STATE ROAD NO 1 CAN NOW BE COVERED IN COURSE OF TWELVE HOURS, IT IS ANNOUNCED
JACKSONVILLE, May 29.
State Road No. 1, the Old Spanish Trail, is so well advanced toward completion between Jacksonville and Pensacola that the run of nearly 400 miles can now be made comfortably in twelve hours according to the Florida State Chamber of Commerce. An attache of the Chamber, in a motor trip from Pensacola to Jacksonville this week, driving at night, made the run from the ferry landing at Mulat, to Jacksonville in eleven hours and ten minutes with one hour and eleven minutes devoted to stops along the route. His running time was 9 hours 59 minutes for the 373 miles. The ferry trip across Escambia Bay requires about fifty minutes while the distance from the ferry landing to Pensacola is nine miles.
The Trail has been completed from Jacksonville to Tallahassee, 177 miles, and engineers now are setting stakes at various points preparatory to hardsurfacing the sand clay road. Construction is in progress between Tallahassee and Quincy. The present road is in such condition as to require at least one hour for the twenty-eight mile run between these two points.
West of Quincy the twenty miles to Chattahoochee has been completed for the most, part while the final surface is being applied elsewhere. West of Chattahoochee the old road is being used to Bevis Mill but it is in excellent condition since Jackson County is keeping a road crew busy upon it. The completed Trail is encountered at Bevis Mill and from that point all the way to Chipley, through Marianna and Cottondale the motorist has a perfect highway. From Chipley to Caryville the old road is in fair condition but extremely rough in spots. Construction of the new highway is proceeding cast of Caryville toward Chipley along a different route. West of Caryville the Trail for a distance of nearly forty miles, through Ponce de Leon and DeFuniak Springs, to the Okaloosa county line, has been completed. Construction through Okaloosa is in progress, and with completion of the remaining few miles the road will have been virtually finished all the way to the ferry landing at Mulat.
In the 373 miles between Jacksonville and Mulat there is not one foot of the road that cannot be negotiated in high gear and the only stretch that the most particular driver could call “bad road” is a three mile section near the Okaloosa-Walton county line where one has the choice of running through deep sand or of pulling through the new roadbed which has not yet been surfaced.
The Key West Citizen, Key West, FL, May 29, 1926