# Mile Marker 0 Before There Were Mile Markers
Imagine leaving Miami for Key West in the 1920s.
You pack the car, fill the tank, point south, and start driving.
At first, everything feels normal enough.
Then the pavement disappears.
The road gets rough. Coral rock starts bouncing the car around. Dust kicks up behind you. The islands get narrower, the water gets closer, and eventually you reach a point where the road simply stops.
Not because of construction.
Not because of an accident.
Because there is an ocean in front of you.
And Key West is still a long way away.
Today, we take it for granted that U.S. 1 runs like a ribbon through the Florida Keys. You leave the mainland, cross bridge after bridge, pass through Islamorada, Marathon, and Big Pine, and eventually roll right into Key West.
Back then, that idea was still being figured out.
For most of Key West’s early history, the highway *was* the water.
People arrived by boat. Food arrived by boat. Building supplies arrived by boat. Mail, equipment, merchandise — if Key West needed it, chances are it came across the water.
Then Henry Flagler did something that sounded almost ridiculous at the time.
He decided to run a railroad to Key West.
Workers pushed tracks farther and farther south, building across islands, shallow water, and open channels until, in 1912, trains could finally travel all the way from the mainland to Key West.
It was one of the great engineering achievements of old Florida.
There was only one problem.
America was falling in love with the automobile.
People didn’t just want to ride a train to Key West anymore.
They wanted to drive there.
So Florida started building roads through the Keys.
And calling some of those early roads “roads” might be generous.
They were rough, narrow stretches of coral and dirt, connecting whatever islands could reasonably be connected. Locals even had names for the especially rough portions of the route.
But engineers kept pushing south.
Eventually, a motorist could drive a surprisingly long way into the Florida Keys.
Then they would reach the water.
There was no bridge.
So they did the only thing that made sense at the time.
They put the car on a boat.
Think about that.
You weren’t taking a ferry as a side excursion.
The ferry was literally part of the highway.
You would drive south until the road ended, wait your turn, roll your automobile onto a ferry, cross miles of open water, unload on another island, and keep driving.
A trip that today feels like one long road trip was once a mix of dirt road, ferry ride, and a little faith that everything would still work when you reached the other side.
And for a while, that was simply how you drove to Key West.
Then came Labor Day, 1935.
One of the most powerful hurricanes ever to strike the United States tore through the Florida Keys.
The storm destroyed communities and badly damaged Flagler’s Overseas Railroad.
The trains never returned to Key West.
But the railroad left something behind.
Bridges.
Causeways.
A path through the islands.
Florida looked at that abandoned railroad infrastructure and realized much of the impossible work had already been done.
Instead of rebuilding the railroad, portions of its bridges and right-of-way were converted for automobiles.
By 1938, motorists could finally make the trip through the Florida Keys without loading their cars onto ferries along the way.
The islands had a continuous road.
Over the decades that followed, the highway changed again and again.
Old railroad bridges were replaced. Roads were widened. New bridges rose beside the old ones. The Seven Mile Bridge we know today eventually replaced the narrow route that generations before us had crossed.
And somewhere along the way, driving to Key West stopped feeling extraordinary.
Now we complain when we’re stuck behind somebody doing 42 in a 55.
We watch the mile markers count down.
MM 50.
MM 20.
MM 5.
Until eventually the road runs out at Mile Marker 0.
But there was a time when there were no mile markers.
There wasn’t even a continuous road to put them on.
And that’s the part of Florida history we love.
Because long before In-N-Out Keys was moving cars through the Florida Keys, people were still trying to figure out whether moving a car through the Keys was possible at all.
The next time you drive across one of those bridges, look out at the water for a second.
A hundred years ago, that water wasn’t beside the highway.
**It was the highway.**
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### Before In-N-Out Keys
Before car haulers.
Before U.S. 1.
Before Mile Marker 0.
There were dirt roads, railroad tracks, ferry boats, and a group of stubborn Floridians determined to find a way south.
And somehow, they did.
**In-N-Out Keys**
*Florida Keys transportation has come a long way.*