The Indian River steamboats and Titusville as the transfer point

For eight years, from 1885 to 1893, Titusville was where the railroad met the Indian River. The Jacksonville, Tampa and Key West line from Enterprise ran its tracks down Broad Street and onto a dock about 1,500 feet out into the lagoon, where the steamboats waited. According to the City of Titusville’s marker on Broad Street, the railroad set up the Indian River Steamboat Company to carry its passengers south, and the town “immediately became the transportation hub of Florida’s East Coast.”

The wharf

The National Park Service’s history of Titusville describes how the system worked. The railroad wharf was “a transfer point where freight and passengers boarded the Indian River steamers for points farther south,” and the steamship companies coordinated their schedules with the railroad’s so travelers could make the connection. With the only rail link in the region, Titusville had steamer service to Melbourne and other points on the river.

Before 1885 the river had no such connection. Travelers from Jacksonville took a steamboat up the St. Johns to Sanford and then either a smaller boat to a landing called Salt Lake and overland to Titusville, or a 42-mile wagon road from Enterprise. A stage made the run three times a week.

The Queen of the River

The best-documented boat on the run was the Rockledge. The University of Florida’s notes on the 1892 Ingraham expedition give her history: Captain Richard P. Paddison brought the sidewheeler Governor Worth to Florida from North Carolina, ran her on the St. Johns between Jacksonville and Sanford, then moved her to the Indian River in 1886 and renamed her the Rockledge. She stopped at Titusville and Melbourne and connected with the Jacksonville, Tampa and Key West trains, and as the flagship of the Indian River Steamboat Company she was called the “Queen of the River.”

In 1888 the Rockledge carried President Grover Cleveland and his wife on their tour of the Indian River. In 1888 or 1889 Paddison sold her to Captain E.E. Vaill, who rebuilt her as “Vaill’s Floating Hotel” and took her south to Jupiter, Lake Worth and Miami.

Other steamers kept running into the 1890s. In April 1892 the Ingraham party came up the Indian River to Titusville aboard the St. Sebastian, stopping at Rockledge on the way.

The end of the transfer

Flagler’s railway began service to Titusville in January 1893 and kept building south. The Broad Street marker says it “soon pushed southward, ending Titusville’s short-lived monopoly,” and that while steamboats “continued to ply these waters into the 1900s,” they “steadily lost passengers to the railroad.” The Park Service form puts it more bluntly: the Florida East Coast Railway “quickly supplanted the steamboat as the principal means of transportation along the Indian River.”

A paid notice in the Indian River Advocate of February 2, 1894, quoted on the city’s marker, made the town’s case for the old line: “Without the JT&KW system and its steamboat service, we could never have had the Flagler line.”

The railroad side of the story is on our railroad page, and the river-wide steamboat story is on Old Space Coast’s Indian River steamboats page.

Further Reading

• A Land Remembered by Patrick D. Smith