The railroads reach Brevard: Enterprise to Titusville in 1885, Flagler's line in 1893

Henry Flagler’s railroad was not the first to reach Brevard County. The first came from the west, eight years earlier. In 1885 a 35-mile line from Enterprise, on the upper St. Johns River, reached Titusville. Flagler’s own line, built down the coast from the north, began service to Titusville in January 1893 and became the Florida East Coast Railway in 1895.

The line from Enterprise, 1885

Before 1885 the way into the Indian River country was overland. The National Park Service’s history of Titusville describes the route: passengers and mail went by steamboat up the St. Johns to Enterprise, then about 42 miles by horse or wagon to Titusville.

The railroad followed that route. According to the Park Service, the line was begun by the Atlantic Coast, St. Johns and Indian River Railroad and leased to the Jacksonville, Tampa and Key West, which completed it, and Titusville’s residents gave $30,000 plus the right-of-way to get it built. The city’s marker at the site records what came next: the tracks ran down Broad Street and out onto a dock about 1,500 feet into the lagoon, and the railroad set up the Indian River Steamboat Company to carry passengers on south. The full story is on Old Titusville’s page on the 1885 railroad.

For eight years that made Titusville the gateway. “With the only rail connection in the area,” the Park Service form says, “it was the hub of transportation for the Indian River region.” The towns to the south, Rockledge among them, were a steamboat ride from the Titusville wharf.

Flagler’s railway, 1893

Flagler came at the coast from St. Augustine. The Park Service form says he visited the city in 1885, imagined it as a winter resort for wealthy northerners, and in 1889 bought the railroad between Jacksonville and St. Augustine, converted it to standard gauge and improved its passenger service. In 1892 he extended it to Daytona, and later that year began building toward the Indian River. His company was then the Jacksonville, St. Augustine and Indian River Railway.

Service to Titusville began in January 1893. The line kept moving south along the mainland shore through the year:

Place	Arrival	Source
Titusville	Train service began January 1893	NPS, Titusville form
Rockledge	”In 1893 Rockledge was finally linked directly with Florida’s growing railroad network”	NPS, Rockledge form
Eau Gallie	Railway arrived May 20, 1893; first engine June 24, 1893; Eau Gallie was the end of track while construction continued south	Eau Gallie marker

In 1895 Flagler renamed the company the Florida East Coast Railway. It “quickly supplanted the steamboat as the principal means of transportation along the Indian River,” the Park Service form says, and until the Dixie Highway and the automobile, decades later, it was the main way freight and passengers moved in and out of Titusville.

What it did to the river towns

The railroad that made the river towns also passed them by. The Rockledge form says the FEC was extended to Palm Beach in 1894 and reached Miami in 1896, and that those two places “supplanted Rockledge as tourist destinations during the late 1890s.” Rockledge lost the standing it had enjoyed as the most popular resort south of St. Augustine.

The Great Freeze landed at the same moment. In December 1894 and February 1895 the cold killed the groves that the railroad had been carrying north, and in Rockledge the population fell from a pre-freeze high of 400 to about 272 by 1900. The full story is on our freeze page.

The Titusville depot

At Titusville the FEC built a wood-frame station. According to the city’s Historic Preservation Board, it was stuccoed and remodeled in the Spanish Revival style in 1925, went out of use in 1963 when the FEC ended passenger service, and still belongs to the railroad.

Further Reading

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