Florida history: The rough, bumpy road that became Dixie Highway, spawning modern tourism

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6 days ago

Editor's note: This story by former staff writer Barbara Marshall originally ran Jan. 14, 2016. It has been edited for updating, length and clarity.
One hundred and 10 years ago, Dixie Highway began to spawn today's tourism industry.
Beginning in 1915 and for decades afterward, "The Dixie" was the artery that delivered the tourists who became residents, transforming America's last frontier into a balmy, palmy middle-class paradise.
In towns such as West Palm Beach, Dixie was the main drag where courthouses and businesses were built. Dixie spawned theme motels, juice stands and wacky roadside attractions.
A rough, rutted road
For intrepid tourists and adventurers at the dawn of the Automobile Age, a trip south on "The Dixie" was a grueling, often dangerous journey. Much of the road was a rutted sand track through Florida's piney woods and coastal scrub. It could take 10 days to two weeks to drive on a Tin Lizzie's narrow tires from Chicago to Miami.
Coming into Palm Beach County, Dixie followed the dry ridge that Flagler's railroad crews had surveyed two decades earlier.
"The FEC had taken the high ground, so basically they had whatever was left," said Lake Park historian L.J. Parker. "When they came to a lake or a sinkhole, they moved the road to the other side of the tracks."
Today, the road is called Dixie Highway only in certain areas such as downtown West Palm Beach. Elsewhere, it has names such as Evergreen and Poinsettia avenues in northern West Palm; President Barack Obama Highway in Riviera Beach; and Old Dixie Highway in Lake Park and Delray Beach.
Despite these perils, Dixie Highway modernized the South by providing its first good farm-to-market roads while simultaneously creating the dream of a winter Florida vacation, said historian Tammy Ingram.
"Auto tourism opened up Florida to middle class tourism. You didn't need a train depot anymore," said Ingram, author of "Dixie Highway: Road Building and the Making of the Modern South."
The genius behind Dixie Highway
Credit goes to Carl Fisher, founder of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and an early automobile enthusiast. He helped form the Dixie Highway Association in 1914 to create a reliable route to get Midwesterners down to his latest project: a mangrove swamp he was busy transforming into Miami Beach.
Fisher's idea was to cobble together the country's existing north-south roads and improve them, creating an interstate highway. (He'd done the same thing earlier with his transcontinental Lincoln Highway, connecting New York to San Francisco.) His genius was persuading states and cities to tax themselves into paying for improving those existing roads.
'Not a trip for faint of heart'
When it officially opened in the fall of 1915, the road came south via two meandering, gerrymandered routes. The eastern route started in Detroit and went through Jacksonville and down the Atlantic coast. The western route left Chicago, connecting Tallahassee with Orlando then continuing down the Gulf coast.
Eventually, the combined Dixie Highway routes stretched 5,786 miles across 10 states from the Canadian border at Sault Sainte Marie in Michigan's Upper Peninsula to Miami on Biscayne Bay.
"Before that, you had to find your own way down without maps or road signs," said Susan Gillis, curator at the Boca Raton Historical Society.
Florida's torrential downpours were also big trouble for those early motorists. Yet, thousands came and stayed, starting Florida's 1920s land boom.
"It was very treacherous, but that was part of the appeal," said Ingram. "It was not a trip for the faint of heart."
"You left early and timed it so you were hitting major towns to eat lunch, get gas, have a place to stay overnight. You carried supplies including extra tires and gas. Wealthy people would have a driver and mechanic go with them."
By 1920, Motor Travel magazine wrote that Florida "no longer lay beyond arduous and impassable sands … just around the corner from Stygian cypress swamps …"
But many of those who followed Dixie to the boom did a U-turn during the bust that began in 1926.
By May of 1928, Boca Raton was so desperate for tourists it erected a painted plywood camel over the road to attract Shriners headed to a national convention in Miami. A sign advertised that its new town hall (now the city's history museum) had restrooms. A month later during a Miami Elks convention, said Gillis, the city added antlers to transform the camel into an elk.
Today, most of what remains of Dixie's original route through Palm Beach is Old Dixie, a workingman's road lined with thrift shops and car repair places.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Florida history: Creation of Dixie Highway in the early 20th century
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