Westville: The County Seat That Moved

Westville is a small Panhandle town with an outsized county history. Holmes County has cycled through four county seats over the years, and Westville was one of them. Settled in the early eighteen nineties, Westville grew into a newer center for the county.

By eighteen ninety-four the courthouse had been moved here. Then in nineteen oh five, it moved again, this time to Bonifay, the newer railroad town a few miles east. Westville never grew large, but it held the seat of government for eleven years, a reminder that in frontier Florida, political power followed the railroad tracks.