FEC Railway Had ‘Likely’ Stop

Readers: A caller asked about a settlement or neighborhood in the Juno Beach or Jupiter area named “Likely.” The caller said it might have been related to the Celestial Railroad, the short-lived line that operated in the late 19th century.
Most of the usual sources and experts were stumped. But Debi Murray, archivist at the Historical Society of Palm Beach County, found it between the Florida East Coast Railway’s Jupiter and Hobe Sound stops on a chart in the back of Speedway to Sunshine, South Florida railroad historian Seth Bramson’s
story of the FEC.
That led to Murray’s Martin County counterpart, Renee Booth, who sent me to Evelyn Way, a retired property manager who is writing a history of Hobe Sound. Her mother was the first white person born there, in 1912. Way knows exactly where Likely is.
It was not a settlement, but rather just one of the stops the FEC Railway placed every few miles, she said. It was on the east side of the track, right about at what’s now the northern boundary of Jonathan Dickinson State Park, near Hobe Sound in southern Martin County.
“At the ‘overhead bridge,’ which crosses the railroad tracks on U.S. 1, if you’re heading north, look directly down to your left,” Way said in an interview. “On the railroad track right there was Likely. There’s nothing
there now.”
Way says she was unable to learn why the stop got that name. But she tells us that Likely was the original name of the Hobe Sound development. She said the stop was long gone by the time Camp Murphy, the state park’s predecessor, was built during World War II.