Tallahassee Rail Road

The Tallahassee Railroad was one of the first operational railroads in the United States headquartered in Tallahassee, Florida. It was constructed in 5 ft (1,524 mm)gauge.

The railroad was conceived and financed by leading cotton planters who needed a way to get their crop to textile mills in England and New England. It was also used by naval stores merchants and timber interests of the area to transport their goods to East Coast ports.

The Tallahassee Railroad Company was approved in 1835 by the Florida Territorial Legislative Council. Also that year, the Tallahassee Railroad Company received the first Federal land grant to a railroad. In 1835 construction began on the Tallahassee-St. Marks Railroad.

The drawing by Francis Count de Castelnau is captioned with: "Railway depot at Tallahassee. Florida already has a railroad, which although short renders great service. It extends from the capital to Saint-Marck on the Gulf of Mexico about 7 leagues away. It crosses such a very deep sandy region that, before construction, it was scarcely possible to cross it on horseback. It serves chiefly to transport cotton from the interior to the sea."

The railroad was completed in 1837 and began operation that year. It was a mule-drawn railroad with wooden rails that connected Tallahassee, Florida, then the territorial capitol, with the Gulf port of St. Marks — a distance of 22 miles (35 kilometers). By 1839 the railroad was extended three miles (4.8 km) south to Port Leon (destroyed by hurricane in 1843).

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