Tallahassee-St. Marks Historic Railroad State Trail in Leon County, Florida

Photograph: Tallahassee - St Marks Historic Railroad State Trail Capital City trail head.jpg by Michael Rivera · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Restored from the credited Wikimedia Commons file, normalized to the consistent attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Portrait originals retain their complete composition over a softly blurred extension of the same photograph.

Leon County attraction

Tallahassee-St. Marks Historic Railroad State Trail

Leon County · Panhandle & Emerald Coast

Sixteen miles of paved trail on the bed of the oldest railroad in Florida, running south from Tallahassee to the town of St. Marks.

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ABOUT THIS PLACE

The Tallahassee Railroad Company was set up in 1834 and received the first congressional land grant ever given to a railroad, in 1831. Trains began running in 1837, hauling cotton down to the water; about thirty thousand bales went over it in that first year, in cars pulled by mules. The line was pushed on to Port Leon in 1839 across a bridge over the St. Marks River, and a hurricane destroyed that extension in 1843, which is why St. Marks became the permanent end of the line. Wooden rails gave way to steel and mules to steam locomotives in 1856. The railroad carried Confederate troops toward the Battle of Natural Bridge in 1865. It stopped running in 1983, and in 1984 the state bought sixteen miles of the corridor for Florida's first rails to trails project. The paved surface is twelve feet wide, with a separate unpaved track alongside for horses. San Marcos de Apalache Historic State Park sits at the southern end

GETTING THERE

Get Directions ↗Official place website ↗

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