A 125-year legacy

R.R. Gladwin moved to Fort Pierce just three weeks before the city voted to incorporate on Feb. 2, 1901. He became Fort Pierce’s third mayor and later served on the school board and county commission.

For a decade, Robert Reed Gladwin rode the rails, learning the promise and the pitfalls of each community along Florida’s east coast. As a railway messenger for the Southern Express delivery service, he was typically armed, safeguarding packages, payrolls and valuables as they moved up and down Henry Morrison Flagler’s ever-expanding Florida East Coast Railway.

As Flagler’s line crept south, reaching Titusville in 1893, Fort Pierce in January 1894, West Palm Beach later that year and Miami by 1896, Gladwin, based in Jacksonville, came to know every stop along the route. He knew Titusville best. His parents, with whom he had moved to Florida from Connecticut in 1879, relocated there from Palatka in 1890, and in early January 1901 Gladwin and his wife and two small children, Stephen and Marion, followed them south, drawn by the promise of a new railway job and a familiar town poised for growth.

But Gladwin, 31, had an entrepreneurial yearning. Days after arriving in Titusville, he quit his railway job, deciding instead to go into business with a customer of his father, J.T. Price. Gladwin’s father, Stephen Nelson Gladwin, a boat builder, had just completed a fishing boat for Price two months earlier.