinters like that. Usually. Suffice it to say that Charlie Mitchell ultimately moved with his wife to Tallahassee and earned his real estate agent's license so he could work for Chuck. Brother John also made the move, bought a chunk of co-op land from Chuck, and now serves as a GTO vice-president and director of manufacturing support. "That's how forceful Chuck is," says Polly. "He is very definitely the leader of this family."
So it was that the boy who once convinced his fellow kindergartners that the apple juice they were drinking was actually beer came to serve as business coordinator of the effort to build a utopia just 21 miles from the Georgia border. Organized into work parties -- modeled on traditional Quaker barn raisings -- the group bought 240 acres and set the walls, rafters, roofs, and floors of 16 houses that first summer. Mitchell's was first, eventually incorporating such components as shrimp-boat keels, utility poles, railroad ties, and a cherry tree that was sculpted into a spiral stairway.
"Chuck was a leader by doing," recalls Elliot, whose home is about 100 yards away from Mitchell's. "He would just get on the tractor and develop a road, or set out working on his house. He elicits other people's involvement in a natural way. It's not a courtesy or a management style; it's how he is."
Laurie Dozier III -- son of GTO's chairman -- worked on Mitchell's house as a founding member of the co-op and later became his business partner. "Chuck could just will things into existence," says Dozier, a 44-year-old who confesses to having sported a basketball-size hairstyle in the co-op's early days. "His attention to every individual, his eye contact, the way he speaks directly to people, and the way he'll understand their plight and agenda make him a very persuasive person. He's a magnet."
Mitchell, for his part, chose to take lessons from the co-op not about his own power -- after all, he already knew there was plenty he did not know -- but about the capacities of others. "People intimidated by trusses and rafters were building houses, even when folks told us we were stupid," recalls Mitchell. "When you get people who never thought they could do something like that, and they do it, then they start thinking, 'Maybe I can do other things I thought I couldn't."
Further, Mitchell believed that the building of the co-op demonstrated that people with individual stakes could work together in teams to make unimagined progress. Although co-op members owned their own plots of land, they never lost sight of the larger aim: to create a community together and to live in harmony with big rats. Or with nature in general, which sometimes includes big rats in the form of beavers.
One day Mitchell's front yard flooded because beavers had built a dam in the creek that runs near his house. Instead of firing away at them -- and enjoying the pelts -- he tore down the dam and strung a transistor radio there, cranked up to a classic-rock station. All that loud music and all that mud; it was a virtual Woodstock '94 for aquatic rodents. "They moved on," reports Mitchell, who knew beavers were sensitive to sound. That kind of respect would form the foundation of the philosophy that Mitchell ultimately brought to GTO last year. But not before refining it with actual human beings.
Given the precision of Mitchell's construction skills, by 1974 he found himself in demand as a builder for hire. He slung a saw over his shoulder, grabbed a nail bag, and roll-started his 1962 pickup; "I was in hog heaven," he says. Make that dog heaven. Mitchell and a partner formed a construction business that would eventually be known as Mad Dog Design & Construction Co.
