Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Near Downtown Waldo Waldo, FL

Waldo began in the early 1800s as Bellamy Station, a stop on the Bellamy Road — the first federally built highway in territorial Florida, constructed in the 1820s to link St. Augustine and Pensacola.

The town was renamed Waldo in 1859, when the Florida Railroad arrived; the name honors Dr. Benjamin Waldo, a friend of railroad president and U.S. Senator David Levy Yulee.

Waldo was incorporated as a city in 1907 and remains a small railroad town on U.S. Highway 301, about 13 miles northeast of Gainesville in Alachua County.

The city had 846 residents at the 2020 census, down from 1,015 in 2010.

In Waldo's steamboat era, citrus and freight crossed Lake Santa Fe by boat and canal to Lake Alto and were transferred to trains at Waldo for shipment to distant markets — until hard freezes in the 1890s devastated the local citrus industry.

Waldo won national notoriety in August 1995 when the American Automobile Association declared it a 'speed trap' and urged motorists to choose alternate routes instead of driving through town.

At the peak of the controversy, Waldo's seven police officers wrote 11,603 traffic tickets in 2013 alone, and court fines made up roughly half of the city's budget.

After a state investigation into alleged ticket quotas, Waldo's city council voted to disband its police department on October 1, 2014, handing law enforcement to the Alachua County Sheriff's Office.

The AAA officially removed Waldo's speed-trap designation in August 2018, ending a listing that had lasted 23 years.

Waldo even appears in James Bond lore: in Ian Fleming's 1954 novel Live and Let Die, the villains stop Bond's train on a lonely stretch of track south of Waldo — a connection the Waldo Railroad Museum highlights today.