Okeechobee, FL (OKE)

Ticket Revenue

FY 2011

$195,109

Station Ridership

FY 2011

3,976

Note: Fiscal year is from
October through September.

The current Amtrak stop in Okeechobee station consists of a platform with a shelter. The 1924 station building originally served the Florida, Western and Northern Railroad, a subsidiary of Seaboard Air Line Railway. This route, which hosted the Orange Blossom Special train, was constructed between 1924 and 1925, between Coleman and West Palm Beach via Auburndale, West Lake Wales, Sebring, Okeechobee and Indiantown.

Okeechobee Main Street, working with the city, restored the station building between 2009 and 2011. The historic station now provides a waiting area for passengers.

While forts were built and abandoned in the area north of Lake Okeechobee during the Seminole wars of the early 19th century, no real settlement took place until Hamilton Disston began dredging and draining lands overflowed by Lake Okeechobee, allowing the railroads to eventually enter the area. Lake Okeechobee is the second largest body of water entirely within the continental United States, second only to Lake Michigan, and covers 730 square miles. Both the lake and the land around it were swampy and difficult to navigate.

Disston originally arranged with the state of Florida to dredge in return for half the land so reclaimed. In 1881, Governor Braxton approached the Philadelphia businessman about purchasing reclaimed land, and Disston and his associates agreed to tentatively purchase four million acres of Florida’s Internal Improvement Fund land for 25 cents an acre—making him the largest land owner in the United States at the time, and considerably helping the bankrupt development fund. Disston’s dredging was supposed to open navigable waterways for steamboat traffic from Lake Okeechobee east to Kissimmee and west to the Gulf of Mexico. While draining peninsular Florida opened it up to settlement, it actually caused a drought north of Lake Okeechobee in the Kissimmee River valley and worse flooding in the lake and southwards. The canals westward and eastward were never completed.

Three miles north of Lake Okeechobee, the area that became Okeechobee City was laid out by the Florida East Coast Railway engineers in the early twentieth century at a place once called, “The Bend.” The town was first called Tantie, after the schoolmistress and postmaster, Tantie Huckaby, who came there in 1902. Local lore of those early days tells of pioneers who came by steamboat and Model T Ford as far as the roads would go, including Dr. Anna Darrow, one of the town’s two physicians, who was also the second woman licensed to practice medicine in Florida.

The railroad surveyed Okeechobee city in 1911 and 1912, and the city was renamed Okeechobee. The railroad engineers planned the town and laid it out by the time rails reached the area in 1914. The first passenger train through Okeechobee arrived in January of 1915, the same year the city was incorporated.

The area's economics were built around fishing, trapping and cattle ranching—there were many wild cattle in the area even prior to American settlement—as well as dairy and citrus. In the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, the Okeechobee canneries were also busy; during World War II, the Markham cannery alone packed about 10 percent of the national production of canned tomatoes. The modern preference for and ability to ship fresh tomatoes and vegetables has since closed the canneries. Today, this small city remains a ranching and fishing community.

Amtrak does not provide ticketing or baggage services at this facility.

Okeechobee is served by two daily trains.