In 1881, the private St. Augustine-based Florida canal company agreed to dredge an inland waterway from Miami, Fla., to St. Augustine, Fla., and later to Jacksonville, Fla., a distance of approximately 400 miles. For every mile of waterway dredged, state legislators agreed to convey to the canal company 3,840 acres of state-owned land. Upon the [...]
Category: dredging
Hillsboro Inlet Lighthouse (built 1903)
This photo shows the lighthouse on the north side of the inlet, Intracoastal continues north between Town of Hillsboro Beach to the right and the City of Lighthouse Point to the left of the ICW.
The Atlantic Deeper Waterways Association and Congressman J. Hampton Moore
At the turn of the last century (1895-1920s), something of a renaissance occurred in the political will of the Nation in the demand for inland waterway transportation. More than thirty citizens groups coalesced from all over the country to demand waterway construction to challenge not only the confiscatory tariffs charged by the railways but also [...]
Watermelon Feast on East Coast Canal (Under Construction) at Boynton Beach, Fla. In 1914
By November 1912, according to the terms and conditions of the Settlement Agreement made in 1906, the last of twelve deeds had been delivered by the State of Florida Trustees of the Internal Improvement Fund (the State Cabinet) to the Florida canal company conveying in the aggregate more than one million acres of prime east [...]
Commodore Avylen Harcourt Brook (1866-1946)
Commodore Avylen Harcourt Brook was born in Sheffield, England, in 1866 into a family of silver and bronze electroplaters. His early education was in England. Brook studied art under the famous English artist and critic John Ruskin. It was said that one of his 'parlor tricks' was to paint two paintings simultaneously, one with his [...]
Corthell’s 1889 Estimate of the Cost to Complete the Florida East Coast Canal
In 1888, Florida canal company general manager George F. Miles engaged acclaimed Chicago waterway and railway engineer Elmer Corthell to survey the soil, rock, sand, and other material the Company dredges would likely encounter in completing the waterway and to estimate the cost of completion.In turn, Corthell employed a former Army engineer, Artur [sic] Wrotnowski, [...]
Fares for the Steamboat “Swan” on October 31, 1911
As the 1912 deadline approached for the completion of the Florida waterway, George Francis Miles became increasingly disenchanted with his role as general manager of dredging operations. In 1911, Miles and others organized the Florida Coastal Inland Navigation Company to run steamboats on the completed portions of the inland waterway (Florida East Coast Canal). Shown [...]
First Commissioners of the Florida Inland Navigation District (1928)
Of all the coastal states contributing inland waterways that now make up the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, only the State of Florida was required to buy its waterway for turnover to the federal government free of charge. For example, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was not required to buy the privately owned Cape Cod Canal built by [...]
Sir Sandford Fleming, chief engineer of the Canadian Pacific Railway
The Canadians are coming! The Canadians are coming! In the late 1880s, four Canadians, including Sir Sandford Fleming's son, Sandford H. Fleming, traveled to the State of Florida to enter into a subcontract with the Florida canal company to perform a portion of the work in the Matanzas-Halifax River Cut joining St. Augustine and today's [...]
Florida’s Big Dig 