So far, I have published 450 posts beginning with several posts on my award-winning book, Florida’s Big Dig, the story of the Intracoastal Waterway, how four St. Augustine investors in 1881 agreed with the State of Florida to construct an inland waterway from Saint Augustine to Miami in exchange for public land. By 1912, the Florida canal company built an inland waterway five-feet deep and fifty-feet wide from Jacksonville, Fla., to Miami, Fla. in exchange for the State conveying to the private company over one million acres of Florida public land from St. Augustine to Miami and the right to collect tolls at six different toll chains stretched across the narrowest sections of the private waterway. By 1929, the federal government had taken over the perpetual maintenance of the waterway, agreed to widen and deepen it, and abolished the collection of tolls. The State of Florida agreed to furnish and maintain the right-of-way land for widening the waterway and land for the deposit of spoil collected by the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers in enlarging the waterway.
From the Intracoastal Waterway, I published posts on historical and international canals like the Panama and Suez canals, water management plans in The Netherlands, Florida rivers, lakes, lagoons, sounds, the Everglades and its restoration, Lake Okeechobee and its dike beginning in the 1930s, the ecology of our land and water, fauna and flora, Florida’s five water management districts under the Secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection.and the scores of drainage districts incorporated as political subdivisions beginning in 1915. One of the largest is the Lake worth Drainage District, which incorporates southeast Palm Beach County, a massive tract of land calledthe Palm Beach Farms Company, presided over by Percy Hagerman of Colorado.
I close this part with several posts on the private spacecraft program at Cape Canaveral and its effects on the Intracoastal Waterway when launches are scheduled.
Florida’s Big Dig 