Before the road
People have moved through this landscape for at least twelve thousand years. Archaeologists divide the record of east and central Florida into long cultural periods, and the coastal estuaries here hold shell deposits left by groups who harvested oysters, clams and fish from the tidal creeks over thousands of years. Along the St. Johns River drainage inland, middens mark seasonal camps. The earliest Paleo-Indian evidence in this part of Florida is thin, partly because the shoreline of that era now lies offshore under the Atlantic.
Spanish and English claims
After the founding of St. Augustine in 1565, the country south of the settlement became a frontier of missions, cattle ranches and marching trails. When Florida passed to Britain in 1763, the new administration cut the Kings Road south from St. Augustine to open the territory to plantation development. That road is the ancestor of the modern corridor, and stretches of its alignment survive in the county road network.
The plantation era
British and later American planters cleared land along the creeks for indigo, rice, cotton and above all sugar. The sugar works were industrial operations built of coquina stone, with boiling rooms, wells and mill races. The economy that built them was slavery, and the labor of enslaved people is what cut the fields and raised the walls now standing in the woods. The Second Seminole War ended the era abruptly in the 1830s, when plantations across the district were burned and never rebuilt.
Railroad and farm towns
The next transformation came with the railroad at the end of the 1800s. Towns appeared where the tracks and the crossroads met, and drainage projects turned wet flatwoods into farmland. Potatoes and cabbage became the cash crops of the interior, timber and turpentine worked the pine, and cattle grazed the open range. The county seat grew as a shipping point for all three.
The tourist highway
By the 1920s automobiles were carrying northern families down the coast, and by the 1950s and 60s this was the route of motels, fruit stands and beachfront cottages. Then the interstate opened a few miles west, traffic moved to it, and the old highway settled into the quiet it still has. That accident of bypassing is exactly what preserved the corridor: the buildings, the tree canopy and the scale of the towns survived because the traffic left.