Page 133 - John Anderson

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associates because of his affiliation with Henry Ward Beecher's
fashionable church in Brooklyn, New York.
Utley J. White had been employed by the Tocoi Railroad Company in
the 1870's. This was a horse, and mule-drawn railway between Tocoi
and St. Augustine, and White was master of transportation in charge
of twenty-four horses and mules which were used to haul the train.
Later, he entered the logging and lumber business near Palatka, and
hauled his lumber over tram roads whose rails were made of wood.
As he became more prosperous he changed the rails to steel, and
extended the lumber road from Rolleston, on the St. Johns River,
southward to Dinner Island. Becoming more ambitious, he visualized
a railroad that would go southward all the way through the isolated
flatwoods to the little towns of Ormond and Daytona that were
beginning to flourish along the Halifax River. Utley J. White did not
have the money to finance his ambitious dreams, but this problem
was solved when N.B. White, who lived at Rolleston, introduced his
brother, Stephen Van Cullen White, to Utley J. White. The "Deacon"
agreed to finance the railroad, and in August, 1885, construction
began.
In surveying the route from the St. Johns River at Palatka to the
Halifax River, White discovered that "it was the barrenness of pine
barrens, almost wholly uninhabited, and the greatest part of it
uninhabitable, unless thoroughly drained. There was not a single
house, or sign of human habitation for the first forty miles ... and the
journey was like crossing a desert in order to reach an oasis, and the
country traversed may be described as having a face but no
features." The following account by Alice Strickland of railroad
construction into Ormond and Daytona brings forth the reality of this
single most important aspect of opening up this area to trade and
eventual prosperity. “The rails for the St. Johns and Halifax River
Railroad, as it was called, weighed 30 pounds to the yard, and they
were laid narrow gauge, three feet apart. The locomotives were wood
burners, and had large, bell-shaped stacks, with a screen over the
top known as the "spark arrester." All equipment had link and pin
couplers, and hand brakes. By the winter of 1885-1886 the railroad
was completed to the Tomoka River, and then the worst part of the
construction began. The railroad workers discovered it was almost
impossible to fill in the marsh on the north bank of the river. Carloads

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