LIVING HISTORY
terminus of the railroad in Titusville.
Richards had a novel process for getting the pineapples
aboard schooners. A dock from his home extended 1,500 feet
into the Indian River and had a tram that carried the pineapples
14
down the dock. Wrote historian Lucille Rights in her
“Portrait of St. Lucie County”:
“Tram cars loaded with pines would roll down on narrow
rails to the river boats. The captain installed a sail on the
tram, letting the reliable easterly winds power the tram, now
loaded with people or supplies, back up to the land.”
The shipping method changed in 1894, when Henry M.
Flagler’s railroad arrived in Fort Pierce and the growers
could load their fruit directly onto the freight cars.
NEW WARNING
Mariel Coleane Minton, the great-granddaughter of a pineapple
farmer, said the trains performed an important service
to farmers. “Before the railroad, farmers had no warning of
an impending storm or freeze,” she says. “When the train
came alongside our family’s plantation, they would honk
the horn a certain number of times and that would warn the
farmers of a freeze or a storm.” Once the railroad came in, the
family moved their packing sheds close to the railroad.
Minton’s great-grandfather, Elon Eldred, moved from
Greene County, Ill., in 1879 to grow pineapples along the
Indian River between what is Midway Road and Palms Cemetery.
The area remains known as Eldred. “My great-grand-
FLORIDA PHOTOGRAPHIC COLLECTION
Before the railroad arrived in 1894, pineapples were transported up the
Indian River by boat.
PHOTOS BY CAMILLE S. YATES
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Mariel Coleane Minton still owns the 1893 home on Indian River Drive that was built on her great-grandfather’s pineapple plantation. Workers lived
behind the home during picking season.