Page 30 - lake-city-florida-a-sesquicentennial-tribute-(h-morris-williams-kevin-mccarthy)-2009

Lake City, Florida: A Sesquicentennial Tribute (2009) H. Morris Williams, Dr. Kevin M. McCarthy

Another railroad, the Pensacola and Georgia, connected Lake
City and Quincy in the Florida Panhandle. Its logo is pictured below
on a bond issued by the company in the 1860s.

The railroads serving Lake City helped the economic recovery
of north Florida, but progress was very slow. A Guidebook of

Florida and the South, originally published in 1869, four years after
the completion of the bloody Civil War, described the slow progress
of Florida towns as they attempted to get back to normal. The
guidebook noted that Lake City, “a promising place of several hundred
inhabitants,” had two “tolerable” hotels, which charged $3 per day or
$15 per week. The newspaper then was the Lake City Press.
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The Lake City Police Department was begun around 1861with
a Colonel House, who was police chief from 1861 to 1865, followed
by Ruben Charles, who was police chief from 1865 to 1870. In a
recent undated history of the police department, the unknown author
wrote that the duties of the police chief in the early days were vague,
the minimum standards of education nonexistent, and the only require-
ment was to “be tough enough to handle the job.” He was told: “Pin
your badge on, strap your gun on, mount your horse, and be the
fastest gun for survival.”
The judges of probate who acted as county superintendent of
schools that decade were Silas L. Niblack (1855 - 1861), William
H. Hunt (1861 - 1864), and George B. Smithson (1865 - 1869?).
The mayor that decade and for half the next one was M. Whit Smith,
who served as mayor from 1859 till 1875.

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