The Railroad Reaches Titusville: the 1885 Enterprise Line and Flagler's 1893 Arrival

Titusville got its first railroad in 1885, and it wasn’t Henry Flagler’s. It was a 35-mile line from Enterprise, the steamboat landing on the upper St. Johns River, begun by the Atlantic Coast, St. Johns and Indian River Railroad and leased to the Jacksonville, Tampa and Key West, which finished the track. Flagler’s railway, the line later renamed the Florida East Coast Railway, didn’t begin service to Titusville until January 1893.

The two dates get blurred together constantly, usually into “Flagler’s railroad reached Titusville in 1885.” That sentence is wrong on both counts. For about seven years Titusville had the only rail connection on the Indian River, and the line that gave it that edge came in from the west, not down the coast.

Getting to Titusville before 1885

The National Park Service’s history of the town describes what a trip from Jacksonville involved in 1885. A fairly large steamboat ran up the St. Johns to Sanford. From there freight went one way and passengers and mail another. Freight moved to a smaller steamboat on the upper St. Johns as far as a landing called Salt Lake, then overland to Titusville. Passengers and mail started at Enterprise, just east of Sanford, and covered about 42 miles to Titusville by horse or wagon. A stage made the run three times a week.

That overland leg was the bottleneck for everything on the river. Henry Titus had opened a stage line over it when he started his town at Sand Point, and the same 42 miles still stood between the Indian River and the nearest railhead.

The 1885 line

The railroad closed that gap. The NPS form says the Atlantic Coast, St. Johns and Indian River Railroad began a spur from Enterprise to Titusville in 1885 and leased it shortly afterward to the Jacksonville, Tampa and Key West, which completed the track. Titusville residents put up $30,000 plus the right-of-way to make sure it got built.

The City of Titusville’s marker on Broad Street adds the layout. The tracks ran down the middle of Broad Street’s right-of-way and out onto a dock about 1,500 feet into the lagoon, where they met the steamboat wharf. The railroad set up the Indian River Steamboat Company to carry its passengers south, and the steamboats timed their departures to the trains. Passengers and freight changed from car to boat at the end of the dock for points farther south.

What the first railroad did to the town

The NPS form calls the 1885 arrival “a pivotal event” and is specific about the effects. Tourists and settlers could now reach the Indian River without the wagon trip, and fish and fruit could leave by rail for northern markets. Ice plants, packing houses and canneries followed. In 1886 D. S. Hutchison bought Henry Titus’s old hotel, the Titus House, remodeled it and renamed it the Indian River Hotel.

Within a few years Titusville had five general or specialty stores, express and telegraph offices, two hotels, two public schools and a steam sawmill. With the only rail connection in the area, the form says, it was the transportation hub of the Indian River region. It was also still rough. One newcomer in 1886 called it “a city of saloons” with “no churches,” and two churches went up that same year, the Presbyterian and St. Gabriel’s Episcopal.

The railroad didn’t kill the steamboats. It fed them. Everything bound for the lower river came off the trains at the Broad Street dock and went south by water, which is why the 1885 line made Titusville rather than any other river town the gateway. Our steamboat page covers that side of the trade.

Flagler arrives, 1893

Flagler came at the Indian River from the north. The NPS form traces his line from St. Augustine: he extended it to Daytona in 1892, started building toward the Indian River later that year, and began train service to Titusville in January 1893. The company was then the Jacksonville, St. Augustine and Indian River Railway. Flagler renamed it the Florida East Coast Railway in 1895.

His line didn’t stop at Titusville. A marker in Eau Gallie records the railway’s arrival there on May 20, 1893, with the first engine on June 24, and Eau Gallie served as the end of track while construction went on south. The Broad Street marker puts the consequence plainly: Flagler’s railway “soon pushed southward, ending Titusville’s short-lived monopoly.” Once trains ran down the coast, the river towns no longer needed the transfer at Titusville.

The town didn’t forget the first line. A paid notice in the Indian River Advocate of February 2, 1894, quoted on the city’s marker, told readers they “should not forget what the Jacksonville, Tampa, and Key West System has done,” and argued that without it and its steamboats there would have been no Flagler line at all.

Then the freeze

Titusville barely had time to adjust. In the last days of December 1894 the Great Freeze dropped the temperature in Titusville as low as 18 degrees, according to the NPS form, and growers lost nearly all the fruit still on the trees. The form notes that the railroads and shippers were hit even harder than the growers, with cars and boats idle for lack of fruit and the men who hauled it out of work. Our freeze page has the rest of that winter. A year later, in December 1895, fire destroyed most of the business district on Washington Avenue.

The depot

The station Titusville uses as its railroad landmark belongs to the Flagler era, not to 1885. The Titusville Historic Preservation Board says the FEC built its Titusville passenger and cargo station as a wood-frame vernacular building, then stuccoed and remodeled it in the Spanish Revival style in 1925. It went out of use in 1963, when the FEC ended passenger service. The railway still owns the building and uses it for storage, behind a fence on Watson Avenue.

The JT&KW’s dock is long gone. The city’s marker for it stands on Broad Street, east of Indian River Avenue, near where the tracks ran out into the lagoon.

Further Reading

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