Key West Florida Weekly

HENRY FLAGLER

AND THE FLORIDA EAST COAST RAILWAY



 

 

ON JAN. 22, 1912, ON WHAT WE can imagine was a reasonably warm day, a man named Henry Morris Flagler arrived in the southernmost city of the United States. A dapper gentleman possessing an enormous snow-white moustache and an eighth-grade education, Mr. Flagler had a penchant for oil monopolies and the kind of jaunty newsboy caps that would, almost 100 years later, become immensely popular with teenage girls in middle schools across America.

Mr. Flagler was in Key West to celebrate the method by which he had just arrived there: the Florida Overseas Railroad, which had just carried him, his moustache, his newsboy cap, and his wife, Mary, over 128 miles of railroad via a specially designed Pullman sleeping car train boasting three bedrooms, one bathroom, a salon and a kitchen. The ride was most likely bumpy, and — one can only assume — nerve-wracking, as workers had placed the final pieces of the track a mere 24 hours before the Flaglers’ tricked-out train car rumbled across them. On either side of the railroad, a gradient of turquoise and milky blues would have stretched out toward the horizon while, underneath, a chain of limestone islands sped past.

Above: Henry Flagler disembarking the train in Key West in 1912. STATE OF FLORIDA COURTESY PHOTOS

Above: Henry Flagler disembarking the train in Key West in 1912. STATE OF FLORIDA COURTESY PHOTOS

The tracks themselves stretched across 42 stretches of open water, 17 miles of viaducts and bridges, and over 20 miles of filled causeways.

It was 10:30 in the morning when Mr. Flagler disembarked from the luxurious train car alongside his wife, herself the owner of a collection of truly ridiculous hats. The two emerged to a crowd of cheering dignitaries, residents and local schoolchildren, all of whom had come to greet the first-ever train to travel from mainland Florida all the way down the Keys.

By his arrival in Key West that morning, Mr. Flagler had spent 27 years of his life and $50 million of his fortune to get there. He was almost entirely blind, and as he emerged from the train car to the cacophonous crowd gathered before him, he wept quietly. He had just turned 82.

Having co-founded Standard Oil alongside partners Samuel Andrews and John D. Rockefeller in 1867, Mr. Flagler had witnessed firsthand the company’s extraordinary ascension to the top of the American business world, from its meager beginnings as an oil refinery to its triumph as the largest oil company in the world. In just a few decades, Standard Oil grew its empire to include over 20,000 domestic wells and 100,000 employees. It cut out middlemen, absorbed its greatest competitors, and by the end of the 1870s, Standard Oil was in the business of refining over 90 percent of American oil.

Left: Members of the Key West Police Department participating in the parade for Henry Flagler on Duval Street in 1912.

Left: Members of the Key West Police Department participating in the parade for Henry Flagler on Duval Street in 1912.

There was, of course, a fair amount of controversy involved with acquiring a monopoly over all the oil refineries in the United States, and — thanks to an increasingly vitriolic series of lawsuits, muckraker authored accusations, public outcry and a growing suspicion of the company’s seeming immunity to the normal pitfalls of the business cycle — by the time the 1880s rolled around, Standard Oil was no longer the biggest, baddest kid on the block. Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Flagler, in an effort to regain their dominance, essentially invented the oil futures market by issuing certificates against the oil stored in their own company’s pipelines. It worked; in 1882, the National Petroleum Exchange opened in Manhattan.

Below: Crowds greet the arrival of Henry Flagler and the first train on Jan. 22, 1912.

Below: Crowds greet the arrival of Henry Flagler and the first train on Jan. 22, 1912.

The problem was, leading one’s business to inconceivable heights was not the best thing for one’s health. In 1878, Mr. Flagler’s doctor encouraged him to spend the winter in Florida. His wife was sick, and Mr. Flagler, by then himself a man of 48, which back then was basically 75, needed the rest. The couple visited Jacksonville, where Mr. Flagler was both convinced of the state’s potential for growth and disappointed by its transportation system and hotel options. By the time he returned with his second wife in 1883, Mr. Flagler had his eye on hotel development, specifically surrounding the historically charming but under-whelmingly developed city of St. Augustine. He stepped back from the more demanding day-to-day duties at Standard Oil, and chose instead to focus on the possible opportunities and assured difficulties that developing in Florida posed.

COURTESY FRIENDS OF OLD SEVEN PHOTO

COURTESY FRIENDS OF OLD SEVEN PHOTO

Two years after his first visit to the city, while honeymooning with his second wife, Mr. Flagler returned to St. Augustine. Seeing that an eccentric and wealthy Bostonian, Franklin W. Smith, had recently constructed a flamboyant Moorish mansion in the city, Flagler offered to purchase the building for his new bride but was repeatedly rebuffed by Mr. Smith. Instead, Mr. Flagler began construction on a 540-room, Spanish Renaissance-styled hotel.

He spent triple what he’d budgeted, invented a new way of building concrete structures and installed electricity throughout the property thanks to a few generators supplied by his friend, Thomas Edison. He then hired staff to turn on and off the electricity for guests, who refused to flip the switches themselves, terrified of electrocuting themselves. He named the hotel after the Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon, who’d mistakenly discovered Florida in 1513 while out searching for the fountain of youth.

Aware that a reliable method of transportation was vital to ensuring his venture’s success, Mr. Flagler purchased a short-line railroad between Jacksonville and St. Augustine, and began the painstaking process of converting the existing railroads to one standard gauge, already envisioning an extended track south. Soon his rail system had spread to reach Daytona, with Mr. Flagler building hotels, schools, bridges and a hospital in St. Augustine along the way to ensure the continued revival of the city to which he’d vowed to bring modernity.

By 1892, Floridian landowners were begging Mr. Flagler to bring his railroad even farther south, and he complied; a charter from the state authorized him to build a rail connecting his existing system all the way to modern-day Miami. Florida was, seemingly, exploding with growth overnight; new cities sprung up in the wake of Flagler’s recently laid tracks within weeks of him arriving, affirming his belief that all of South Florida’s untapped worth had simply been buried underneath the state’s then-abysmal transportation system. All it had taken was one man already trained in mining for profit to have the good sense to uncover it all.

By 1894, Flagler’s railroad — then referred to as the Florida East Coast Railway, or FEC — reached what is today the ritzy community of West Palm Beach. He built a series of supremely luxurious, outrageously expensive hotels (one of them, The Breakers, remains one of the most famously grand properties to this day), as well as a quaint 100,000-square-foot home for himself. Drawn like moths to the suddenly brilliant flame, the Gilded Age’s most affluent members descended on the seaside town, transforming West Palm Beach from a sleepy Southern community to the preferred location for rich folks looking to spend the winter getting tipsy on the beach.

A year later, after connecting them to the railroad, building them streets, instituting water and power systems, and financing their first newspaper, he had to convince the residents of the area surrounding Biscayne Bay not to name their town after him. They settled for the Native American name given to the river that bisected their city: Miami.

Though the town had already proved its use in the Civil War as a strategic military port thanks to its deep-water-anchorage-friendly location in the Florida Straits, it was not until the proposed construction of the Panama Canal that Key West became a true candidate for connection to Mr. Flagler’s railroad. At the time, Key West was no primitive islet; between 10,000 and 20,000 thousand residents called the tiny island home, having enjoyed exceptional wealth thanks to a steady business of turtle farming, sponging, cigars, fishing and shipwrecking for decades. The island was primed for a railroad depot — the difficulty was figuring out how to build a 7-mile-long bridge stable enough to support a multicar train, among other hellish obstacles along the way.

As a businessman, Mr. Flagler saw Key West’s position as an opportunity to increase trade in the West, Latin America and Cuba. But the idea proved, for years, almost impossible to execute. First, months of surveying and mapping of the land and channels over the Keys were required to discern the least-difficult route, though some of the very methods of construction it would take to build the railroad had not yet been invented. From there, it would be another eight years before that fateful January morning when Mr. Flagler’s train car arrived in Key West to rapturous applause. In the meantime, “Flagler’s Folly,” as some referred to the project, was besieged by three devastating hurricanes, each of which delayed construction considerably, each time endangering the lives of the 4,000 men employed on the project. Coupled with the annual summer arrival of yellow fever, the railroad seemed at times to be almost biblically doomed, and Mr. Flagler was raked over by the press without mercy.

Some modern historians maintain that Mr. Flagler never set out to reap a profit from the Overseas Railroad — that the reason the otherwise extraordinarily successful and prudent businessman would have risked so much of his own personal fortune was not because he assumed he would make his money back in eventual profits, but for far nobler reasons: Mr. Flagler wanted to create something magnificent, a gift to Florida and to the American economy. They posit that, nearing death, aware of his own mortality, Mr. Flagler wished in no small part to be immortalized.

To be fair, others believe this theory to be absolute garbage.

Whatever the impetus, Mr. Flagler’s project stalled in Marathon, long enough for the city to become a boom town, with cargo ships of Cuban limes and pineapples docking island-side where they could then be loaded onto the FEC to travel north. By 1910, the first rail spike was driven into the dry, rocky earth of Key West. Construction ramped up, so that by the morning of Jan. 20, 1912, Mr. Flagler’s special Pullman car left New York City bound for the country’s southernmost town.

Technically, the first FEC train to cross into Key West was a test car, which rolled into town at the ungodly hour of 2:45 a.m., crossing the final steel plate placed only hours earlier unharmed. When Mr. Flagler’s car door opened and the legend himself stepped out, it began a weeklong celebration in town — parades, banquets, lines of Navy officers in crisp white uniforms cracking off their salutes to the frail, white-haired man. A letter from President Taft was read; the mayor was ecstatic; children sang. Even Mr. Flagler, by then incredibly frail, was moved to make a brief speech at a dinner held at the local Marine barracks.

The same day he and his wife had disembarked in Key West, regular passenger service trains began departing the island to head north. Soon, the cars would begin transporting goods from Cuba, ferried over first by barge, then loaded into cars; sugar, molasses, pineapples so bountiful that they required an extra-heavy mountain locomotive to jump-start the journey. The ride became known as the Havana Special, and was soon renowned for its elegance.

Oil-powered engines meant the riders sitting down for a white linen-accessorized meal in the dining car kept their formalwear clean from coal dust. In total, it took four hours to get from the depot in Key West to Miami, the same amount of time it does to drive today. Since he’d financed the job himself, the profits, whatever they were, remained largely unrecorded, closely guarded by Mr. Flagler and his inside circle.

The Overseas Railroad soon became known as the Eighth Wonder of the World, and though Mr. Flagler himself was not alive long enough to see the railroad’s continued success — he died a year after his famous journey down the line — his absence may have been a kinder fate; much of the railroad was damaged beyond repair when, in 1935, a Category 5 hurricane, later called “the storm of the century,” produced a 17-foot storm surge that ripped through one of the route’s bridges in Islamorada, killing hundreds of workers. Because of financial constraints, the railroad was never rebuilt to completion again (indeed, even later attempts to dismantle some of the left-behind parts resulted in the bankruptcy of multiple companies, proving the railroad to be both impressively constructed and eternally expensive).

Bankrupt, the FEC sold the remaining road and bridges to the state of Florida. Eventually, when hauling cargo by truck became cheaper than trains, there began a long conversion of the Overseas Railroad to its current form: the Overseas Highway. New bridges, built in the 1980s, were erected alongside some of the original concrete ones; a few original bridges were left standing to serve as historical markers, jogging routes and excellent fishing piers. A local charity, Friends of the Old Seven, continuously raises money to fund the preservation and rehabilitation of the original 7-mile bridge, now listed on the National Register of Historic places and home to a museum documenting the railroad’s construction.

To limit Mr. Flagler’s legacy to his being responsible for the Overseas Highway is to grossly underestimate the man’s effect on modern-day Florida. It was Mr. Flagler who possessed the foresight to imagine our state’s current identity, world-famous for our agricultural exports, tourism, biodiversity, countless businesses, colleges, hospitals, restaurants, sports teams, Enrique Iglesias and the giant golf ball that is EPCOT. Mr. Flagler is immortalized in the rail spikes preserved in the remaining fragments of the railroad he dreamed up over a century ago, but just as much in every road, every town, every resident and every visitor who is fortunate enough to make their way south to the Sunshine State.

Not too shabby for a kid in a newsboy cap who never graduated from high school. ¦

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