Bonifay: Named by the Railroad, Seat of Holmes County

Bonifay did not exist before the railroad. In eighteen eighty-two, when the Pensacola and Atlantic Railroad laid tracks across the Florida Panhandle, the company chose the name Bonifay for its new station, honoring Frank Bonifay, a member of a prominent Pensacola family that ran a brick-making business. The town grew as a trading and agricultural center, and in nineteen oh five it finally wrested the Holmes County seat away from Westville.

The Pensacola and Atlantic was later absorbed into the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, but Bonifay remained. Today it is a small city of around three thousand people and the largest community in Holmes County, its fate still tied, as it always was, to the road that runs through it.