William G. Crawford, Jr., author of the award-winning "Florida's Big Dig," is to be interviewed by Jason Dorman, a graduate of Flagler College, for C-SPAN 2 Book TV. The interview is to air the month of May, with a special emphasis on a showing throughout the weekend of May 16 through May 17, 2015. The [...]
Category: Florida history
Matanzas Inlet – South St Johns County
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 [...]
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.
North New River Lock No. 1 at South Bay, Florida, ca. 1920’s
St. Augustine’s anchoring and mooring pilot program tested | StAugustine.com
St. Augustine's anchoring and mooring pilot program tested | StAugustine.com. Under a state pilot program, St. Augustine enacted an ordinance requiring boats to moor at least fifty feet from the navigable channel of the Intracoastal Waterway. One man who has lived aboard his sailboat for eleven years filed suit challenging the law in federal court. [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
Florida’s Big Dig 