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The Florida Ship Canal

( Originally Published Mid 1930's )

Around the southern shores of the picturesquely-named Lake Tsala Apopka we return to the northbound trail and reach Dunellon and the Withlacoochie River. Dunellon is the center of the hard-rock phosphate mining district of Florida. While much less extensive than the phosphate mines farther south in Polk County, the output from the Dunellon district is a considerable factor in the world phosphate market.

Dunellon's major current prominence in the public eye, however, is the position it occupies in the plans for the Florida cross-state Ship Canal as the first point at which ships entering the canal from the Gulf will find a turning basin and supply station. The broad Withlacoochie River flows westward from Dunellon to Yankeetown and Port Inglis on the Gulf, where the western terminal of the canal is to be extended to deep water by means of 22-mile rock jetties.

The route laid out for the canal extends easterly from Dunellon to a point near Ocala, thence northeasterly through the Oklawaha River valley to the St. Johns River and Jack sonville. It is worth the traveller's time to follow the canal route now to Ocala and see the canal for himself.

All that the tourist can see of the canal is a great gash in the earth, five or six miles long and nearly five hundred feet wide, where excavation was begun in the Autumn of 1935 for a sea-level canal, deep enough and wide enough to permit the passage between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, of ocean-going ships. The excavation and the masonry piers that were built to carry a bridge, which in turn was to carry a trunk line highway across the canal at an elevation great enough to permit the clearance of the masts of the biggest freighter afloat, are all there is of the canal. South of Ocala is a great array of buildings, neatly arranged in a beautifully parked area, constructed to house the headquarters of the corps of United States Army engineers which began to dig the canal, with quarters for officers and barracks for enlisted men and laborers, complete with canteens, mess-halls and all the other appurtenances of an army post, including guard-house.

It all looks as substantial as if it had been built for permanency. It was, indeed, constructed with the idea that the flimsiest of the buildings would be occupied for the six or seven years it would take to complete the canal and that the others would serve the needs of the necessary supervisory and maintenance units indefinitely.

There is still a military air about the reservation, although work on the canal ended hardly a year after it was started. The buildings are occupied, but except for a handful of officers and soldiers left on the ground to see that no depredations are committed on government property, the occupants of the buildings are teachers and classes of adult education courses sponsored by W. P. A. and supervised from nearby Gainesville by the faculty of the University of Florida.

Tourists who view this scene are told that the canal project was financed with $5,400,000 allocated to it by President Roosevelt from his $4,800,000,000 emergency relief fund, in August, 1935, and came to a halt when Congress refused, in the Spring of 1936, to appropriate any more funds to carry on the work. From there on what the tourist will be told will depend in large measure upon the teller. There is no topic in Florida concerning which one can so readily start a controversy or hear so many opinions and diametrically opposite statements of what purport to be facts. The story, as impartially as the authors can tell it, is set down here.

The idea of a canal across the neck of the Florida peninsula is almost as old as the occupation of Florida by the Spanish in 1565. There is said to be still extant a letter written by King Philip II of Spain to Don Pedro Menendez de Aviles, Governor of Florida, asking him to try to find a sea route from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic north of the "Island of Florida." Sir Francis Drake and his buccaneers were making entirely too much trouble for the Spanish King by holding up and looting his galleons bringing treasure out of Mexico through the narrow Florida Straits and the Windward Passage. General Andrew Jackson, who took Florida from Spain in 1818 and became its miltary governor after its annexation in 1821, urged upon the government at Washington the construction of a canal across Florida for military purposes. In 1825 the residents of St. Augustine, then the principal community in the peninsula, under the leadership of one Colonel John White, made an appearance before Congress, advocating the construction of a waterway with St. Augustine as the eastern terminus and some point near the mouth of the Suwannee River as the western terminus. In 1826 Congress passed an Act directing and authorizing the survey, the Act being approved by the President March 3, 1826. The report was submitted February 19, 1829 and was the first report under the auspices of the Corps of Engineers, U. S. Army, ever made on this project. Subsequently reports were submitted dated March 3, 1832, May 1, 1855, April 3, 1876, April 6, 1880, and June l, 1882, November 9, 1911, December 3, 1924 and the several reports occasioned by the River and Harbor Acts of 1927 and 1930.

The first mention of a ship canal, in those terms, was made by Lieutenant M. L. Smith, in a report made pursuant to the Act of Congress of August 30, 1852. The report appears to have been dated October 30, 1852. The next mention was made in a report of December 30, 1876, submitted by Brevet Major General Quincy A. Gillmore, of Civil War "Swamp Angel," Charleston Siege fame.

A ship canal in those days meant less than it does now, for there were a large number of ocean-going sailing vessels drawing only 12 feet of water, and a considerable portion of the commerce of the world was carried in such ships.

The next reference of significance to a ship canal was made by General W. H. Bixby, then Chief of Engineers, in a report dated August 9, 1913. At that time he had under consideration a possible barge canal, but expressed the view that "the Chief of Engineers believes that, although before many years it may be considered desirable to have a canal across the northern portion of Florida capable of use by boats of 10, 12, or more, feet of draft, yet if the cost is to be as great as sixteen million dollars for a 10-foot canal, it would be better to pay a moderate amount more for a much greater depth than 12 feet."

The next mention is in a report dated December 9, 1924, and subsequent to the River and Harbor Act of 1927, Major General Harry Taylor, the former Chief of Engineers, and others repeatedly advocated a survey for a ship canal with a view to determining the facts. The result was an appropriation in the Rivers and Harbors Act of that year, for a survey for a ship canal by the Army Corps of Engineers. The Congress of 1930 made a further appropriation to complete the survey. On December 30, 1933, the War Department reported that the survey had been completed. Twenty-eight possible routes had been explored at a cost of $400,000 and six years of time.

In the meantime the National Gulf-Atlantic Ship Canal Association had been formed at a meeting held in New Orleans in 1932. Called at the instigation of the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce and the city government, the meeting was attended by representatives of business interests in all five of the Gulf states, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. General Charles P. Summerall, retired, former Chief of Staff of the U. S. Army, was chosen as president of the Association, a post which he still holds.

This organization was the culmination of several years of effort on the part of the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce. That organization's attention had been directed to the project by the many inquiries made by the Army engineers for information on which to base an estimate of the economic value of the proposed canal. The World War, among other things, had impressed upon high officers of the Army and Navy the desirability of more traffic facilities running east and west, between the Mississippi Valley and the Atlantic coast. South of the Great Lakes and their easterly extension, the Erie Canal, there is no freight route between East and West which does not have to carry its load over one or more mountain ranges, until you get down to Florida. Since the war the water traffic between Gulf ports and the Atlantic coast has increased enormously. The tonnage passing through the Florida Straits annually is the largest volume of salt water traffic through a restricted passage anywhere in the world; the 40,000,000 tons of cargo carried in and out of Gulf ports every year is more than passes through the British Channel or the Straits of Gibraltar. More than 10,000 ships are engaged in this traffic, two-thirds of them oil tankers. The home port of the largest American sea-going fleet engaged in foreign trade is Tampa, whence ships ply between the Gulf of Mexico and African, Mediterranean and East Indian ports. If ships could cut straight across Florida instead of having to go around the Keys and through the Florida Straits, they could save 360 miles of steaming and a corresponding amount of time. Moreover, they would not be so liable to attack by enemy submarines.

The Army and Navy wanted a ship canal across Florida, but to get public funds appropriated to build it they had to show its economic justification, and in this they asked the help of the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce in gathering the trade statistics and facts necessary to demonstrate the economic value of the canal.

The Chamber of Commerce decided to put an end to the repetition of such requests by engaging engineers and economists to go into the facts and definitely establish what merit, if any, there might be in the project. Since such a canal would naturally have its eastern terminus at or near Jacksonville, it was apparent that its construction would be of benefit to that city. The Chamber of Commerce, therefore, enlisted the interest of the City Council and City Commissioners, and obtained from them the necessary funds to finance the initial economic survey. The Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce has been, in fact, the main driving force behind the canal project, obtaining financial support for its efforts not only from the city government but from the County Board of Commissioners of Duval County.

The contract between the City of Jacksonville and its engineers and economists contained a stipulation that the latter should have a free hand to find the facts, whatever they might be, whether or not favorable to the project as a whole and whether or not favorable to Jacksonville as a terminus. At that time the persons in the City of Jacksonville responsible for the movement practically pledged themselves without reservation to support the findings of the U. S. Engineers as to location, route and all other details. The Army Engineers, after considering not less than twenty-eight possible routes through Georgia and Florida, finally selected the route which they designated Route 13-B and it is this route upon which construction has been begun.

The route upon which the Army engineers agreed as being the most practical and feasible from every point of view was quite different from the one which many of the Florida advo cates of the canal had desired. It did not enter the Gulf of Mexico either at Cedar Key nor in the harbor of Tampa, where there had been, if not great enthusiasm for the canal, at least no material opposition. Instead, the engineers reported that the best western entrance for the Florida cross-state canal would be formed by extending the mouth of the Withlacoochie River, at Port Inglis, 22 miles out to deep water in the Gulf of Mexico by means of jetties, in the same manner that the mouth of the St. Johns River has been extended into the Atlantic and that of the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico.

The canal route approved by the Army connects Ocean and Gulf by way of the St. Johns, Oklawaha and Withlacoochie rivers. The plan calls for the dredging of the channel of the St. Johns to the full depth required, southward to a point above Palatka, where the Oklawaha River, which originates in Silver Springs, enters the St. Johns. By dredging and straightening the bed of the Oklawaha and then, on the other slope of the Ocala limestone ridge which forms the backbone of the Florida peninsula, deepening and straightening the Withlacoochie River from a point near Dunellon, there would remain only about twenty-seven miles of excavation, not already traversed by a watercourse, to connect the two rivers and so complete the canal. Nothing was contemplated until 1935 but a lock canal. The Ocala limestone ridge rises to an elevation of 130 feet above sea-level, so that to excavate through it for a sea-level canal with thirty feet of water would involve digging a ditch one hundred and sixty feet deep across a stretch of twenty miles or more.

Early in 1932, nearly two years before the Corps of Engineers had completed their survey, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation had been formed, having power, among other things, to lend money for self-liquidating public works. On the theory that the Florida Ship Canal would charge tolls which would eventually pay for it, the Association applied to the R. F. C. for a loan to be made to some public corporation such as R. F. C. might approve. This was midsummer, 1932.

Before R. F. C. got into action on the application a new Federal administration came into power in Washington. The Public Works Administration was formed, and the authority of R. F. C. over loans for public works was transferred to P. W. A. In the meantime, the Legislature of Florida had created a Ship Canal Authority, and adopted a memorial to the President urging the construction of the canal. General Summerall was made chairman of the Ship Canal Authority, with four other members representing the four major sections of Florida. The Authority asked P. W. A. for a loan to build the canal.

The Secretary of the Interior, Mr. Ickes, as chief of P. W. A., appointed his own engineers to make a physical and economic survey. On October 19, 1933, they made their report, that the project was feasible, sound economically and from an engineering standpoint, and a public necessity. The P. W. A. engineering board recommended that the loan be made.

The Army engineers made their report on December 30, 1933. Both reports agreed on the feasibility and the benefits of the canal, but the Army's estimate of cost was $190,000,000 and that of P. W. A. but $115,000,000. The ten Senators from the five Gulf states saw both reports, and all signed a joint petition to the President asking him to appoint a Board of Review to try to reconcile the two conflicting reports.

Both were still talking about a lock canal.

In May, 1934, the President appointed a Board of Review, two Army Engineer Officers, two engineers named by W. P. A., the four choosing the fifth. The Board went to Florida, studied the project, went over the route, set a new group of geologists to study the possible effect of the canal on the state's water supply, and on the strength of their study reported to the President these conclusions:

1. That it would be cheaper and more efficient to construct and to operate a sea-level canal than the lock canal contemplated by previous surveys and estimates. They fixed the cost at $142,700,000.

2. That there was no likelihood of any impairment of the fresh water supply of any part of Florida, from a sea-level canal, either by possible lowering of the water table or by seepage of sea water into the subterranean fresh water channels.

3. That the economic benefits to the nation as a whole would justify an expenditure of $160,000,000, which would cover interest during construction and all other costs, exclusive of the land required for the right of way.

The State of Florida, in the meantime, having authorized the counties through which the canal would run to bond themselves for the purchase of the right of way, and the entire right of way having been pledged to be so purchased and presented to the nation, the President's Board of Review recommended on June 28, 1934, that the canal be built.

One question remained, and the President asked it.

"Can the canal collect tolls enough from ships using it to pay the costs?"

The Board got busy on a . new economic survey. It figured that whereas the bulk of traffic through the Florida Straits at present, and for some years to come, is oil tankers, the oil re serves of the United States and Mexico may peter out in the next 15 or 20 years. Therefore, the Board was not willing to predict what might happen to Gulf-Atlantic traffic by the time a 50-year bond issue on the canal matured. It declined to commit itself so far into the future in the supplementary report it made to the President on September 15, 1934.

That report took the canal out of the class of self-liquidating projects, to which the authority of P. W. A, was limited. It left but one official agency concerned with the canal. This was the President's own Board of Review, which recommended a sea-level canal. But if it were to be built it would have to be done as a Federal project, at "he Government's sole expense. That meant a free canal. No inland waterway ever built or improved under a Rivers and Harbors appropriation has ever charged tolls. The Panama Canal, lying entirely outside of the United States, is the only important waterway under U. 5, control on which tolls are charged. All others are "general welfare" projects.

That Winter of 1934-35 Congress appropriated $4,800,000,000 for the Works Progress Administration, over the functions and expenditures of which the President had ex clusive personal control. To the President personally the Florida Ship Canal Authority applied for an allotment from the W. P. A. fund, pointing out that there was no requirement that W. P. A. projects must be self-liquidating. On August 28, 1935, the President accordingly signed an executive order, allotting $5,000,000 of his Emergency Relief Fund to begin work on the canal and directing the Army Engineers to proceed. The date of that order is unimportant except that it explodes the myth that there was some relation between the Florida Ship Canal project and the accident to the steamer Dixie. The Dixie was blown upon a reef near the eastern entrance to the Florida Straits, and for a while her 350 passengers were in peril. It has been represented that this incident was the compelling argument which induced the President to order work on the canal begun. That might be plausible except for the fact that the Dixie grounded at midnight on September 2, 1935, more than five days after the President's action had been taken.

The Corps of Engineers began work on the canal immediately. With the original $5,000,000 and two additional allotments of $200,000 each they established the headquarters and set 4,000 men at work on the actual digging, a little south of Ocala.

Up to the time when work on the canal actually began, no serious opposition to it had publicly developed anywhere in or out of Florida. As soon as work started a flood of criticism was let loose, based chiefly, so far as a motive is publicly avowed, upon the belief that a sea-level canal cut through the Ocala ridge would so seriously affect the underground watercourses of the entire peninsula as to impair the water supplies of cities, lessen or shut off entirely the pressure of the artesian wells upon which the citrus growers and other farmers depend for their existence, and permit the infiltration of salt water into the present sources of fresh water.

The opposition based upon this belief found expression on the floor of the United States Senate in the Spring of 1936, when the War Department, in submitting its estimates for the annual Army appropriation bill, included an item of $12,000,000 for the continuance of work on the canal. The original allotment by the President from W. P. A. funds had been exhausted, and he had declined to apportion any more from the same source to this purpose. He had turned the job over to the Army, however, and the Army wanted to finish it. Suddenly the Florida Ship Canal became an issue in party politics in a Presidential election year. So vigorous were the attacks upon it from the minority party in the Senate that the proposed appropriation, although the Senate voted by a majority of ten to authorize the construction of the canal, was stricken from the Army Bill, and work on the canal came to a complete standstill.

There the matter lay until May, 1937, when the Rivers and Harbors Committee of the House of Representatives, after a series of exhaustive hearings, presented a report recommending that Congress authorize the completion of the canal and appropriate the necessary funds. From the report of the Committee the following extracts are taken:

"Evidence submitted to your Committee shows a widespread public support for the project. This includes the endorsement of the Governors of a large number of states, representatives of organized labor, civic and commercial bodies and national associations, especially those located in or representing the Mississippi Valley and Gulf states and those of the Atlantic seaboard. The evidence also includes objections to the project from some communities in Southern Florida, from a number of railroads, and from certain shipping companies, as well as from organizations interested in wild life and ecology. With the exception of the railroad and steamship companies, these objections are stated to be based solely upon a fear that the construction of the canal will damage agriculture, plant and bird life of Florida through overdrainage of its fresh water supply . . . The Secretary of the Navy has advised the Committee that the project will be of material aid in the National Defense. . . .

"The area within the United States which should benefit directly by reduced transportation costs if the canal is constructed extends along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and well into the interior . . . This area includes forty-five percent of continental United States, with seventy-four percent of the population . . . It is not probable that any such distribution of benefits over the nation as a whole can be shown by any other Federal project. . . .

"The Committee has had evidence presented to it which demonstrates conclusively that as a protected route for the movement of troops, munitions and supplies between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic seaboard, and as a safe alternate route to the Panama Canal, compared with the potentially hazardous route via the Windward Passage, ordinarily used, the Atlantic-Gulf Ship Canal will serve as a major element of National Defense in time of war."

The report goes at length into the opposition based upon the argument that the construction of the canal will have adverse effects on the underground fresh water supply of the state. Its conclusion on this point is stated thus:

"After a very careful consideration of all the evidence submitted, both pro and con, your Committee concludes that the findings of the Chief of Engineers in this matter are cor rect and supported by ample data, evidence and authoritative opinion. It regards the assertions that ground water supplies in Southern Florida will be adversely affected, to be wholly beyond the realm of reason."

The majority report of the Rivers and Harbors Committee concluded thus:

"Your Committee, after an unusually extensive examination of all phases of this project, concludes that the opposition is not well founded; that the project is of unusual merit; that its economic justification is beyond question; that its benefit will increase with time and will accrue to a larger portion of our country and its population than those of almost any other Federal Public Work; and that its construction is needful and in the public interest."

Three members of the Committee, Representatives Beiter of New York, Mosier of Ohio and Schulte of Indiana filed a dissenting report indicating their disapproval of the canal project. They stated their reasons as follows:

"The undersigned members of the committee conclude that: Damage will occur to a portion of the State of Florida, north and south of the canal, and that such damage, the amount of which cannot be predetermined, must be compensated by the United States Government.

"The initial cost of such a canal would be from $197,921,000 plus about $18,000,000 interest during construction, about $215,000,000 total, to $263,838,000 plus about $25,000,000 interest during construction, about $288,000,000 total. That the ultimate cost would be about $288,000,000.

"That the benefits would be enjoyed largely by the petroleum industry with some benefits to most water shipping in the Gulf but that the annual cost of maintenance and operation would be greatly in excess of the benefits to be derived.

"That such a canal would not decrease hazards of navigation between the Gulf and Atlantic ports.

"That the proposed canal would not be an aid to national defense.

"These members of the Committee for Rivers and Harbors of the House find there is not sufficient justification for undertaking the project."

Six other committee members, Representatives Segar of New Jersey, Carter of California, Culkin of New York, Short of Missouri, Dondero of Michigan and Bates of Massa chusetts, filed a minority report opposing the authorization and appropriation on the ground of their disapproval of further expenditures by the Federal government in view of the Treasury deficit and the size of the National Debt.

That was the legal status of the Florida Ship Canal when the first session of the 75th Congress adjourned in 1937. The Senate of the 74th Congress had authorized the appropriation of Federal funds for its completion; the Rivers and Harbors Committee of the House of Representatives of the 75th Congress had made a favorable report on the bill to authorize an appropriation. As this is written, in the Autumn of 1937, no one can foretell with certainty when work will be resumed on the canal.

The physical effect of the canal upon the topography of Florida will be to make an island of nearly seven-eighths of the Florida peninsula, an island separated from the mainland by a watercourse a quarter of a mile wide and thirty-five feet deep. Highways and railroads are to be carried across the canal on bridges, most of them 135 feet above the surface of the water, necessitating the regrading of these thoroughfares for distances of from two to eight or ten miles on each side of the canal, depending upon the natural elevation of the terrain at the point of crossing.

Under these bridges and across the state of Florida there will flow, if the expectations of the canal proponents and the estimates of the Army engineers prove accurate, a continuous stream of sea-going ships moving in both directions. The Army Board figures that ninety percent of the present traffic between Gulf and Ocean will move through the canal rather than continue to follow the longer and more hazardous route. This would mean, on the basis of the volume of traffic as it was in 1937, a ship passing in one direction or the other every fortyeight minutes.

The economic effects of the Florida Ship Canal are quite unpredictable in detail, but seem certain to be profound. Among these probable consequences are the elevation to greater commercial importance of the three little cities of Palatka, Ocala and Dunellon. The plans for the canal provide for docks and turning basins at those points, any or all of which may become an important warehousing and distributing center for incoming freight and a shipping point for outgoing cargoes.