The three-mile Arcadia Railroad, one of the oldest in territorial Florida, was completed in 1840 after just five months of construction and connected Arcadia with the mouth of Pond Creek at the Blackwater River. Mules pulled cars along wooden rails covered with flat strips of iron, and the line, though primitive, was useful for transporting lumber from Arcadia to the Blackwater River. In November 1830, Timothy Twitchell bought the northeast quarter of the Arcadia land from Joseph Forsyth for $121, dammed a small creek, and erected a small sawmill. A 1,000 foot ditch dug from Arcadia’s huge mill pond to Twitchell’s mill provided additional waterpower and carried logs directly to his mill site. In 1836, he added a shingle mill, and by the end of the 1830s, his sawmill and shingle mill had shipped more than 150,000 board feet of lumber and more than 50,000 shingles to New Orleans. In 1841, Twitchell built the Arcadia Pail Factory, a system of water-powered machinery that assembled wooden buckets made of juniper and white cedar wood, and with only four laborers, the enterprise produced about 1000 buckets per year. During the late 1830s silk boom, Twitchell planted eight acres of Chinese mulberries and erected a 100-foot-long, two-story cocoonery to house around 400,000 silkworms, along with silk reels and other machinery for transforming silk cocoons into bales of raw silk, but the boom collapsed and his silk endeavors were unsuccessful.