The Intracoastal Waterway through the Indian River: from toll canal to federal channel

The Intracoastal Waterway that runs down the Indian River through Brevard is a federal navigation channel, but it started as a private business. According to the Florida Inland Navigation District, the state agency that sponsors the waterway, the idea of a canal linking the waterways of Florida’s Atlantic coast from Jacksonville to Miami was first taken up in 1881 by the Florida Coast Line Canal and Transportation Company.

The toll canal

The company’s canal was the state’s project as much as its own. By 1889, the district’s history says, the legislature required the canal to be at least 50 feet wide and 5 feet deep at mean low water for the whole distance between the St. Johns River and Biscayne Bay, maintained by the company. Widening it to that standard cost about $3.5 million, and the company charged tolls. Problems persisted even after the work was done.

The federal channel

Shippers wanted more. A 1920 federal survey recommended a channel 70 feet wide and 8 feet deep at mean low water, and the River and Harbor Act of 1927 authorized it. The act required a local sponsor to acquire the rights-of-way and provide sites to dump the material dredged from the channel. Florida created the Florida Inland Navigation District that same year to meet those conditions. It bought the old company canal, and the federal project replaced it with a larger, toll-free waterway.

Keeping it open

A channel has to be dredged again and again, and the dredged material has to go somewhere. The district says that finding and permitting places to put it, in environmentally sensitive and fast-developing country, became steadily harder, and in 1986 it began a long-term program to build permanent dredged-material management areas along the whole waterway. When finished, the program is meant to handle the maintenance dredging of all 398 miles of the Intracoastal Waterway from Fernandina Harbor in Nassau County to Miami Harbor, plus 15 miles of the Okeechobee Waterway. The district also works on the sources of the sediment, through inlet management, stormwater control and shoreline stabilization.

The district still acts as the waterway’s local sponsor, working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and gives grants to local governments in its twelve east coast counties, Brevard among them, for public waterway access.

Before the federal channel, the river’s traffic was steamboats; that story is on our steamboat page.

Further Reading

• Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon