Yes, They Moved Fernandina Beach - Here’s Why | Notes from Amelia Island, Florida
In this episode of the Gallivanter Podcast, we examine one of the most unusual decisions in Florida town planning.
Fernandina Beach did not simply expand over time. It relocated.
Before Centre Street became the commercial spine visitors recognize today, the original town stood farther north in what is now Old Town Fernandina.
Established during the Spanish period, the settlement faced the Amelia River, built for harbor control, trade, and defense. Its layout reflected maritime priorities, not tourism or rail commerce.
By the early nineteenth century, shifting channels, marsh constraints, and the growing importance of rail access forced a choice. Adapt the original site at great cost, or move.
Fernandina chose to move.
In this episode, we walk through the logic behind that decision, how the new grid was laid out, why Centre Street became central, and how Old Town transitioned into a quiet residential layer of history that still exists today.
Understanding this relocation explains why downtown Fernandina feels deliberate, why Old Town feels separate, and how railroads reshaped Amelia Island’s trajectory.
This is Episode Two of our four-part Amelia Island series.
Why the Railroad Skipped Fernandina | Notes from Amelia Island, Florida
NOTES FROM AMELIA ISLAND is a four-part narrative series from The Gallivanter Podcast about how places become what they are, not through slogans or branding, but through a long chain of choices, accidents, and absences.
Amelia Island sits just off Florida’s northeast coast, close enough to the state’s major historical currents to have been swept up in them, yet curiously untouched by many of the forces that transformed the rest of Florida into something louder, faster, and more uniform.
This series looks at Amelia Island and Fernandina Beach the way a historian reads a landscape. Not as a postcard, but as a record.
Railroads that never arrived. Ports that should have boomed and didn’t. Industries that flared briefly and vanished. Preservation movements that succeeded when others failed. Small decisions that quietly compounded over decades.
Each episode traces a different layer of that story, moving between past and present, and using the modern island as evidence of what happened long before most visitors ever set foot here.
Episode 1: The Island the Railroad Passed By
The first episode begins with a simple observation. Amelia Island never became a railroad hub. Not because it lacked potential. Not because people didn’t try. But because, at several critical moments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, powerful rail interests chose to build elsewhere.
Those decisions redirected capital, labor, and population toward other Florida ports and interior cities, and left Amelia Island on a parallel track. Close to growth, but never at its center.
Episode One examines Fernandina’s early promise as a deep-water port, the competing railroad schemes that surrounded it, Henry Flagler’s expansion strategy along Florida’s east coast, and how being bypassed ultimately preserved a walkable downtown, a human-scaled street grid, and a town that never had to be rebuilt around mass automobile tourism.
Rather than telling the story as nostalgia, this episode treats Amelia Island’s present-day character as a consequence. A product of infrastructure choices, economic pivots, and moments when history quietly turned left instead of right.
Notes From Amelia Island is about learning how to read places differently. Not for trivia. Not for bucket lists. But for understanding why a place behaves the way it does when you arrive.
