Lake Wimico and St. Joseph Canal and Railroad Company

The Lake Wimico and St. Joseph Canal and Railroad was the first steam railroad in Florida and one of the first in the U.S., opening in 1836. It was soon abandoned, and is now mostly a state highway.

History

The Lake Wimico and St. Joseph Canal Company was chartered in 1835, and was renamed in 1838 to the Lake Wimico and St. Joseph Canal and Railroad Company. It was constructed with 5 ft (1,524 mm)[1] track gauge. The first section, stretching 9 miles (14 km) from St. Joseph on the St. Joseph Bay to White City near Lake Wimico, opened on September 5, 1836.[2] The rest of the road opened in stages from 1837 to 1839, eventually reaching Iola on the Apalachicola River. The company did good business hauling cotton to St. Joseph.

In 1841 yellow fever struck St. Joseph, by that time a popular summer resort, and the city was abandoned. A reincorporation that year as the Iola and St. Joseph Canal and Railroad Company failed, and rails were removed soon after and shipped to Georgia.[3] The West Florida and Alabama Railroad, incorporated in 1883, attempted to revive the roadbed, but it too failed. In the 1920s the portion of the roadbed between Wewahitchka and White City in Gulf County became part of the Beeline Highway, a national auto trail, and now part of State Road 71.[4]

References

  1. ↑ A Short History of Florida Railroads
  2. ↑ Archived September 28, 2007 at the Wayback Machine
  3. ↑ Archived October 30, 2005 at the Wayback Machine
  4. ↑ Womack, Marlene (March 16, 1997). "Beeline Highway helped open Panhandle for tourists". The News Herald. Archived from the original on October 19, 2004.
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