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All Aboard! A History Of Florida’s Railroads By Stephanie Murphy-Lupo Soft Cover
All Aboard! A History Of Floridas Railroads By Stephanie Murphy-Lupo
Softbound
316 Pages
Copyright 2016
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: Before Rail
A Forbidding Territory, Too Far to Tackle
Chapter 2: Road Tested
Trails, Tramways, and Trains
Chapter 3: Yes to Yulee
The Force Behind the Florida Railroad
Chapter 4: An Act of Congress
Pen to Paper Transfers 500,000 Acres
Chapter 5: Tolls of Civil War
Death, Railroad Casualties, and Economic Ruin
Chapter 6: Reconstruction
Martial Law, Carpetbaggers, and Fraud
Chapter 7: Pioneer of Portent
William Chipley Warms to Pensacola
Chapter 8: Firmly Planted
"Henry and Friends"
Chapter 9: A Decisive Detour
St. Augustine Beguiles Henry M. Flagler
Chapter 10: Outsiders on Board
Reed, Walters, and Warfield
Chapter 11: Overseas Marvel
Flagler Tames the Florida Keys
Chapter 12: Plus and Minus
Loss, Gain, 1920s Boom, 1930s Fallout
Chapter 13: War and Peace
Hostile Takeover, Rational Mergers
Chapter 14: Private Places
Love-and-Less for All Aboard Florida
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
Who and what rode trains around Florida? It was quite a democratic mix:
The famous (Ulysses S. Grant, John Dos Passos, "the Queen of Chicago," Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders, occasionally a president, often a US senator or congressman); the infamous Edgar Watson (and members of the Ashley gang of train robbers); and the garden-variety anonymous (visiting relatives or going to bury one).
Heroes and scoundrels, check; soldiers, pilots, and sailors; the superrich, some big fish in little ponds, and those barely scraping by. Good and bad clergymen, sinners with clay feet; tipplers and teetotalers; truck farmers and plantation owners; desperados, shipwreck salvagers, cowboys, wranglers, and Indian chiefs.
On the train at any given time, one might find innocence, fraud, greed, feuds, larceny, and a plot to murder; sex, romance, tragedy, and thrills; ego, cargo, payrolls, and gold. Blind hope and vision without borders.
From day one, the Sunshine State held a special allure among the well-intentioned as well as a slew of scoundrels eager to exploit its assets and economic potential. The crazy quilt of stakeholders who made their mark is dizzying, indeed, even if one considers railroads alone.
What does it take to build a railroad?
Money and "land rights" in the old days versus the modern bugaboo of right-of-way. Railroad construction is not rocket science, but it does require precise engineering (rails do need to be exactly parallel). And it takes sweat to clear a forest or swamp, grade a roadbed, build bridges, culverts and trestles, switches, turnabouts, cross-ties and rails, spikes, plates, wells, tanks, crossings, and cattle guards ("I've been working on the railroad, all the livelong day . . . ").
Who built the railroads in Florida?
Slaves and immigrant laborers bore the brunt for construction and regular maintenance. Several chapters in this book deal with the leading developers and owners, some of the main players, some power brokers, and some women of influence, along with some reprobates in the mix.
Readers will learn about David Levy Yulee, Henry B. Plant, Henry M. Flagler, William D. Chipley, Sir Edward Reed, Julia D. Tuttle, and Bertha Honore Palmer. But don't expect to master the "ampersand" dialect, that treble-like symbol that altered company names like a shell game. The ampersand is as ubiquitous in the rail realm as directions on a compass. Florida acknowledged hundreds that came and went in head-spinning fashion.
Expect some careening through acronyms. Maybe the first name and second name were reversed, or the name changed from "railway" to "railroad" to make a legal distinction.
Florida was shapeless without railroads, in that its chest was trapped between outsize shoulders, the hands couldn't reach the feet, the torso was in a blind spot, and Georgia was always turning the head around. Given this huge land mass, a minute population in the Colonial era, scant capital, and little more than primitive industry to prop up its economy, Florida was relatively slow to develop rail service.
But not that far behind such efforts recorded elsewhere. The first train left St. Joseph on the upper Gulf coast in 1836. Compare that debut with the first steam train in the United States, which was operational in 1829, and the Jamaica Railway Company's first complete railroad in 1843 (when Jamaica was still a British colony).
In fact, the first federal grant of land to assist a railroad was made to the territory of Florida. This occurred in 1835, when the number of Americans who had seen a locomotive was slim indeed, so Florida was making national history before it was a state.
How did people decide where to build a railroad?
Spanish trails, English outposts, and Indian camps gave early owners some hints about where to build: a trail from St. Augustine to DeLeon Springs and Titusville, for instance.
What was some of the lingo?
"Second trick" was second shift-at least in this business. "Ghost train" was the payroll car, "whiskers" stood for seniority, and "rip-track" was where the engineer went for minor repairs-in-place.
Readers will find out more about Romeo and Juliette; how Robert Mugge persuaded Adolphus Busch to ship a trainload of beer to Tampa; and the why of railroad gauges (the distance between the parallel tracks is the gauge; early railroads used narrow gauge, 3 feet, while others used standard gauge, 4 feet 81/2 inches).
Trains evolved from wooden platforms over a rutted roadbed to iron rails, then came the invention of the steam locomotive in 1797 in England. Early trams moved freight, but they were pulled by mules and oxen. In the earliest times, "train" passengers rode in a conveyance behind a team of horses.
Florida railroads began in a similar fashion-pulled by animals over rough roadbeds carved out of flat swamps and rocky ridges, and across rivers and lakes. Eventually one of those railroads would cross islands between Florida Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, accomplishing engineering feats that still fascinate more than a century later.
Many of Florida's railroads were developed by people from elsewhere who found an exotic tropical puzzle when they arrived and a melting pot of stakeholders. Hence, the inclusion of a chapter about the array of people here and in charge-or those with a say-so in how things unfolded.
This book was put together to show how hard it all was, so readers could marvel that railroads got built at all, and to show that railroads were the impetus for Florida's civilization and the capitalization of its economy.
Meanwhile, the pace of this story is meant to underscore the premium placed on Florida during centuries of European exploration, imperial saber-rattling, diplomatic claims, military confrontation, the territorial era after 1821, the Seminole Wars, and statehood in 1845 (confirming Thomas Jefferson's prediction that the United States could not keep its hands off Florida).
Upon statehood, Florida got 500,000 acres of federal land (plus another 20 million acres by 1900). Also bending and sometimes breaking development were the American Civil War and martial law during Reconstruction. The seesaw continued through the 1920s land boom, the busted threadbare '30s, and industrial modernization through much of the 20th century.
So at various times in this book, "Florida" refers to colonies owned by other countries, a US territory, a member of the Confederacy, and a state rejoined to the Union.
Florida railroaders showed the rest of the developed world the abundant crops easily cultivated here, often during seasons when the rest of the country shivered. Florida land was cheaper than Northern land, even farmland in the rest of the South, giving historians a reason to notice the swarms of homesteaders crowding the rail lines into Florida in the late 1880s.
Even President William McKinley visited Florida in 1897, when Henry Flagler invited him to see his domain-which was anywhere on the east coast south of Jacksonville.
As Sandra Wallus Sammons noted: "One [Henry Flagler] took the east coast and one [Henry Plant] took the west coast. Together the two Henrys helped make Florida what it is."
Florida was something of a crapshoot throughout the 19th century, especially before railroads made it possible to go from one coast to the other or north to south-and before engineers connected the dots of lagoons to form a passable inland marine route. Day-to-day was not unlike the Wild West. The only law to speak of was military here and there, and a local marshal. Decidedly more lawless in the interior than the coast, Florida outposts created situations often fact-checked pretty casually by whichever badge had to choose between justice or stayin' alive.
Early Florida was wild, man. Home to killer reptiles, wild boars, panthers and bears. If humans wandered around at night and did not get swallowed whole, they might see the glint of an eye in the darkness of a swamp, and hear the snap of jaws on a small creature's neck. Settlers built forts to keep out predators, and most forts were near a coast.
Obstacles to rail development included unpredictable, often inclement weather; lack of access to building materials; fitful financing; diseases (yellow fever, for one); pesky mosquitoes and poisonous snakes; and a labor force dealing with menacing wildlife and transient criminals.
The Spanish came here to prosper, not create a democracy. They had a caste system that dictated which classes of people paid taxes, including slaves, free blacks, and Indians. That is just one way in which disparate cultures shaped the landscape and decided what "Florida" would be by the time rail developers put an oar in the water.
Statehood brought along the Internal Improvement Fund in the mid-1850s, enabling developers to apply for land grants and offering a guarantee to pay the interest on their construction bonds. The first companies thus aided were therefore a platform for Florida's rail network in the future. At times, however, the state reneged on those bonds and Florida's reputation suffered.
Readers will not just see trains as museum relics, but also discover their influence in pop culture. As a movie poster set the tone in 1936: "All aboard for danger . . . excitement . . . romance . . . on the crack train of the Florida run!"
Not to be overlooked was the role of Florida trains in the realm of national sports. Baseball spring training was a whirlwind in Tampa alone-with the Chicago Cubs, 1913-16; the Boston Red Sox, 1919; the Washington Senators, 1920-29; the Detroit Tigers, 1930; the Cincinnati Reds, 1931-42, 1946-87; the Chicago White Sox, 1954-59; and the New York Yankees, since 1996.
Of course, waterways are one of the first hooks for people visiting Florida for the first time, and while the rivers and lakes gave developers countless headaches, it's easy to relate to the purple prose that Jefferson Browne penned in the 1890s about the daily variation of colors and hues in the waters of the Florida Keys, about fickle tints that "no brush can paint or pen describe." Browne cites olivine running into indigo blue . . . fading to milky whiteness after a storm . . . a patch of sea grass, into moss-agate, with light winds causing the surface to ripple like a stream of precious stones . . .
With that being reality, and no reason to embellish, it's easy to see why railroaders were hell-bent on bridging the transportation gap. Given the new passenger-rail wrinkle known as All Aboard Florida, it seems that they still are.
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