Always Keep a Spare Mule Handy: Early Travel in Florida

Rebekah Sheats
Contributor

For all recorded history, Florida has offered a kaleidoscope of landscapes—rolling hills, flatlands, balmy inlets and beaches of stunning beauty. Yet it has also been a land of swamps, forests, dense brush, and stubbornly clinging vines. So much of a wilderness was this land that when American emigrants began to arrive here in the early 1800s, they were hard pressed to find a viable means of transportation in this tropical wilderness.
Take the post office, for example. When a post office was established in Monticello in the 1820s, it was one of only thirteen post offices in existence in Florida. Florida was still a territory and wouldn’t achieve statehood for almost another twenty years.
Monticello’s first postmaster was John G. Robinson. Some of the names who followed him include C. A. Bradley, Anthony Mills, John Garwood, Mr. Mays, P. R. Whitaker, Emerson Ridgeway, Will Bullock, Mr. Montgomery, and Tom Braswell. Being postmaster was an interesting job; one was able to keep abreast of current news and gossip. But the position didn’t pay well. Originally postmasters received an annual income of less than five dollars. (Postal revenues were little better. During its first year of operation, the Monticello post office recorded a total revenue of $2.48. By 1859, its net proceeds had risen to $290.69.)
Monticello received out-of-town mail every two weeks. It was driven in by wagon team, first from Tallahassee to St. Augustine and then from Jacksonville to Monticello via Albany, Ga.
Mule team was perhaps the most reliable method of transportation available, so this was the method the post office used. But even mule teams had their problems. One man who contracted with the postal service to deliver the mails was chronically late due to the illness of one of his mules. After his contract ended, the postal service required his successor to “provide a spare mule at all times” to ensure a timely delivery of the mails.
By 1859, it appeared that these mule troubles were coming to an end. In early July of that year, Monticello residents excitedly discussed the approach of the railroad. Hopes ran high that tracks into town would be laid that fall. The rails would benefit more than just the post office. Local businesses hurriedly prepared for the increased traffic they expected from this new mode of travel. One man described the anticipation swelling the small town: “New buildings are being spoken of on every hand, and general improvement appears to be the order of the day.” Monticello indeed began to exhibit a startling change. “Monticello is awaking from her Rip Van Winkle sleep and is preparing for the flood of business that is to be concentrated at this point,” it was noted.
By the end of July 1859, Monticello’s newspaper The Family Friend assured its readers, “We are informed from headquarters that the [train]cars will be running to our town about the middle of September. This is no surmise but really the case.”
Neighboring towns and cities also readied for an increase in rail traffic. The Tallahassee Railroad Company began erecting larger warehouses at St. Marks alongside its existing warehouses. These new buildings, it was hoped, would be sufficient to house the cotton and other merchandise being shipped over the rails.
Helpful as the railroad was, it couldn’t solve the transportation problem in Florida. Rivers, swamps, and thick forests barred access to many regions of the territory. Something more than a standard railroad was necessary.
Once again, a new solution offered itself. Could the trouble be solved by the use of a special stage line? Some believed it possible and had already set to work on the ticklish problem. Their means of travel employed railroads, stagecoaches, and even steamboats to transport passengers from northern and western states to southern destinations such as the Carolinas or Georgia—and even the wilds of Florida. Because of its partly amphibious nature, this special line was known as the Alligator Stage Line. No mudhole was too deep, no swamp too long for this hardy line and its teams of agile horses, trusty rails, and mud-spattered boats.
The Alligator Stage Line maintained a good reputation among local Floridians. In Monticello a bed and breakfast known as the Monticello House proudly informed its patrons that an office of the Alligator Stage Line was located on its premises. Guests staying at this inn would have easy access to this convenient mode of travel.
Newcomers to the area, however, offered a different insight into the rustic stage line. A man from Kentucky traveling over the line in the 1850s described his trip in less than glowing terms: “I was fatigued by a week’s traveling by stage-coach over what they called an ‘alligator road’ (the fates deliver me from such another); [I] was not disposed to be very civil, and certainly not in a very agreeable humor.”
I suppose you can’t please everyone, not even with an Alligator Stagecoach Line. If we were to poll the crowd, perhaps this archaic mode of transportation would be a piece of history that most people are glad has faded into the distant past . . .