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A History of Columbia County Florida (1996) Edward F. Keuchel 205/340

The Early Twentieth Century

Florida. When work got underway in 1921, it was still common for
an automobile trip from Jacksonville to Pensacola, a distance of
373 miles, to take two or three days, depending on the weather.
Jacksonville was noted for its brick streets, but the nine foot wide
brick road only extended three miles west of the city. The Jackson­
ville to Lake City (U.S. 90) concrete highway was opened on July
12, 1923. U.S. 41 received a hard surface coating in 1924, and U.S.
27 in the southern part of the county was hard-surfaced in 1929.29
The development of better roads in Florida was a factor in the
Florida boom—“Florida Fever”—of the 1920’s. In 1925 The
Saturday Evening Post featured Lake City in an article on “Florida
Fever.” The city was described as a “flourishing North Florida
community . . . surrounded by pecan groves, towering live oaks
and rolling hill slopes whose contours suggest Southern Maine or
Vermont rather than tropical Florida.” The Post article estimated
that about half of the automobile tourists going to South Florida,
the main area of the boom, passed through Lake City, while the
other half entered the state via Jacksonville. The Post article
referred to Lake City as “The Gateway to Florida.”30
During the height of the tourist season in the mid-1920’s, the
Lake City Chamber of Commerce opened its office at six o’clock
in the morning for the start of an eighteen hour day, and there
were usually tourists waiting for information. Throughout the
height of the season of 1925, automobiles from northern states
were moving through Lake City at the average rate of two to three
per minute. Boy Scouts of Lake City made a check of tourists
during the season of 1925 and found that south-bound automobiles
averaged 1,700 a day and had an average of four persons in each.31
Although most of the automobile tourists were going to South

'^Ibid., pp. 211-212: Davis, History of Jacksonville, p. 283; James Ward,
Interview, December 8, 1976. •
30“Florida Fever,” Saturday Evening Post 198 (December 5, 1925), p. 207.
3[lbid.

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