8 Facts You Didn't Know About Our Beaches!

3. Rum Row



"Rum Row" was a prohibition-era term that was coined to refer to a long line of ships loaded with liquor and anchored beyond the maritime limit for the United States; approximately 13 miles off-shore. Cargo ships were sent out of major ports to these freight ships, where they would load up on alcohol and sneak it back into port. Jacksonville was a key Rum Row destination.

Due to Florida's proximity to islands in the Caribbean, cities like Jacksonville became some of the earliest Rum Row destinations on the Atlantic coast. Often, Caribbean rum, Scotch whiskey, and English gin were imported from the Bohemian port of Nassau and snuck up into rum row, where it was easy to move up anywhere on the east coast from there. This would lead way to what was known as the "Great Whiskey Way."


Image courtesy of http://www.cowart.info/blog/?m=200712&paged=2

Popular rum runners of the era included "The Real McCoy," William Fredrick McCoy. Originally a Jacksonville boatyard owner, he quickly rose to gain control of Atlantic Ocean rum-running between the Bahamas and Canada. McCoy began to smuggle whisky into the U.S., traveling from Nassau and Bimini in the Bahamas to the east coast of the United States, spending most time dealing on a rum run off Long Island. After a few successful trips smuggling liquor off the coast of the United States, Bill McCoy had enough money to buy the schooner, which he placed under British registry. Another popular runner was John Hysler, known as the Whisky King of Duval. He bootlegged whiskey and lead runs of "hooch" to Mineral City (now Ponte Vedra Beach), and was also allegedly connected to Al Capone. Also known as the "Liquor czar," Hysler died in a 1928 Acosta Bridge shootout with customs after picking up 30 sacks of red whiskey at Mineral City.


McCoy, in his autobiography, entitled The Real McCoy, explains what drew him into this illegal trade. "I went" he says, into rum running "for the cash and I stayed in it for four years for the fun it gave me." In those years he made hundreds of thousands of dollars, and by the time he was arrested he had personally delivered more than 700,000 cases of liquor to the U.S. He wrote, "there was money in the game -- lots of it if you could keep it. Beyond that there was all the kick of gambling and the thrill of sport, and besides these, there was open sea and the boom of the wind against full sails, dawn coming out of the ocean, and nights under rocking stars. These caught and held me most of all." source: http://www.oceannavigator.com/content/smuggler-kicks-st-pierre-boom