The Murmuring Surf Cottages were located on Scenic Highway 98, across from Embassy Suites in Miramar Beach.
In 2007, I posted a couple of photos on a message board and asked for information about Murmuring Surf. I was delighted when Clay Terry, the daughter of the owners, wrote to me. She graciously gave me permission to post her family’s story:
My father and mother, John and Emily Terry, made the bold decision to leave their city lives, jobs, friends, and connections to move to what was then an isolated parcel of land overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. They left Memphis TN in 1948 with their two toddler girls, moved into an old rental cottage with no hot water, and my father began to build a house for them and to plan for the “tourist court” that he and my mother decided would be their family business. My mother taught school while my father built the eight cottages that were the original Murmuring Surf, and once tourists began to trickle in and then become faithful customers, mother was able to give up working away from home and join my father in running the business. I was born in 1953 and my brother John was born in 1959, which meant that our family was too big for the original house my father built, so he built a new house that was attached to the old one. Although my father had an architect design the cottages and the “new house”, he build them himself, with only an unskilled helper who was often not available due to his drinking habits. These buildings were so solid that they survived numerous hurricanes with little or no damage, including Hurricane Opal, which absolutely devastated the Destin/south Walton area and washed away our beach and the bluff above it, but our only structural damage was a partial “peeling back” of the roof on one cottage. My brother John graduated from Georgia Tech with a degree in civil engineering but always knew that he would come back home and work in the family business, which he did in 1982. He built a four unit apartment building and “double-decked” the two front cottages, bringing the total number of rental units to fourteen. In 1995, he completed a new house on the property (the one that I think you mentioned you saw being moved from our property) and that is where he, his wife and daughter, and my parents lived until Murmuring Surf was sold in October 2005 (except my father, who died in 2003 at almost 90).
Murmuring Surf was the last family owned and operated motel on what used to be called the Miracle Strip (now the Emerald Coast), the stretch of land from Pensacola to Panama City. The decision to sell after 57 successful and entertaining years was too difficult to imagine, except that our area had changed so drastically and it was no longer the pleasant, easy-going, reasonably-priced little corner of the world that it had once been. Folks who were not our customers (often they were staying at Embassy Suites across the street) roamed over our property and beach at all hours of the day and night and were apt to become belligerent if they were told that it was private property and asked to leave. Our own customers, most of whom had been coming for decades, did not hesitate to patrol the cottages and beach and alert us to these trespassers, but what had once been a veritable Shangri-La became the last vestige of a way of life that had disappeared into a jungle of ludicrously overpriced and overdeveloped rental units, condos, houses, stores, and restaurants and aggressive, ill-mannered tourists. Our area had once been a place where folks from all walks of life and with all levels of income could and did mix, mingle, and enjoy the natural beauty of the sea and sand. When so-called progress destroyed that, my family sold our property to a developer who planned to build fourteen luxury condos on it. He started the process of clearing the land, but then the economy took a dive and he couldn’t finish the project. The property came back to my family and that is how things are now, and will be until either someone makes my brother a sound offer or he decides that we should use the land for some other business. My mother, now 90, and my brother and his family live together in a house in a quiet area a few miles from our property and often hear from and are visited by former customers. Our customers were like family and they, along with the wonderful scenic views of beach, water, and sky, and all the good times we had through the years are what we miss the most about Murmuring Surf.
I hope this email answers the question of “what happened to Murmuring Surf?” My parents had a simple idea for a beach-front tourist court that succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, but like the Bible says, “to everything there is a season”, and after 57 years, Murmuring Surf’s season came to an end.
To read the entire thread, which includes the remembrances of several people who stayed there, see historydetectives.proboards.com/thread/7.