Florida State Road 609

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Locally known as Glades Cut-off Road, the former State Road 609 (now St. Lucie County Road 609) is a 16-mile-long southwest-northeast route parallelling the tracks of Florida East Coast Railroad between Port St. Lucie and Bluefield. The northern terminus is an intersection with Selvitz Road (former SR 611B, current CR 611) just north of Port St. Lucie; the southern terminus is an intersection with Carlton Road midway between Bluefield and Cena (Glades Cutoff Road continues to the Martin County boundary near Bluefield).

County Road 609 makes no turns as it passes through sparsely-populated territory west and south of Port St. Lucie; it is sometimes used as an alternative route to Lake Okeechobee. Most of the route passes through woodlands and wetlands that are characteristic of southeastern Florida between Lake Okeechobee and the Atlantic Ocean.

[edit] An earlier State Road 609 and 609A

Roughly a decade before Glades Cut-off Road was designated SR 609, State Road Department (the predecessor to the Florida Department of Transportation signed and maintained a different State Road 609 west of Fort Pierce and Port St. Lucie. The north-south Header Canal Road between Okeechobee Road (SR 70) and Orange Avenue (SR 68) was a 5.1-mile-long SR 609 serving orange groves.

At the same time, Shinn Road, parallel and one mile to the east of Canal Header Road, was designated State Road 609A. Like the "parent route" (although it never intersected then-SR 609), then-SR 609A spanned SR 68 and SR 70 (Shinn Road continues 0.4 miles south to intersect with Midway Road, at that time SR 712).

Upon decommissioning by FDOT in the mid 1980s, both the former SR 609 and 609A were redesignated St. Lucie County Road 609 (some maps show Shinn Road as "CR 609A"), ironically the same designation that was given to the part of Hale Dairy Road in St. Lucie County when it lost its State Road 609 signage in the 1990s.