Old Railroad Grade

When looking thru the USGS maps for North Florida (7.5 Minute Series, Topographic), you will commonly see features marked Old Railroad Grade. These are ballast and limerock back-fills that were made to support a temporary railroad line. How temporary depended on how much timber it would haul, and over what length of time. Some may have lasted less than a year, some were used for several decades.

Looking at those same maps, you notice unimproved side roads, that leave the main road via long sweeping curves. These were also old railroad grades. A good example of this is Dixie County 357 (the Shired Island road), as shown on the Cross City SW quadrangle map. There are many unimproved roads, which run off today's main road, that represent old logging railroad grades. Dixie County was a main source of timber to the Putnam Lumber Company mills at Shamrock. Shamrock milled old growth longleaf pine and tidewater cypress (sometimes called bald cypress), from the late 1920s, until the mid 1940s. That timber is all gone, other than possibly a rare tree tucked away somewhere.