Florida Friday; Deep Lake and the Harrisburg to Everglades City Railroad

Back in 2013 I checked out a ghost town in Collier County on Florida State Road 29 which along the Harrisburg to Everglades City Railroad.

The name Deep Lake refers to a 90 foot sink hole on the eastern side of FL 29 which apparently is the largest south of Lake Okeechobee. Deep Lake is located in the middle of the Big Cypress Swamp and was part of Lee County until Collier County split away in 1923. Deep Lake was originally settled in 1900 by investors looking to built grapefruit ranch. The investors built a small railroad line to transport the grapefruit from Deep Lake south to Everglades City. Said railroad line can be seen on the 1916 Lee County map.

1916 Lee County Map

By 1928 the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad purchased the rails between Everglades and Deep Lake. The ACL expanded the line north to Harrisburg which was a rail siding located near Palmdale and the current junction of US 27/FL 29. The expanded line can be seen on the 1932 Collier County Map.

1932 Collier County Map

The Everglades City to Harrisburg line was partially abandoned in 1957 between Everglades City north to Sunniland with the rest of the line sometime in the 1980s according to abandonedrails.com.

Everglades City to Harrisburg Railroad

At some point a prison complex was built in Deep Lake. The prison ended up being a FDOT maintenance facility which was abandoned in 2002. The prison complex is located being a fence line which can be seen from FL 29.

Comments

Paper Highways: The Unbuilt New Orleans Bypass (Proposed I-410)

There are many examples around the United States of proposed freeway corridors in urban areas that never saw the light of day for one reason or another. They all fall somewhere in between the little-known and the infamous and from the mundane to the spectacular. One of the more obscure and interesting examples of such a project is the short-lived idea to construct a southern beltway for the New Orleans metropolitan area in the 1960s and 70s. Greater New Orleans and its surrounding area grew rapidly in the years after World War II, as suburban sprawl encroached on the historically rural downriver parishes around the city. In response to the development of the region’s Westbank and the emergence of communities in St. Charles and St. John the Baptist Parishes as viable suburban communities during this period, regional planners began to consider concepts for new infrastructure projects to serve this growing population. The idea for a circular freeway around the southern perimeter of t

Hernando de Soto Bridge (Memphis, TN)

The newest of the bridges that span the lower Mississippi River at Memphis, the Hernando de Soto Bridge was completed in 1973 and carries Interstate 40 between downtown Memphis and West Memphis, AR. The bridge’s signature M-shaped superstructure makes it an instantly recognizable landmark in the city and one of the most visually unique bridges on the Mississippi River. As early as 1953, Memphis city planners recommended the construction of a second highway bridge across the Mississippi River to connect the city with West Memphis, AR. The Memphis & Arkansas Bridge had been completed only four years earlier a couple miles downriver from downtown, however it was expected that long-term growth in the metro area would warrant the construction of an additional bridge, the fourth crossing of the Mississippi River to be built at Memphis, in the not-too-distant future. Unlike the previous three Mississippi River bridges to be built the city, the location chosen for this bridge was about two

Memphis & Arkansas Bridge (Memphis, TN)

Like the expansion of the railroads the previous century, the modernization of the country’s highway infrastructure in the early and mid 20th Century required the construction of new landmark bridges along the lower Mississippi River (and nation-wide for that matter) that would facilitate the expected growth in overall traffic demand in ensuing decades. While this new movement had been anticipated to some extent in the Memphis area with the design of the Harahan Bridge, neither it nor its neighbor the older Frisco Bridge were capable of accommodating the sharp rise in the popularity and demand of the automobile as a mode of cross-river transportation during the Great Depression. As was the case 30 years prior, the solution in the 1940s was to construct a new bridge in the same general location as its predecessors, only this time the bridge would be the first built exclusively for vehicle traffic. This bridge, the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge, was completed in 1949 and was the third

Gribblenation

Search This Blog