“No single factor influenced the growth and insured the success of Gainesville during the first years of its existence more than the coming of the railroad.” Gainesville historians Charles Hildreth and Merlin Cox did not exaggerate in assessing the importance of the railroad to Gainesville. The same could be said of all Alachua County, one of the most productive areas of the state, but one that depended on the railroad to link it to markets and seaports on each coast. Indeed, Gainesville became the county seat because a railroad was routed too far south of the original seat of government in Newnansville in the 1850s. As Newnansville became an isolated village, Gainesville grew into a bustling center of commerce and industry, thanks to its vital rail connections.

David Levy Yulee, a brilliant entrepreneur and politician and the state’s first U.S. senator, realized that a railroad linking the Atlantic Ocean with the Gulf of Mexico was an absolute necessity for Florida’s future. He incorporated the Florida Railroad in 1853, and the Florida legislature authorized the line in 1855. The ports of Fernandina on the east coast and Cedar Key on the west were chosen for the enterprise, and a line linking the two passed through what was the small village of Gainesville. The rails of progress stretching from Fernandina reached Gainesville in 1859, then rumbled slowly eastward to Cedar Key by 1861, creating the first cross-Florida transportation link, a total of 155.5 miles. The intervention of the Civil War in the 1860s stalled the Florida Railroad, which moved its offices and records to Gainesville for the duration. Service was resumed after the war and was the foundation of the boom that followed.

The first trains chugged into Alachua County at Waldo, taking on water and fuel before heading down what is now the Waldo Road and swinging west to its main stop in Gainesville, the freight and passenger station on Depot Avenue at the foot of Main Street. The present Old Gainesville Depot, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is on the site of the original 1850s depot. By the 1880s, the Florida Railroad was known as the Transit Railroad. The Gainesville press welcomed the new management, which had ordered two new engines and would provide sleeping coaches and direct service between Cedar Key and Savannah. Very soon an impressive number of industrial enterprises were established near the depot. In 1881 the Florida Southern also had a depot south of the Transit Depot, later moved up Main Street north of University Avenue.

By the 1890s cotton gins, a foundry, fruit packers, a fertilizer warehouse, a gas works, and an ice house stood near the depot. Spur lines reached out to sawmills, lumber yards, planing mills, wholesale grocery warehouses, a moss factory, and a furniture manufacturing plant. The Florida Transit Railroad became part of the Seaboard Airline Railway system in 1903. The scale and variety of businesses clustered around Gainesville’s first depot picked up early in the 20th century and included oil depots, a wheelwright and blacksmith, a sash, door and blind factory, a box and crate assembly, a coffin factory, and the Coca-Cola bottling works. The SAL also built a station at Waldo Road and University Avenue, later demolished.

The first railroad seemed to act as a magnet for other lines. The Florida Southern Railway, also known as the “Orange Belt Route,” thundered into town from the north on tracks laid down the center of East Main Street, then curved over to West Main Street at 8th Avenue North (both streets are now N. Main Street) for the first time in 1881. The trains were required by the city to limit their speed to four miles an hour within the city limits. The scramble to add new lines and absorb existing ones continued. Henry Plant entered the picture, and for a time the train down Main Street ran on tracks assigned to his Savannah, Florida and Western line.

Railroad fever persisted, resulting in many side tracks and branch lines and several different track sizes or gauges, necessitating the change from narrow to standard gauge wheels at the junction of Main Street and Depot Avenue. The Atlantic Coast Line, which became part of the Plant system in 1902, later built a station a block north of the courthouse, and by 1903 locomotives stopped in Gainesville long enough for passengers to enjoy a leisurely meal at the White House Hotel across the street. The train down the center of Main Street was a source of great pride to the town in its early days, a symbol of progress incorporated into the Gainesville city seal.

Today, Gainesville's N. Main Street, with its 8th Avenue curves, follows the path of the old railroad.

There is evidence that the location of the depot scene pictured below is Gainesville's oldest existing train depot, located just east of South Main Street on Depot Avenue.

The occasion could be, quite likely, a farewell scene for young men off to World War I, possibly dating the photograph around 1917/1918.

The first depot in Gainesville was part of the Florida Railroad system built by David Yulee. Yulee's train, which connected Fernandina and Cedar Key, was begun in the 1850s, completed in 1861, and is essentially the reason for Gainesville's existence. Yulee's train was going to bypass the county seat, Newnansville, so in 1854 the citizens created a new town on the train's path: Gainesville. The train came into town from the northeast, down Waldo Road (now State Road 24), and turned west to the depot. Then it traveled west to Archer and on to Cedar Key. By the 1880s the Florida Railroad was called the Transit Railroad; Transit became part of the Seaboard Airline Railway system in 1903. A new Seaboard depot was built in 1907 on the same site as the old; it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is central to plans for an Eco-History Trail Project-an urbanization project featuring a 2-mile long rail-trail through the historic urban core of Gainesville.

The Atlantic Coast Line passenger train is seen below in this photograph, circa 1925, coming south on Main Street just north of University Avenue. The original First National Bank building, located at 15 North Main Street, can be seen on the right:

According to Jess G. Davis in "History of Alachua County," southbound trains would stop at the White House Hotel (located between 4th and 5th Avenues on North Main) so passengers who so desired could disembark to dine at the Hotel. After they were off the train it would travel three block south to the ACL station, discharge other passengers, baggage, and mail, and then back up to the White House so the diners could get back on the train. Gainesville had a city ordinance that limited the speed of the train to 4 miles an hour as it went through town. A train employee ran along the side of the locomotive, waving a red flag. The first tracks were laid on Main Street in 1881. The last train to make that journey through downtown Gainesville did so on Monday, May 31, 1948, and the next day the train traveled the NW 6th Street tracks to the new ACL depot, just north of West University Avenue.

Another source of civic pride was the million-dollar creosote plant built in 1911 on one hundred acres north of present day NW 23 Avenue in Gainesville. The Atlantic Coast Line announced that it would be able to turn out more than a million cross ties annually with the facility. The toxic substance affected not only those who worked in and near the plant, but the men on the section crews who had to handle the cross ties day after day. A chemical plant also processed turpentine or naval stores in this industrial section 20 blocks north of the courthouse.

The Gainesville and Gulf railroad, chartered in 1895 to cater to growers in the region, was called the “Grits and Gravy” by the locals. It ran to Irvine and Micanopy and Fairfield to the south and Sampson City 20 miles to the north, where it connected to other lines. The G & G was sold early in the century and the name changed to the ambitious title of the Tampa and Jacksonville, or T & J, even though the short line did not reach either city. The T & J tracks, which stretched all of 56 miles, crossed the Atlantic Coast Line tracks north of Gainesville at Michigan Avenue (NW 16 Avenue) and ran parallel to what is now NW 6 Street, curving to the east and south as it crossed Depot Avenue.

In 1928, the Florida Peanut Milling Company spread over a large site at Hampton Avenue (NW 12 Avenue) on the T & J line. The T & J established a small engine shop south of Depot Avenue, and a depot and some modest industrial sites and warehouses were built north and south of University Avenue. In 1927, the Seaboard Airline Railroad purchased the T & J (referred to by many as the “Tug and Jerk” because of its rough ride), renaming it the Jacksonville, Gainesville and Gulf Railway. This line carried mostly freight, produce, timber, and phosphate.

In the 1920s, railroads radiated out of Gainesville in six directions, touching points on the route that have become ghost towns today: Bellamy, Cyril, Louise, Millican, Burnett’s Lake, Cadillac, Kokomo, and Half Moon. A promotional booklet produced in 1925 to extol Gainesville as “Opportunity’s Gateway” features at least 15 thriving businesses and industries adjacent to the railroad tracks.

However, the dominance of the railroad was waning and losing ground by the 1930s and 1940s. The Seaboard Airline Railroad dropped its service from Gainesville to Cedar Key in 1932, and its depot closed around 1948. The T & J operated until 1943, when it was dissolved and most its track taken up. When the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad abandoned its track on Main Street in 1948, it used the old T & J right of way, laying newer, stronger tracks to its new station built at NW 6 Street and NW 5 Avenue (now the downtown campus of Santa Fe Community College). Stringfellow Supply Company purchased the old T & J terminal, a two-story brick building, for use as offices and a warehouse.

Moving the train station from Main Street to what is now NW 6 Street stirred up a storm of controversy in the late 1940s. By then, city fathers and civic boosters considered a train running through business and residential sections of town and holding up traffic at crossings a nuisance rather than an economic blessing, as their counterparts had in 1881, when Gainesville was thrilled to have a railroad rumbling through the heart of town.

It took several years of negotiation with the ACL to reach an agreement to place the new passenger and freight depot two blocks north of University Avenue and to arrange for closing some streets and accommodation of longer trains that would block traffic as they loaded and unloaded. The tracks ran along the west side of the terminal with a short spur going off to the east to a seed and feed warehouse near the depot. The ticket office and waiting rooms were in the south end of the terminal, and freight was handled at the north end. A loading platform ran along each side of the building where freight was moved from trucks on the east side to the railroad cars on the west side. Daily passenger train service was convenient for students at the University of Florida as well as townspeople and visitors. Special trains were put into service when there was an important out-of-town football game.

The railroads and the jobs they provided, from engineers, telegraph operators, ticket agents, engineers, conductors, and porters to the men who maintained the tracks and loaded and unloaded the cars, spurred the growth of residential neighborhoods close to the railroads. Small cottages still line some of the streets off of the Sixth Street Corridor and south and east and west of the Old Depot, many built in a similar pattern to house those whose livelihood depended upon the railroad and its matrix of industry and commerce.

"All Aboard" for the Last Time

Shown above, the last train traveled down W. Main Street in Gainesville in 1948. Gainesville’s days as a railroad center drew to a close in the 1980s as railroad companies merged and closed routes that no longer produced sufficient revenue. Passenger travel was diverted by the spread of Florida’s road and highway system and the expansion of air travel. The railroads shut down station after station, and by 1971, Gainesville passengers had to travel to Waldo to catch a train. Freight was also diverted to other lines, and by the early 1980s railroads had ceased to run through Gainesville.

As the railroad tracks were abandoned, so were many of the industrial sites that depended upon them, making ice houses, sawmills, and freight warehouses obsolete. A few of these buildings have been adapted to other uses, but most were dismantled or demolished, taking with them their noise and clamor, their grimy air and toxic substances, but also the vitality, energy, and jobs that they provided.

In 1984, as the last of the tracks in the Gainesville area were being abandoned by the Seaboard System Railroad, the county commission voted to develop policies to acquire these lines for such uses as, among others, “pedestrian walkways, bicycle and equestrian ways.”

The town of Hawthorne sprang into existence because of the railroad when it became a junction of the Florida Southern and Peninsula lines in 1879. The "e" was added to the original name of the town, which honored pioneer James Hawthorn, by the railroads when they made their signs. The town finally gave into the misspelling and adopted Hawthorne as the official name in 1950. The Hawthorne Historical Museum and Cultural Center, formerly a church for one of the town’s African-American congregations, stands near the site of the original depot. The museum is just two blocks from the east end of the Gainesville-Hawthorne Trail, a 14-mile recreational trail that follows the tracks of one of old railroad lines along the north rim of the Paynes Prairie State Preserve.

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Melrose

The Melrose founding fathers were far thinking in their plans to develop this area into a vibrant community. Starting in 1879, they founded a company which dredged a canal from Little Lake Santa Fe to Lake Alto, and from there into Waldo. The canal bordered a railroad spur to the Yulee’s cross-Florida railroad.

Upon completion, Melrose was a lake port for many years. The docks were in the vicinity of Bayview which is located on Melrose Bay at the foot of Quail Street. Bayview was the home of Mckendrie "Mac" Lambdin, who served as dock master for many years.

This provided transportation to ship their citrus production to northern markets and bring tourists to Melrose. This was The Melrose Connection!

The first boat that made the journey was the FANNIE S. LEWIS in 1880, depicted at the left.

Seen below, the ALERT was one of several boats that plied those waters:

Freezes in 1895 and 1896 damaged the orange groves and spoiled some of the tourist enthusiasm. The CITY OF MELROSE was the last boat, in 1925, before improved roads and the automobile doomed the era of steamships in Alachua County.

There was also separate rail line from Green Cove Springs to Melrose which was not part of the cross-Florida railroad, but also served Melrose with connections to the St. John’s River and the steamboat commerce there, with steamboats running between Jacksonville, Middleburg and Palatka.

Finally we had an enterprising local citizen that later ran a short railroad from Melrose to Orange Heights and which wasn’t part of either of the other two lines.

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Micanopy

Not every town wanted train tracks running down its Main Street when the railroad companies came calling, and some, such as Micanopy, took their time permitting the noisy new transportation technology to disrupt their lives. For the people of Micanopy in the mid-1800s, the stage coach worked just fine, and they enjoyed the advantage of crossing Paynes Prairie, then flooded, by barge or flat-bottomed steamers to catch a train in Gainesville. It was not until 1883 that a branch line of the Florida Southern brought rail service to Micanopy. Soon Micanopy had two stations, a freight depot and a more comfortable passenger station with a waiting room and ticket office, plus more branch lines to nearby towns such as Tacoma and direct service to Gainesville.

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Rosewood

The Rosewood Massacre has a compelling link to the history of the railroad that began as David Yulee’s cross-state Florida Railroad. Rosewood was a small community located between Otter Creek and Cedar Key made up mostly of African-American families. On January 1, 1923, a white woman from the nearby lumbering town of Sumner reported being assaulted by an unidentified black man. A mob of 200-300 white vigilantes massed in the area and descended upon Rosewood, burning buildings and killing those they caught. Women and children fled to the nearby swamps as the fires and rampage went on for days. Some of the survivors were rescued on January 6 when a train made its way to the area and picked them up and took them to safety in Gainesville. For decades the story of the Rosewood Massacre was buried, until the 1990s when a full investigation was conducted and many of the descendants of the survivors were finally acknowledged.

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Waldo

When the Florida Railroad began to forge its way across the state in the 1850s, it not only changed the face of the landscape of North Florida, but the names of some towns as well.

Bellamy Station was a small village located just south of the Santa Fe River in the northeast corner of Alachua County where the old territorial-era Bellamy Trail crossed the even older colonial-era trail. But when the tracks of the Florida Railroad reached Bellamy Station in February of 1859, the town was renamed Waldo, in honor of Dr. Benjamin Waldo of Ocala. David Yulee, the president of the railroad, had a habit of dropping the names of his friends and supporters all along the route, not only claiming the land, but fastening a lasting legacy on maps, official documents, and local identities.

When the Florida Railroad reached Waldo, the small settlement had a post office, but only two streets. With the addition of a train depot, the future looked promising. However, the happy prospects of growth and progress would have to wait until the Civil War ended in 1865. After the war years, Waldo rebounded as new settlers arrived to take advantage of the mild climate and favorable agricultural conditions, and the restoration of regular train service to both coasts. Orchards and groves were set out, and new crops such as sweet potatoes and cut flowers for northern markets were introduced.

The entrepreneurial spirit that had created the Florida Railroad in the 1850s was harnessed in the 1880s when a steam dredge was built to dig a canal to connect Lake Alto just east of Waldo to Lake Santa Fe and the town of Melrose. Soon steamboats were making daily trips between Melrose and the railroad town of Waldo with shipments of fruits and vegetables and throngs of tourists, winter residents, and new settlers.

By the end of the 1880s, Waldo was the second largest town in Alachua County, with a population of 1,000. Advertised as “a winter playground,” Waldo boasted of its opera house and three resort hotels surrounded by beautiful gardens. New tracks were laid, curving to the south as Waldo became a major railroad junction. A cigar factory, ice house, sawmill, cotton gin, and wagon factory provided economic stability. Until disastrous freezes late in the 19th Century wiped out most of the groves and orchards, Waldo enjoyed the reputation of a horticultural Eden.

Despite this misfortune, Waldo continued to prosper as a railroad junction, with steady jobs and plenty of trade for the town’s shops and businesses. Conductors and engineers and other railroad men built new homes and supported churches and schools. Waldo had one of the state’s largest railroad turntables, and its railroad shop and roundhouse serviced all of the engines and freight and passenger cars that rolled through town. Water was pumped from the canal leading to Lake Alto into the large water tower next to the track where the boilers of the steam engines were filled.

A combination of events, the depression that began in Florida in the late 1920s and the decision of the Seaboard Airline Railroad to move its operations from Waldo, spelled disaster for the town. The Bank of Waldo closed in 1932 and the population dwindled. However, the pecan trees planted early in the 20th Century still produce generous crops, and a number of Waldo’s historic buildings, including the bank and the old cigar factory, have become antique shops. A reminder of Waldo’s railroad heritage is the red caboose standing in the town park, and although a modest Amtrak station has replaced the original depot, travelers still go to Waldo to catch the train, as they have for more than 150 years.

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Yulee

One of Florida's oldest highways, although probably more like a rugged footpath, was the Kings Road built during Florida's English period from the St. Mary's River to what is now Jacksonville. In 1839, Isaiah D. Hart petitioned Congress for a better road to serve the needs of the citizens of the Territory of Florida, particularly for the delivery of the U.S. mail. Early maps show Hart's Road, but there was no town until the road was intersected by the tracks of the new railroad in 1858. The Florida Railroad Company built a depot there, and the Flood brothers seized the opportunity to establish a general merchandise store, which also served as the local post office. The new settlement was called Hart's Road, and that name lasted until 1893, when the town was renamed for David Levy Yulee, the founder of the Florida Railroad.

Compiled by Murray Laurie

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Where Are They Now?

Did you know that there used to be more than 50 railroad depots in Alachua County? Harold McGee, a member of the Alachua County Historical Commission, has provided this snapshot of our county, once studded with depots and train stations. See how many of these towns you can even find on a map today!

• Alachua had two stations on S. Main St. and one on the west edge of town.
• Archer station is still standing as the Archer Railroad Museum.
• Arno
• Arredondo
• Bellamy
• Buda
• Burnett's Lake
• Cadillac
• Cannon's
• Clark
• Clyatt's
• Cyril
• Daysville
• Evinston
• Ellithorpe
• Fairbanks
• Gainesville had three stations, two of which still stand.
• Grove Park
• Hague
• Half Moon
• Haile's Siding
• Hainesworth
• Hawthorne
• High Springs
• Kanapaha
• Kirkwood
• La Crosse
• Lexington
• Lisman
• Louise
• Micanopy had two stations.
• Millicans
• Nedra
• Newberry
• Paradise
• Rochelle
• Rocky Point
• Santa Fe
• Tacoma
• Teen Jay
• Wacahoota Station
• Wades
• Waldo

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Copyright © 2006 Archer Historical Society, Inc.