Railways and Agriculture: The Enduring Legacy of Homestead, Florida

Long Bridge, Florida Keys Historic Overseas Highway to Key West, Florida  (Photo by Simon Dannhauer on Adobe Stock

Located just south of Miami and often considered to be an outlying suburb of the city, Homestead is a thriving agricultural center with a population of over 60,000, situated within a stone’s throw of Biscayne Bay and the Everglades. Today, Homestead is a quiet, rural enclave, but its history is one of industry and grit. Rusted-out railroad ties and defunct tracks still dot the lush landscape, bearing silent witness to this placid town’s fascinating and ambitious past.

Early Inhabitants and European Arrival

The area around Biscayne Bay was originally home to the Tequesta Indians, a powerful local group whose influence reached deep into southeastern Florida, encompassing parts of what would later become Broward and Palm Beach counties. The Tequesta lived off the land, fishing, hunting, and collecting wild fruits, roots, and other vegetation. They did not practice any form of settled agriculture or horticulture. The Tequesta remained in the area until the late 1700s, when the decimation wrought by contact with European settlers and European diseases sent them on a desperate journey to Cuba in search of a new homeland. Sadly, the vast majority of the Tequesta Indians died despite aid from Cuba, felled in large numbers by endemic European diseases to which they had no immunity.

Over the next several decades, the area around Biscayne Bay remained occupied, if sparsely, often serving as a point of territorial dispute between various European colonial powers. Spain finally regained control of Florida in 1783, but could no longer afford the heavy costs involved in maintaining the territory. In 1819, under the terms of the Adams-Onis Treaty, Spain ceded the region to America. Three years later, in 1822, Florida was formally incorporated as a U.S. territory, but it would take a further two decades for Florida to gain full statehood.

Homesteading and the Push Southward

In 1862, the U.S. government passed the Homestead Act, which allowed all citizens the right to claim 160 acres of land in designated regions around the country in order to create a homestead. In 1898, the southern part of Dade County, including Miami and Biscayne Bay, was opened up to prospective settlers under the new act. That same year, the first European homesteaders began to arrive in the region of far southeastern Florida.

The area that later became the city of Homestead was, at this time, difficult to get to, with the only access route being a dirt track that was pragmatically named “Homesteader’s Trail”. It seemed that the rural enclave was on the verge of becoming a vast network of unincorporated farms and homesteads, not all that different from other homesteading regions spread out across the country.

Henry Flagler and the Florida East Coast Railway

However, fate intervened in the form of Henry Flagler, a railroad magnate who was at one time Rockefeller’s partner in Standard Oil. By the early 1900s, Flagler had already established the Florida East Coast Railway (FEC), which was formed from a combination of several local, privately owned railway lines that he purchased. By 1904, he had connected all of southern Florida, including Biscayne Bay, to the more northern reaches of the East Coast.

In 1902, Flagler’s men came to the area around Homestead to survey the land for the newly proposed Key West expansion of Flagler’s FEC. Three years later, in 1905, work began on the new extension line, which happened to pass through the area that would come to be known as Homestead. At the time, it was simply an assortment of farms, founded by settlers in the wake of the Homestead Act of 1862. However, Flagler’s engineers and laborers needed a name for the area at the terminus of the slowly expanding line. The workers had established a construction camp there, but without a formal address, there was no clear way to send construction equipment and materials to the camp. So, with the stolid imagination of seasoned engineers, they named the area Homestead Country. The name stuck, and over time was shortened to Homestead, a moniker that became official when the small town was formally incorporated in 1913.

From Rails to Roads: Homestead’s Growth and Challenges

Homestead, Florida     (Photo by Felix Mizioznikov on Adobe Stock)

Since that time, the town of Homestead has continued on its path of slow, steady growth. In 1923, Homestead became a city and opened its own Chamber of Commerce. The FEC continued to run through the city, bringing tourists and commerce, until the overseas railway line to Key West was all but destroyed in the infamous Labor Day hurricane of 1935. After this disastrous event, the railway line was reconstructed as a series of bridges to accommodate car traffic, and Flagler’s ambitious vision came to an ignominious end. Yet, the towns and cities that developed as a result of Flagler’s railway expansion continued to thrive.

Over the next several years, Homestead grew and prospered, barring a few reversals of fortune caused by the hurricanes that are sadly a regular part of life in southern Florida. In 1945, a massive hurricane forced the permanent closure of the Homestead Army Airfield, which had only been open for three years.  A few decades later, in 1992, Hurricane Andrew made landfall directly over Homestead, leading to city-wide devastation on a massive scale. Yet, the town’s citizens continued to persevere, rebuilding their damaged town and seeing a slow growth in population over the years. Today, Homestead is a charming historic city that stands as a testament to the grit and tenacity of the pioneers who settled on this land and the engineers and workers who labored so tirelessly to construct Flagler’s audaciously imagined FEC railway line.