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A History of Columbia County Florida (1996) Edward F. Keuchel 140/340

Chapter VII

A PERIOD OF GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT: 1876 - 1900

Ambrose Hart’s comments about Lake City becoming a tourist
center were not the result of idle thoughts. Tourists were starting
to look upon Florida for health and vacation purposes, and those
areas of the state served by railroads were in the most advan­
tageous position to capitalize on the new industry of tourism.
In 1875, Sidney Lanier writing for the Atlantic Coast Railway
Company, traveled across North Florida as a part of a health
promotion and gave a glowing reportof Lake City. In his own words:
Lake City itself, a pleasant town of some two thousand
inhabitants, county-site of Columbia County, with seven
churches, three hotels (probably thirty rooms in each), a
newspaper, and terminal station of the Cuban telegraph
line. . . J
Four years later George M. Barbour, a newspaper corre­
spondent of the Chicago Times, traveling with the well-publicized
Florida tour of former President Ulysses S. Grant, was even more
enthusiastic:
Lake City, the most important place in the region, is
on the railroad about fifty miles west of Jacksonville. It is
a prosperous and substantially built town of some twenty-
five hundred inhabitants, with a number of brick stores,
wellkept hotels, seven or eight churches, good schools,
tasteful private residences, and a large trade in vegetables
and other products of the surrounding country, including
lumber and turpentine. Its climate being drier than that
of Jacksonville, is thought to be more favorable to those
consumptives who are in advanced stages of the disease,
and the place is a favorite winter retreat for such invalids.
Lakes almost surround the town, hence its name.* 2

‘Sidney Lanier, Florida: Its Scenery, Climate, and History (Philadelphia,
1876), p. 143.
2Georga M. Barbour, Florida for Tourists, Invalids, and Settlers (New York,
1882), pp. 88-89.
137

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