Florida’s Big Dig
The story of the Intracoastal and other thoughts on water, waterways, land, and ecology
Tag: Intracoastal Waterway
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The 1889 Corthell survey of the Florida East Coast Canal showed the Lake at 5′ – 9′ deep with a forty foot bluff along the near, east (Atlantic Ocean) side of the Lake. While four feet would have satisfied state specifications in 1881 (3′ then), by 1889 that depth would not have been navigable for…
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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.…
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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…
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Sketch of survey of Lake Boca Raton, Boca Raton, Florida, made by Arthur Wrotnowski, Civil Engineer, for a Report on the Florida East Coast Canal (Intracoastal Waterway) from Jacksonville to Miami, Florida in 1889 by Elmer Corthell of Chicago, Illinois. The report was undertaken to encourage New England investors like Bradley and Albert P. Sawyer…
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Assembled here with a few exceptions are the eleven commissioners of FIND appointed by Florida Governor David Sholtz to purchase the old Florida East Coast Canal (“the Canal”) from Harry Kelsey (1st row, 2nd from the right) for turnover to the Federal Government for enlargement and perpetual maintenance as the Intracoastal Waterway. Erstwhile New Jersey…
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Our literate cat Whiskers peaks over the top of a book stand to view my award-winning book, “Florida’s Big Dig: the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway from Jacksonville to Miami, 1881 to 1935.” Winner of the Rembert Patrick Award in 2008, my book tells the story of how a privately built tollway barely five feet deep in…
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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…
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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…