John Burleigh’s Fabulous Wooden Railroad
Transcript
Greetings, history nerds. I’m Jason and this is the Florida History Blog podcast.
Imagine it is 1895. You’re living in Florida frontier. There are no paved roads, no trains, automobiles, or heavy machinery. Now, imagine you need to move a 12-ton locomotive 23 miles across untamed flat woods. How in the world do you do it? That’s the challenge our story’s hero, John C. Burleigh, had to solve.
Born in Connecticut, Burleigh moved to Florida in 1886 and founded the town of Midland. He served as postmaster, ran the general store, and owned the sawmill. But by 1890, the ambitious 25-year-old saw potential in Oliver Crosby’s new town of Avon Park. So he sold his Midland property and moved to Avon Park, where he opened a steam-powered sawmill.
Business was so good that Burleigh ran into a problem: he’d depleted the nearby timber. Hauling logs with mules from farther away was too slow. Burleigh had a choice: build a new mill deeper in the woods or find a better way to transport logs.
He found his answer in Shay locomotives, lightweight engines used by loggers up north. He learned that a locomotive could cut transport costs from $3.50 to just $1.25 per thousand feet of timber. That was a game-changer!
Burleigh ordered a used 12-ton locomotive from Ohio. It arrived at the Bowling Green train depot, 23 miles away. Today, that’s a 30-minute drive. In 1895, it was a six-hour journey on horseback, crossing creeks and marshes. Now, imagine bringing a 12-ton engine back the other way!
On December 13, 1894, Burleigh and his crew of a dozen men arrived in Bowling Green. They brought camping gear, a cook, and plenty of wood planks. Their first challenge was just getting the massive locomotive off the boxcar. They constructed a series of interlocking wooden ramps to guide the engine down. Once the “beast” was in motion, gravity did most of the work.
Next, they built a temporary railway using the planks. They eased the engine’s wheels onto the makeshift tracks, then gave it a little steam. As the engine moved forward, the crew grabbed the planks from behind it and raced to lay them down in front.
This grueling process continued for nine days. The crew inched along, covering less than three miles a day. They carefully throttled the engine over creeks and through swamps until, finally, on December 22, the team arrived triumphantly in Avon Park.
They were met with a huge celebration! Townspeople, local dignitaries, and a band all turned out to witness this incredible feat. Bells rang, and the train whistled its victory salute, marking the arrival of the first steam engine in Avon Park.
Burleigh’s team constructed a permanent track to transport far-away lumber the mill. The railway was made entirely from lumber milled at his own facility. It was held together with hardwood strips and wooden pins—no metal at all.
The experiment was a huge success. The wooden track held up perfectly, and the 12-ton train made twenty trips a day without a single issue. The town was so impressed that the Avon Park Transportation Company, which had struggled to build a traditional steel railroad, proposed a new idea: a wooden railway.
They planned to build 40 miles of track to Haines City, an ambitious project that would be incredibly cheap compared to a steel road. Northern railroaders marveled that the estimated cost for the entire wooden line was barely enough to build a single mile of traditional track.
The company secured a fraction of the funding, and construction began in June 1895. By September, the first four-mile segment was open for business, carrying 150 people on its maiden voyage. There was so much hope and excitement that the line would soon connect more communities.
But additional funding never materialized, largely due to two devastating freezes. The ambitious wooden line never reached the county line.
It took another 16 years for the mainline steel railroad to finally reach Avon Park. But the ingenuity of Burleigh’s wooden railroad was celebrated by publications like Harper’s Weekly and stands as a testament to the power of human will.
Burleigh’s pioneering feat should live on in our memory. That’s all for this episode of the Florida History Blog podcast. Thanks for listening!