Tracks of the Spirit: Mapping How the Iron Horse Engineered Florida’s Religious Landscape, 1850-1950 - An Overview
When Henry Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway pushed south toward Miami and Henry Plant's West Coast lines opened the Gulf interior, they did more than move citrus, phosphate, and tourists. They moved people, capital, and—less obviously—churches. Brian D. Wilson's doctoral dissertation, "Tracks of the Spirit: How the Iron Horse Engineered Florida's Religious Landscape, 1850–1950," argues that Florida's denominational geography was not a spontaneous expression of frontier piety but a built environment, engineered alongside the rails themselves. A Question Hiding in Plain Sight Historians of Florida have long studied the railroad as an economic and demographic force, and historians of Southern religion have mapped the spread of Baptist, Methodist, and African Methodist Episcopal congregations across the region. Yet these two literatures rarely meet. The result is a curious gap: scholars routinely assume that transportation "changed" religion, b...