At the dawn of the Automobile Age, Dixie Highway was the way tourists and new residents traveled to Florida. In 1928, Boca Raton erected a plywood camel over the road to greet motoring Shriners headed to a Miami convention. (Boca Raton Historical Society)
Twenty years after Henry Flagler brought his railroad and private rail cars full of swells to Florida in the 1890s, Henry Ford’s Model T and Carl Fisher’s Dixie Highway brought everyone else.
It’s the road that created – and democratized – Florida.
“Auto tourism opened up Florida to middle class tourism. You didn’t need a train depot anymore,” said Tammy Ingram, author of “Dixie Highway: Road Building and the Making of the Modern South” and a history professor at the University of Charleston.
THEN: An arch on what is now Old Dixie Highway greeted visitors to Kelsey City, now renamed Lake Park. (Lake Park Historical Society)
NOW: The arch was removed in the 1980’s when the road was widened.
The highway, cobbled together from existing north-south roads stretching from Michigan to Miami, was dedicated in 1915.
Today, the original route is an almost forgotten alternate business route called “Old Dixie” in much of Palm Beach County, but still serves as the main drag through downtown West Palm Beach.
There’s even an abandoned stretch that retains the isolated feeling of what driving Dixie once must have been like.
Australian pines line a stretch of Old Dixie in North Palm Beach, that was abandoned in the 1930s when a canal bridge burned. Post photo/Rich Graulich)
In North Palm Beach, Old Dixie dead-ends on the south bank of the C-17 Canal/Earman River, the site of a bridge that burned in 1933. The bridge and highway were rebuilt further east.
But a remaining line of Australian pines stands in last, lonely testament to the inroads this lonely path once made in Florida and Palm Beach County’s history.
Read: The Road That Created Florida: Dixie Highway at 100
SEE: “Then” and “Now” photos of Dixie Highway in Palm Beach County
