Florida’s Big Dig
The story of the Intracoastal and other thoughts on water, waterways, land, and ecology
Category: Uncategorized
-
Group of Road Scholars on tour of the Intracoastal Waterway in Fort Lauderdale led by Lawyer/Historian Bill Crawford. To amplify voice and screen out boat noise, I wore a head set and a microphone while the ‘Scholars’ wore adjustable ear buds to increase/decrease sound as needed. In the distance is the relatively recent E. Clay…
-
The completion and operation of the Flagler railway and other railways throughout Florida spelled the death knell for the Florida East Coast Canal and other inland waterways. At first, it was thought that inland waterways would serve as ‘rate-regulators’, competitors against a monopolistic railway system. As the railway system became more reliable and economical, many…
-
Bucket dredge in the Matanzas -Halifax rivers Cut south of St. Augustine ca. 1893. Large steel buckets attached to a continuous heavy chain scooped up sand, clay, and rocks, and then dumped the material on either side of the Cut via conveyor belts. Among the earliest of the dredges employed, the bucket dredge soon fell…
-
Plans to deepen the waterway in Broward and Palm Beach counties threaten sea grass, Deerfield Island Park and Palm Beach County. Deepening the waterway and its estuaries to attract mega yacht business potentially threatens the environment. http://touch.sun-sentinel.com/#story/fl-megayacht-dredge-20131215/.
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
In 1882, the Florida Coast Line Canal & Transportation Company (“the Florida canal company”) began dredging the difficult dry cut between the Matanzas and Halifax rivers using bucket, continuous chain dredges. The Florida canal company would not complete the work until 1912, thirty years later. For dredging what would become the Intracoastal Waterway from Jacksonville…
-
Double-tracking the Florida East Coast Railroad signaled the end of commercial waterborne traffic along Florida’s east coast and the end of its only competitor in the 1920’s, the privately owned Florida East Coast Canal, later transferred to the Federal government in 1929 for conversion into the modern, toll-free Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway.
-
Young barefooted boys digging for clams along the western sandy shore of the Indian River ca. 1900, with a long dock draped in nets in the background. Courtesy, collection of the author.