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Flagler's era in Florida is a compelling read
Elizabeth A. Doehring
Before Trump, before Hughes, there was Henry Morrison Flagler.
 | | Last Train to Paradise Three Rivers Press 2002 ISBN # 1-4000-4947-4 $14.00 softcover pages: 272 |
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Writer Les Standiford, one of America's smoothest voices and the author of over a dozen books, including the renowned John Deal mystery series, takes the reader on a literary ride of a lifetime down to the Keys in Last Train to Paradise.
Not a big fan of history? No worries here. Standiford offers compelling and sheer characterizations that make Henry Flagler's career and life fall off the history pages like good ribmeat falls from the bone at an outdoor cookout.
Henry Flagler grew up poor but his trademarks were sheer tenacity and a knack for hard work. The son of a Presbyterian minister, Flagler was an early teetotaler who made his first fortune in the Ohio grain brokerage business by selling corn to distilleries.
Yet, all was not wealth. Flagler learned some early lessons in losing money. Investing $50,000 in a Michigan salt business, he found himself in debt.
Back in Ohio, Flagler walked to work each day with one John D. Rockefeller. A business marriage and personal bond developed as the two men eventually created the Standard Oil Company in 1870, the most powerful and profitable corporation ever founded in the world.
While working with Standard Oil, Flagler discovered that his wife, Mary, had developed tuberculosis. Deeply concerned for his spouse, Flagler took her by train to Jacksonville where her health improved. Thus began Flagler's exposure to and lifelong fascination with Florida.
After his first wife passed away, he then married his late wife's personal nurse. They honeymooned, spending time together in a small hamlet called St. Augustine. While others saw a simple section of property covered in with unproductive orange groves, Henry Morrison Flagler saw something more. Flagler immediately hired a New York-based architect and the posh 540-room Hotel Ponce de Leon was built in 1887.
While his business career was taking off in Florida, his second wife began to suffer emotional troubles and Flagler had her committed for mental disorders.
The ever-shrewd entrepreneur, Flagler would travel his own railroad service (later to be called the Florida East Coast Railway Company) incognito as he scouted for more real estate resort acquisitions without drawing attention from the locals.
On a visit to Palm Beach in 1892, there were less than a dozen homes. Flagler recognized the potential and built the elegant Breakers Hotel in 1896.
In 1895 Flagler made a decision to extend the Florida East Coast Railroad 66 miles from West Palm Beach southward to Miami. Along the way, Flagler realized still another hotel landmark. This time it was
the Royal Palm on Key Biscayne Bay.
Henry Flagler's empire extended far beyond Standard Oil Company and Florida land dealings. A tough businessman, he once contacted William McKinley just before McKinley was elected the 24th president of the United States and invited McKinley to visit him in what he termed "my domain."
After his second wife was institutionalized in 1897, Flagler began spending time with another woman, Mary Lily Kenan. In order to wed Kenan, Flagler changed his legal residence from New York to Florida in 1901. Soon after their move to Florida, the state legislature passed an unusual bill that was signed into law by the governor which made "incurable insanity a grounds for divorce." Rumors circulated that Flagler had paid $20,000 to key individuals and made gifts to a public university in Florida to get the bill passed and signed into law.
The author also balances out Flagler's ruthless tycoon image by offering up a somewhat warmer side. Standiford relates that during the hard freeze of 1894 Flagler handed one of his employees $100,000 in cash and instructed him to travel on a relief mission of disbursing the money to suffering farmers, growers, and laborers.
The year 1905 brought about a major undertaking in Flagler's life and in the history of this country. Flagler announced a railroad enterprise across water that in many respects was more arduous than the construction of the Panama Canal. The maverick visionary began construction on a railroad across the Straits of Florida down to Key West. This is where Standiford's story really begins to sizzle.
Site surveying down in the Everglades was conducted by William Krome. Working among
Elisabeth A.
Doehring, Book Review Editor and Travel Feature Writer for the "Gulf Breeze News" and "Splash! Magazine," visiting Henry Flagler's old Hotel Ponce de Leon. This St. Augustine landmark, now known as Flagler College, was built in 1887. Moorish roofs and breathtaking Mediterranean styling make the structure a lavish showplace. Flagler's personal friend, Thomas Edison, designed the electrical system. Edison's work set a precedent-the hotel became the first building within the state of Florida equipped with electricity. Louis Comfort Tiffany mapped out furniture, chandeliers, and numerous lighting fixtures. The opulent dining room includes 40 Tiffany stained-glass windows as well as other glass works throughout the hotel-these Tiffan y pieces are valued today at over $25 million. "The Ponce" has served as host to American presidents, Hollywood stars, and such corporate giants as John
D. Rockefeller and John Jacob Astor.
waterfowl, and te alligators,
n Krome admonished the area as "a return to their machines in the morning hours only to find alligators occupying the decks. eloquent prose describes the working conditions as the deadly hurricane of Half of the railroad extension involved laying track
Just south of Homestead, workers built up
Dredge operators would
Laborers covered switches to the swarms of mosquit S t a n d i f o r d 's
October, 1906 headed toward the "lulled to a near torpor by the hypnotic heat and sun, the repetitive rhythms of pile and the steady gentle men seem to forget what might come the summer-cooked waters between
Yet, through these obstacles and ongoing sparrings
President Theodore Roosevelt,
"I want to see it (the
The next year, 1907, workers rebuilt the sixteen miles of Key Largo track that was demolished in the 1906 hurricane. Standiford offers, "...they were followed every step of the way by the growling supply trains and the relentless clouds of mosquitoes that drank the blood of the workers as resolutely as the workers guzzled fresh water carted down in the huge tanks."
Again in the month of October, and this time in the year 1909, another hurricane struck, this time in the Middle Keys. Resources of money and men were being depleted. The following year Flagler authorized JP Morgan to issue $10 million in bonds to underwrite completion of the East Coast Railway.
As work was going in earnest on the last miles of track along the Lower Keys and the Seven Mile Bridge something else was about to happen. "And yet once again," Standiford writes, "nature one-upped mankind" with the 1910 hurricane. For over thirty hours the storm passed over the fragile Lower Keys, wrecking havoc on the most vulnerable of Flagler's entire Florida Keys railroad extension. Flagler's foreman used his own belt to tie himself around the trunk of a poisonous manchineel tree. Weathering it out in maximum sustained winds of 125 miles per hour, somehow the foreman survived.
After seven years of work in 1912, the Key West Extension was completed and the 336 miles of track linking Jacksonville to Miami and the 156 miles connecting Miami to Key West was completed. What the press had initially headlined as "Flagler's Folly" was now being crowned as "the Eighth Wonder of the World."
Flagler lived to see the completion of his railroad project. Before he died the following year in 1913 he said, "I would have been a rich man if it hadn't been for Florida."
The story then moves into the final in the series of hurricanes-the deadly Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 that eventually wiped out the Key West Railroad. "Desperate parents groped madly for children torn from their grasp. Panicked men flailed blindly, their limbs dangling with those of others clawing just as wildly in return. As best we know, no one drowns with dignity."
Chalked full of historical archival photographs and a well-documented index, Last Train to Paradise is a must read for anyone who wants to gain a true sense of American business and capitalism at the turn of the last century. Seasoned with lazy Florida days, Papa Hemmingway mystique, hurricane lore and primitive weather prediction devices, this book offers a final look at the nation's most southern frontier as well as a visionary who made modern day Florida what it is today. Add all these literary and historical ingredients together and the read is better than any premium tropical libation.
Last Train to Paradise is rich with the fluidity of language that the Miami-based writer Les Standiford is so known for. This work is masterfully written and researched. Standiford is clearly one of America's top writers of both fiction and creative non-fiction.
Readers will find Last Train to Paradise as powerful as a locomotive with intervening stops as silky smooth as a Key West sunset.
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