Caddo Lake: Businesses profit from influx of tourists to the lake

Special Projects Editor

 Mike and Nita Fyffe are busy serving their customers at Fyffe's Corner Grocery and Bait this summer. It's that time of year, the couple said, when tourists visiting Caddo Lake triple the store's usual trade.

 And Fyffe's — located at the entrance to Caddo Lake State Park — is not the only business that profits from the lake's visiting fishermen, campers, sightseers and birdwatchers.

 The entire Caddo Lake business community, Harrison County and East Texas as a whole would suffer economically without the lake's pull on vacationers.

 Tourists spent $53 million in Harrison County in 2002, generating $931,000 in local tax receipts and 620 jobs, according to Dean Runyon Associates, a firm that specializes in economic consulting work.

 Travel and tourism spending in the combined Longview-Marshall area was $203.1 million, and travel and tourism for the entire upper East Texas region was $868 million, according to the same source.

 Travellers and tourists accounted for only $7.3 million in Marion County.

 A Runyon spokesman said the firm did not investigate the link between Caddo Lake and tourism.

 But more than 100,000 tourists visited the lake in 2003, said the Texas Parks and Wildlife department, and when tourists or fishermen visit the lake, "they don't just go to the lake. They go to Marshall to buy things and eat here and sleep here and buy supplies here," said Connie Ware, Greater Marshall Chamber of Commerce chief executive officer.

 Tourism, she said, saves each county taxpayer about $800 per year.

 Caddo does draw people and she should know, Ware said, because she and husband, Jim, "used to have a place at the lake and we had to be a visitors center for people who were lost.

 "Every weekend we had 10 people driving down our driveway and they were totally from out of town. And that was just us."

 Ware predicted that recent publicity about the Ramsar Convention will draw more visitors to the lake, as well as the newly-created national wildlife refuge, because "bird watchers are growing in huge numbers in the United States."

 The Ramsar Convention is a treaty between nations, including the United States, regarding wetlands protection.

 Ware is right, "Nature tourism and birding (bird watching) are two of the fastest growing kinds of tourism," said Patsy Dreesen, the chamber's director of convention and visitor development.

 "It used to be that" birdwatchers "just went to the coast, but now they are venturing to the lakes, especially the naturally-formed lakes," she said.

 Lexie McMillen, who co-owns the Caddo Lake Steamboat Company, said she believes that up to 75 percent of the customers she and her husband take on boat rides are either drawn to the lake for its beauty, or its ecology, or they are birdwatchers.

 The nature lovers are drawn to Caddo "due to the uniqueness of the lake," she said, including the bald cypress trees. "It's just totally different.

 "They've seen it in pictures, but not necessarily in person because these kinds of swamplands are hard to get to, and they are scarce too. They're not a place you just get to wherever you go.

 "It's been estimated that 90 percent of American swamps have disappeared, and so that makes Caddo a special place."

 Asked if the lake's problems, such as low oxygen levels that harm fish, could eventually hurt the tourist trade, Dreesen said yes.

 "Although the bass fishermen don't call themselves tourists, they are tourists, and they spend money for hotels and food and gas and they have to buy something for the wife to take home," she said.

 And if the lake's problems can't be cured and it deteriorates further, Dreesen said tourism based on birdwatching and ecology will suffer because those visitors would not "have the beauty to look at."

 Not everybody agrees. Gary Kempf, whose family owns Crip's Camp, on the lake, said he doesn't believe that fishermen particularly care that the lake's large-mouthed bass are contaminated with mercury.

 Most fishermen who come from places other than Harrison County are unaware that the bass can be dangerous to eat in quantities, he said.

 But even when they do know about the mercury warning, it doesn't keep fishermen from coming because they come for the sport, he said, and tend to release the bass they catch.

 Contact special projects editor Julia Robb via e-mail at: jrobb@coxnews.com; or by phone at (903) 927-8918.