Palm Coast Historical Society: William Crawford on the Intracoastal Waterway’s Big Dig

Palm Coast Historical Society Speaker Series: Florida’s Big Dig, The Intracoastal Waterway History, presented by William Crawford, 10 a.m., Palm Coast Community Center, 305 Palm Coast Parkway NE. This presentation is the story of people of vision and courage, of a small group of prominent Saint Augustine investors who conceived of the Florida waterway and began the first dredging work; of an obscure group of New England capitalists who provided significant financing and obtained a million acres of undeveloped Florida public land in pursuing what was, at best, a speculative enterprise; of innumerable citizen groups like the Florida east coast chamber associations and the larger Atlantic Deeper Waterways Association that demanded at the turn of the last century what they believed was the peoples right-a public waterway, free of the burden of tolls; and finally, of the U>S> Army Corps of Engineers, who conducted all of the Florida waterway’s early surveys and assumed the project’s control in 1929 to convert what was once a private toll way into Florida’s modern-day, toll-free Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. The women’s defiant advocacy, despite physical violence and verbal abuse, revived the crusade for a federal suffrage amendment and established a tradition of highly visible public protest in the nation’s capital.