Last Train to Paradise (5 page)

5

Empire Building

Flagler did not want for distractions from his devastated personal life, however. Hardly had he embarked upon a career in hotel-building than he realized that transporting customers to these emporia of delight was as important a link in the process as moving crude oil to his refineries had been so many years before.

In this case, for Flagler, there was something of a carryover from his former life. All that experience in railroading was about to be put to use in an entirely different context, as he tried to make sense of one of the most chaotic rail systems in the United States.

There had been almost no railroad construction in Florida since the end of the Civil War. The aftermath of the conflict had sent most of the operators into bankruptcy and the ensuing litigation had tied up much of the state-owned right-of-way in court battles. The lines that did exist had been built without regulation and with no regard for consistency of track. Where one line ended and another began, the gauge and type of track might vary wildly. To continue on, engines and cars would have to have their wheels refitted and their axles resized. The alternative was to unload passengers and cargo from one train and reload them on another.

It was a situation that a man who had worked with peerless organizer John D. Rockefeller could scarcely comprehend. But with construction under way on the Ponce de Leon, Flagler realized he was in dire need of better transport service over the forty-mile route from Jacksonville, which was then the southern terminus of decent rail service in the state of Florida. As matters stood, to get from Jacksonville to St. Augustine required a leisurely cruise down the broad St. Johns River, then the boarding of a narrow-gauge railroad for a few remaining miles’ passage eastward to the ultimate destination.

When talks with existing line owners proved fruitless, Flagler did what anyone with his resources might: he ponied up half a million dollars and bought the railroad. As the new owner of the Jacksonville, St. Augustine & Halifax River Line, his first decision was to build a bridge across the St. Johns.

The moment that the company’s engineers heard of Flagler’s plans, they came forward quickly, announcing that no one had ever sunk railroad support piers in ninety feet of water, the depth they would have to cross. Flagler pondered this information for a moment, then turned back to the engineers. “Cannot you build that pier in ninety feet of water, then?”

After a brief huddle, the engineers had decided. “We can,” they told Flagler.

“Then build it,” Flagler replied.

The result constituted railroad history, but it was only the beginning of Flagler’s involvement with railroading in Florida. Shortly afterward, he bought another Jacksonville short line and extended it directly eastward to Jacksonville Beach and its environs, where he constructed a series of coal and lumber docks that made Jacksonville a major port.

With that behind him, Flagler turned his interests southward again, extending his line to Ormond Beach, where he bought a modest inn and renovated it, renaming it the Ormond Beach Hotel, adding a golf course and other amenities so pleasing that Rockefeller built his winter home across the street.

By this time Flagler was convinced he was onto something in the providing of uninterrupted train service for tourists visiting Florida. He extended the line to Daytona Beach, laying the foundation for that town, whose twenty miles of hard-packed, snowy sand beaches would make it one of the leading resort destinations in the nation.

Residents of the lands farther south needed no convincing of the value of Flagler’s efforts. He was offered free land for his right-of-way, and less than a year after the railroad had reached Daytona, it had leapfrogged another eighty miles south across the palmetto-dotted scrublands to Rockledge, almost halfway down the state from Jacksonville, across the Indian River from Cape Canaveral.

Meanwhile, a competitor of sorts had cropped up. On the west coast of Florida, perhaps inspired by Flagler’s notoriety, a man named Henry Plant had been buying up a series of existing narrow-gauge railroads with the stated intention of extending a line all the way from Tampa to Miami. Plant had also built a deep-water pier that transformed Tampa into an important port on the Gulf of Mexico, and by 1891 he had completed his own extravagant hotel, the Tampa Bay, which, at $3 million, considerably exceeded the cost of the Ponce de Leon, a paltry $2.5 million.

Goaded by the outspoken Plant’s vow to “outdo” him, Flagler considered what he might play as a trump card. In a letter written to the
Miami Herald
many years later, Jefferson Browne, a Key West resident and onetime president of the Florida Senate, recalls being taken aside by Henry Flagler during the grand opening of the Tampa Bay Hotel. During that conversation, Browne said, Flagler first proposed to him the notion of extending his own railroad another four hundred miles to the south, all the way to Key West.

Flagler told Browne in that conversation that the logical end of all railroad building in Florida was to reach a deep-water terminus in proximity to Central and South America. In fact, some have argued, had Flagler been successful in getting the U.S. government to help him pay for the costs of dredging such a harbor in Miami’s Biscayne Bay, there might never have been a Key West Extension.

In any case, the Panama Canal was sure to be built one day, Flagler told Browne, while Plant’s imported symphony played and opera stars sang, and the nearest deep-water port in the United States was sure to have an enormous advantage. It soon became clear, Browne recalled, that Flagler was seeking Browne’s assistance in seeing that the existing government franchises for building such a line be set aside.

In 1883, General John B. Gordon of Georgia had obtained the first franchise from the state for the building of a railroad to Key West, but Gordon had little capital of his own, and had secured the rights in hopes of attracting deep-pocketed investors to the project. After building a few miles of track on the mainland, Gordon had gone broke, but other speculators had acquired the franchise in turn.

As Flagler argued, this series of petitioners were only schemers involved in the grossest speculation (not unlike contemporary consortiums tying up Internet domain names or seeking rights to the first Burger King franchise on Mars). Browne listened intently to Flagler, and, apparently unimpressed by the thousands of guests who strolled and rode rickshaws about the grounds of Plant’s hotel—dukes, duchesses, and theater stars included—finally gave his agreement to the railroad man from the other side of the state, sensing that Henry Flagler was the one man in all creation who might be able to pull off such an impossible feat.

Warming to the advantages such a railroad would open to his constituency, in 1894 Browne wrote an essay titled “Across the Gulf by Rail to Key West,” which was to be published in the
National Geographic
in June of 1896.

“Key West will within a short time be connected with the mainland by a railroad,” Browne asserted, adding, “It is not too much to say that upon the completion of the Nicaragua
[sic]
Canal, Key West will become the most important city in the South.”

Browne seemed to overlook the fact that the canal project, which had been mired in political maneuverings for more than twenty years, had also been assailed by critics who thought it as much of a crackpot notion as a proposal to build a railroad across the ocean. Of the latter, he was willing to grant that its having no precedent could possibly make it, “like all other great enterprises, a subject for a time of incredulity and distrust.” Still, Browne asserted, “it presents no difficulties that are insurmountable.”

In the piece, Browne laid out a route from Key West northward over the island chain, which he said would be protected by the neighboring Florida reef, safe from high seas “even in the severest hurricanes.” If the several lighthouses that had been built along the reef had not been blown over, he reasoned, why worry about track, trestles, and bridges?

As to who was capable of building this mighty road, Browne ended his piece with another bold declaration: “The building of a railroad to Key West would be a fitting consummation of Mr. Flagler’s career, and his name would be handed down to posterity linked to one of the grandest achievements of modern times.”

Whether or not anyone was looking over his shoulder as he composed his article, Browne had by 1895 carried out his promises to Flagler, using his position as a state senator to see to it that all legislative impediments to Flagler’s plans had been disposed of. Shortly thereafter, Flagler recombined all of his rail holdings in the state into the Florida East Coast Railway, and gave official notification to the state that it was his intention to extend his system all the way to Key West.

The proposal was so grandiose on the face of it that most lumped Flagler’s Key West intentions into the same category as those of earlier speculators. He was, however, granted a charter by the legislature to extend the FEC line to Miami, a move that went beyond the mere permission to spend a great deal of money laying iron track.

An 1889 act of the Florida legislature set aside some 10 million acres of land to be deeded to entrepreneurs willing to build new railway lines and thereby bolster the state’s economic infrastructure. As a result, Flagler was able to lay claim to eight thousand acres for every mile of track he built. In the end, he would control more than two million acres of land for which he had essentially paid nothing.

While sales and leasing of these lands abutting his right-of-way were a windfall, Flagler was always on the lookout for properties that might be developed as resorts, thereby creating an incentive for passengers to ride each new leg of his line. He took to riding his own railroad incognito, the better to scout out likely targets for acquisition without arousing the attention of local speculators certain to jack their prices sky-high should it be known that the great Henry Flagler might be interested.

In 1892 he had visited the seaside hamlet of Palm Beach in such a manner, and had returned to St. Augustine in a lather. “I have found a veritable Paradise,” he told his managers, instructing them to acquire the necessary land for the “largest hotel in the world” and to begin planning the extension of the line to Palm Beach.

One would have to give Flagler credit for his vision. At the time the entirety of Palm Beach, situated on a narrow, palm-laden barrier island between Lake Worth and the Atlantic, consisted of less than a dozen houses. While the place was undeniably lovely, it was virgin territory, with no housing facilities for the hundreds of workmen who would be required to bring these dreams to fruition. And with no railroad line in existence, the building materials for the colossal hotel project would have to be brought down the Florida coast by a hastily assembled flotilla of cargo ships and riverboat steamers.

Although such a staging process taxed Flagler’s infrastructure, it was valuable preparation for what would come later. Workmen were housed in hastily assembled communities of tents and shacks, resembling nothing so much as a vast gold-rush camp. Because Flagler was loath to mar the landscape surrounding his dream hotel, most of the camps were laid out on the west side of Lake Worth, requiring men to row to work in the mornings, then row back to camp at night. It might have been an inconvenience for those doing the rowing, but it gave Flagler another moneymaking idea.

He decided to lay out a new town on the west shores of Lake Worth, where he would erect the terminal for his railroad. It was a fortuitous decision for Flagler, but one that was to have implications that persist to this day, with the “haves” living in the palatial estates of Palm Beach itself, and the “have-nots” in what was originally conceived of as the service town of West Palm Beach. The literal distance is measured in a few hundred yards of water, but in social terms, the two municipalities are light-years apart.

Meanwhile, work on both the railroad and the hotel continued with all dispatch, workers on each spurred by a race devised by Flagler. The hotel builders won out, finishing the largest wooden structure in the world in the early spring of 1894, barely nine months after it was begun. When the 540-room structure was opened, guests might pay in the neighborhood of forty dollars a day for double accommodations, one hundred dollars for a suite.

Once again the hotel was a hit with the public, especially the moneyed public. Demand was so great that Flagler immediately commenced work on a second hotel, this set on the ocean side of the island and christened as the Breakers. Though the original Breakers structure was to be destroyed by fire a few years later, Flagler had the hotel rebuilt, and its successor remains today as popular a destination for the privileged as it was back then. Prominent among the first group of passengers to arrive, via a rail spur that Flagler had extended from the main station in West Palm Beach, were several members of the Vanderbilt family, along with a number of others on the register of the “Four Hundred,” the most exclusive set of its time.

By this time, then, it seemed that everything Flagler touched would turn to gold. He was besieged with business proposals and pleas of every stripe. Hardly had he completed his line to Palm Beach than those who were aware of his charter rights were begging him to extend the rails southward to Miami, even though there was no Miami at the time.

6

The City That Flagler Built

In the 1890s, all that existed where the modern metropolis of Miami sprawls today was a muddy settlement of fewer than five hundred souls. The place was called Fort Dallas at that time, after a long-abandoned military outpost that had been established in the 1830s where the Miami River empties into Biscayne Bay. The few hardy settlers who lived there near the turn of the century had been enticed by land speculation syndicates at work everywhere in the wild southern half of Florida, groups of businessmen who stood to make their fortunes by seeing such frontier lands settled.

Those who moved to Fort Dallas to seek their fortunes were interested in encouraging others to join them, of course. Among the most active of those pioneers was a Cleveland, Ohio, woman named Julia Tuttle, who had fallen in love with the wild but exotic setting during a visit to her father’s homestead.

When her industrialist husband died and her father bequeathed her his holdings in the area, Tuttle, then forty-one, performed an uncommon act of bravery: she pulled up stakes in Ohio and moved to Fort Dallas, intending from the outset to carve a city from the wilderness. She purchased a homestead allotment of her own from the Biscayne Bay Company—640 acres, including the site of the original fort—and went to work remodeling one of the original settlement structures into a home for herself and her two children.

Mindful of what it would take to turn the sleepy settlement into a city, she approached Flagler’s rival Henry Plant about the possibility of extending his railroad from Tampa southeastward across the Everglades to Fort Dallas. Plant dispatched his chief of railroad operations, James E. Ingraham, to investigate the 250-mile route. In what became a virtual survival march, it took Ingraham and his men nearly a month to make their way across the soggy wilderness of south-central Florida, and while they were given a hero’s welcome by Tuttle and her friends, Plant, after hearing Ingraham’s report, dismissed the building of a railroad across such territory, forever.

Tuttle, undaunted, turned to the other great railroad builder in Florida, offering Henry Flagler half of her land if he would only bring his railroad southward to Miami along the east-coast route. When Tuttle began her campaign, Flagler was not interested.

Though he had received a charter from the Florida legislature granting him rights to an extension of his lines to Fort Dallas, that claim presumably constituted an insurance policy for some distant future. Flagler saw no immediate reason to press his road beyond Palm Beach, not when the “city” making its blandishments was little more than a squatters’ outpost.

With the grandest hotel in the world in operation and his tracks humming all the way from Jacksonville to West Palm Beach, Flagler, now in his early sixties, felt that he had indeed reached a logical resting place. And then fortune intervened.

In the winter of 1894, one of the worst freezes in Florida history swept southward across the state, wiping out crops and citrus groves all the way to Palm Beach. The suffering he saw among farmers, growers, and laborers stunned Flagler. He sent James Ingraham, whom he had hired away from Plant, out on a private relief mission with $100,000 in cash, instructing him to disburse it all “and more, than have one man, woman, or child starve.”

Flagler was also mindful of news sent to him by the indefatigable Julia Tuttle that Fort Dallas had not been touched by the freeze. Flowers still grew in profusion, and blossoms studded the citrus groves. Though legend has it that it was Tuttle who sent Flagler a bouquet of orange blossoms as dramatic proof of her settlement’s favorable climate, it is more likely Ingraham who came up with that notion, following a meeting with Tuttle and others eager to entice Flagler southward.

In any case, Ingraham returned from Fort Dallas greatly impressed with the potential he saw in the land surrounding what is now Miami. And many historians insist that Flagler did have a spray of lemon, lime, and orange blossoms before him as he pondered his decision, though they say it was Ingraham and not Julia Tuttle whose idea it was.

Orange blossoms or not, the decision did not take long. Inside of three days, Flagler had made plans for what was then an arduous trip: by rail to West Palm Beach, then by launch to Fort Lauderdale, then more than thirty miles by horse and carriage to Miami.

On the journey, Flagler brought along his hotel designers, as well as his chief of railroad operations, Joseph Parrott. By the time Flagler and his men stepped down from the carriage into the balmy moonlight and gazed out over the placid waters of Biscayne Bay, it is likely that his mind was already made up. In short order, he struck the deal that Julia Tuttle had been urging upon him for years.

Flagler would receive half of Tuttle’s homestead allotment and one hundred acres more, as well as another one hundred acres from the Brickell family, on the south side of the Miami River. In return, he would bring his railroad to Miami, construct another in the series of grand hotels, and develop a modern city on the site as well. Flagler confirmed the terms of the agreement in a letter dated April 22, 1895, and promised to have his railroad crossing the Miami River by the following February.

He very nearly kept his word. Construction of the sixty-six-mile extension south from West Palm Beach was aided by a sizable contingent of convict labor leased to the Florida East Coast Railway at the rate of $2.50 a month. The company had to feed and house the men, but it was still an attractive deal when private labor might approach two dollars or more per day. The process took about ten months from start to finish, and the first passenger train pulled up to a makeshift station platform in Fort Dallas in late April of 1896.

While Flagler’s Royal Palm Hotel was still under construction and the rest of the town-to-be was little more than dreams sketched out on paper, the arrival of the railroad changed everything. Within three months the city had been incorporated as Miami (Flagler had to gently urge the new town council to choose the original Native American name for the settlement over his own name), and the population had soared from three hundred to fifteen hundred.

During the ensuing summer, a business section developed: a string of one- and two-story structures housing a bank, a general store, a Chinese laundry, and more, all of it resembling a mining outpost. On Christmas night of 1896, a fire broke out that leveled most of the new development, but the Royal Palm was spared.

Three weeks later the hotel on Biscayne Bay opened, five stories tall and almost seven hundred feet long, capped by an awe-inspiring lookout platform and surrounded by a golf course and palm-studded grounds. There were electric elevators, electric lights, and 350 rooms, most of them with private baths, a feature that was not common then, even at the most elegant hotels.

The Royal Palm was not only an impressive feature of the new city, but virtually the very reason for Miami’s being. Flagler was not dismayed at this, of course, for over the past dozen years he had seen development thrive in the wake of his method: build a railroad to a place, erect a destination-worthy resort hotel there, and other development was sure to follow.

For a man whose former accomplishments were measured by the proliferation of belching refineries and a network of steel pipeline, watching this new process at work was bound to be heady stuff. Instead of being hounded by trust-busting government agents and muckraking reporters, Flagler found his footsteps being followed by thousands of Americans, discovering not only previously unimagined pleasures in this far-flung land, but in many cases finding new lives and careers there as well. He had little doubt that things would proceed in Miami as they had in St. Augustine and Daytona Beach and Palm Beach, but even Flagler could not have predicted the events that would cause Miami’s growth to explode in exponential terms.

On February 15, 1898, scarcely a month after the Royal Palm opened its doors for a second season, the USS
Maine,
stationed in Havana harbor ostensibly to protect American interests against the incursion of Spanish colonialists, was blown up and sunk. While historians still debate whether or not the catastrophe was a put-up job, “Remember the Maine” became a rallying cry, and by April, America went to war with Spain.

Given South Florida’s proximity to Cuba, the government was under pressure to put a garrison in place there to defend U.S. shores. Not a man to let opportunity pass him by, Flagler lobbied Washington to deploy a sizable number of troops, adding that Miami was “the most pleasant place south of Bar Harbor to spend the summer.”

Locals, well accustomed to the annual summer mosquito plague that made life near the Everglades almost unbearable, howled at that one. But Flagler persisted. He sent a crew of men to clear some palmetto scrublands west of the settlement for a camp, and in short order the first of a contingent of seven thousand troops was on its way to Miami.

What they discovered was a town consisting of a hotel shuttered for the season and a clutch of raw buildings that might have dropped down from the sky.

In
Miami: The Magic City,
the historian Arva Parks Moore shares a letter written by one of the young soldiers: “There was a most magnificent and gorgeously appointed hotel right in the midst of a perfect paradise of tropical trees and bushes,” he said. “But one had to walk scarce a quarter of a mile until one came to such a waste wilderness as can be conceived of only in rare nightmares.”

The war was over by August, and the troops were soon gone, but still, Miami had become a
place
in the eyes of the world. And the outcome of the war was to reawaken in Flagler the stirrings for the last of his great projects.