Biloxi, Mississippi; New Orleans; Mobile, Alabama; and Pensacola, Florida are familiar names among the Gulf Coast resort towns advertised in this brochure. But some are not so familiar, including De Funiak Springs, Florida; Evergreen, Alabama; Ocean Springs, Mississippi; and Harrogate, Tennessee.
Click image to download a 17.1-MB PDF of this brochure, which is from the David Rumsey map collection.
De Funiak (now spelled Defuniak) was named after a vice president of the Louisville & Nashville. It is home to a nearly circular, spring-fed lake that in 1890 was imagined to have some healing powers.
Harrogate was home to the Four Seasons Hotel, “one of the largest and most magnificent of its kind in the country,” the brochure asserts. It goes on to claim that it was at just the right altitude — not to high nor too low — “for the comfort of persons suffering especially from pulmonary diseases.” Apparently, not too many people believed this, as the hotel went bankrupt and was torn down in 1895. The site is now home to Lincoln Memorial University, a private school that currently has about 330 students.
In addition to Ocean Springs and Biloxi, the brochure lists three other Mississippi cities that are all a few miles apart from one another, with the western-most one being about 60 miles from New Orleans. All were conveniently situated on the L&N line for the benefit of people seeking to escape winter weather in Cincinnati and other northern cities.
Two of the 18 panels on the text side of this brochure have timetables showing the schedules of trains from Cincinnati and St. Louis to New Orleans, Tampa, and other Gulf Coast cities, plus Harrogate (which isn’t a Gulf Coast city). All of the schedules are southbound; travelers had to trust that the railroad would also be able to take them home at the end of their vacations.
Most of these trains, the brochure promises, carry “Pullman buffet sleeping coaches.” Pullman buffet sleeping cars were sleepers with a small area set aside for making and serving meals, but I’m not sure what “sleeping coaches” were.