The railroad reaches Rockledge, 1893

The railroad reached Rockledge in 1893. The National Park Service’s history of the town says simply that “in 1893 Rockledge was finally linked directly with Florida’s growing railroad network.” Two other records pin the timing down to the first months of that year. Henry Flagler’s line, then called the Jacksonville, St. Augustine and Indian River Railway, began service to Titusville, to the north, in January 1893, and a marker in Eau Gallie, to the south, records the railway’s arrival there on May 20, 1893. Rockledge sits between them, so the rails passed through it in between.

Before the railroad

For its first two decades Rockledge was reached by water. Steamboat service to Lake Poinsett began in 1880, and from the landing Gardner Hardee ran a coach for the last five miles. After 1885 the railroad ran to Titusville, and passengers and freight came south from the Titusville wharf by steamboat. That was enough to make Rockledge, in the Park Service’s words, one of the premier resorts on Florida’s east coast in the 1880s.

Citrus went out the same way the tourists came in, by boat to Titusville and then by rail.

Flagler’s line

Flagler built down the coast from the north. The Park Service’s Titusville history traces it: he extended his railroad to Daytona in 1892, began building toward the Indian River later that year, and started service to Titusville in January 1893. The line kept going. In Eau Gallie the railway arrived on May 20, 1893, the first engine came through on June 24, and Eau Gallie served as the end of track for a while as construction pushed on south. A ticket from Jacksonville to Eau Gallie, the marker says, cost $7. In 1895 Flagler renamed the company the Florida East Coast Railway.

For Rockledge the railroad meant growth. The Park Service form says the new service “promised a period of significant growth,” drew a new wave of settlers and pushed more land into citrus, “now that growers had the means of more efficiently shipping their products to market and receiving the supplies necessary to continue their operations.”

Then the freeze

It lasted less than two years. The Great Freeze of 1894-95 destroyed the groves, and the Park Service form describes what it did to the railroad’s business: “Hundreds of railroad cars that stood ready to receive crates of oranges and grapefruit were left standing empty on their sidings. Packing houses had to close, and thousands of workers were left without employment.”

The railroad also took the tourists somewhere else. The same line that brought winter visitors to Rockledge in 1893 reached Palm Beach in 1894 and Miami in 1896, and the form says those places “supplanted Rockledge as tourist destinations during the late 1890s.” Rockledge’s population fell from about 400 before the freeze to about 272 by 1900, and the town lost the prestige of being, as the form puts it, “the most popular resort south of St. Augustine.”

The road that followed the rails

The railroad shaped the town’s next big change too. When the state built the Dixie Highway in the 1920s, its route generally followed the Florida East Coast Railway, according to the Park Service form, and it reached Rockledge by 1926. Trucks began carrying the Indian River’s fruit alongside the trains.

Titusville’s railroad story, including the 1885 line from Enterprise that came first, is on Old Titusville’s railroad page.

Further Reading

• Flagler: Rockefeller Partner and Florida Baron by Edward N. Akin
• Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon