Kissimmee Station: The Railroad That Made a Cow Town
Near Orlando, Florida
The depot you're near traces its origins to eighteen eighty-three, when the South Florida Railroad Company established Kissimmee as a key junction in the push to open Central Florida's interior. The original eighteen eighty-three station served both the South Florida line and the narrow-gauge Sugar Belt Railway, which ran east to the sugar mills on East Lake Tohopekaliga. The Atlantic Coast Line eventually absorbed all three railroads that met here and built the current station building around nineteen ten.
Kissimmee in those years was a cattle town, one of the last open-range communities in Florida, where Cracker cowboys drove herds through the streets on their way to shipping pens. The railroad transformed it from a frontier outpost into a regional market center.
