This sunset view was taken from Skull Creek at Hilton Head Island over the Calibogue Sound. The Sound is a section of the federally controlled Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. The Waterway extends some 1,400 miles from Miami, Florida, to Norfolk, Virginia. Of all the barrier islands protecting the Atlantic coast, the longest is Long Island, New [...]
Category: Florida Coast Line Canal and Transportation Company
From Skull Creek over Calibogue Sound to a Sunset over Daufuskie Island
This sunset view was taken from Skull Creek at Hilton Head Island over the Calibogue Sound. The Sound is a section of the federally controlled Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. The Waterway extends some 1,400 miles from Miami, Florida, to Norfolk, Virginia. Of all the barrier islands protecting the Atlantic coast, the longest is Long Island, New [...]
Brigadier General Quincy Adams Gillmore
Brigadier General Quincy Adams Gillmore, Second Florida chief of the Army Corps of Engineers. Gillmore graduated first in his class at West Point. He conducted several surveys of the Florida east coast during his command (1869-1884). In later years, Gillmore published several textbooks, including one on underwater concrete, a necessity in waterway and canal improvements. [...]
Lt. Horatio G. Wright, Florida’s first chief of engineers
Horatio G. Wright was the first Florida chief of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (1852-1854). Wright superintended the first cut in what would become the Florida section of the Intracoastal Waterway, joining the Matanzas and Halifax rivers at Titusville, Fla. After years of wrangling over Congress's constitutional powers, Congress authorized a mere pittance of $1,200 [...]
The Steamer “Swan” Schedule of Tolls
The listing of tolls to travel along what would become the Intracoastal Waterway between several points along the privately owned Florida East Coast Canal in 1911. During its long history, the "Swan" would carry freight and passengers, and often, passengers and their automobiles. Freight included large cargoes of citrus fruit and pineapples in the late [...]
James Louis Colee (1834-1912)
Original incorporator and director of the Florida canal company, James Colee (pronounced, 'Coolee') served as an engineer in the dredging of the Intracoastal Waterway until his death in 1912. Colee also served as state representative and county commissioner for St. Johns County and was a stockholder in the First National Bank of St. Augustine. In [...]
Boston & Florida Atlantic Coast Land Company
In 1892, to raise additional cash to finance canal dredging, Bradley enlisted the assistance of Albert P. Sawyer, a wealthy Newburyport, Mass. investor to organize a new company to raise $100,000. Sawyer selected the State of Maine as the venue for the new enterprise because Sawyer believed that Maine assessed the least amount of incorporation [...]
Outboard motorboat towing a house
Outboard motorboat towing a house on the Indian River portion of the Intracoastal Waterway near Rockledge, Fla. Courtesy, Ralph Crawford.
George L. Bradley Home, Providence, R.I.
Home first of Charles S. Bradley, former Chief Justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court and father of George L. Bradley. By the late 1880s, George Bradley became the primary financier of the construction of the privately owned Florida Coast Line Canal & Transportation Company which would later become Florida's Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. George grew [...]
George L. Bradley, president of the Florida canal company
Born in Providence, R.I., in 1846, George Lothrop Bradley had made three fortunes by the time he had become the largest investor in the Florida waterway. Bradley made his first fortune investing in the Newport Mining Company, a square-mile iron mine property along the Michigan upper peninsula-Wisconsin border, in the late 1870s. The mine would produce [...]
Florida’s Big Dig 