![]() Then again, Flagler may simply have been driven by the era's desire to conquer nature, like the mountaineer George Mallory, who notoriously explained his own mad (and fatal) passion for summiting Mount Everest in 1923: "Because it's there." The Upper and Middle Keys had only a few fishing settlements, and residents even in the bustling port of Key West traveled just as they had when it was a pirate outpost generations before-by boat. When Henry Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway expanded to Miami in 1896, it led to the growth of the city and other resort communities nearby. goods to Latin America and returning with cigars, sugar, fish and fruit. Flagler's larger dream was to turn Key West into a trade gateway to the Panama Canal then being built, bringing U.S. By creating a legacy, Flagler thought his place would be secured in the history books-while (not incidentally) producing a tidy profit for him along the way. Quite possibly, Standiford suggests, the visionary project was a grasp at immortality. Others thought that he was competing with his former partner, Rockefeller, who had by then become more famous. According to Standiford, some thought that he wanted to impress his third wife, Mary Lily Kenan, who was 37 years his junior. įor the next seven years, Flagler pumped over $27 million (a then-fantastical sum) into a railway project that many engineers considered impossible. But Flagler was already 75 years old in 1905 when he approved the wildly ambitious Key West Extension linking Miami to the Keys, a series of coral clumps dismissed by one contemporary writer as "worthless, chaotic fragments … have been aptly called the sweepings and debris which the Creator hurled out to see when he had finished shaping Florida," cites author Les Standiford in his classic account Last Train to Paradise. (His Palm Beach mansion remains as a museum downtown Miami's 12th Street, where he founded the city's first hotel, is now Flagler Street/) His Florida East Coast Railroad (FEC) opened up the state to the rest of the U.S. travel-that transformed lonely stretches of sand, including Palm Beach, into thriving metropolises. He was one of the world's richest men by the 1880s, but instead of resting on his laurels, he embarked on a risky second career in his mid-50s building railways and luxury hotels in Florida-then the last frontier of U.S. Morgan, Flagler was once a household name as a co-founder of Standard Oil with John D. Although less notorious today than titans like Andrew Carnegie or J. The brilliantly engineered railway, commonly referred to by contemporaries as "the Eighth Wonder of the World," was the brainchild of one of America's lesser-known robber barons, Henry Flagler. The famous writer and Keys fan John Dos Passos later called the trip, in a letter to his friend Ernest Hemingway, "a dream journey.” And while many travelers stayed in Key West-even before the building of the railway, it was Florida's largest city, a thriving port of 20,000 souls-others would hop directly onto a steamer bound for Havana.ĭeveloper and railroad magnate Henry Flagler is responsible for much of the development of southern Florida. It was as if they were flying: In the shallows some 18 feet below, they might spot dolphins, sharks, turtles or the four-feet-long tarpon prized by game fishermen. Travelers gazed in awe at the sparkling emerald water through windows on both sides of the carriage. As the name suggests, it crossed seven miles of open ocean, supported by concrete pylons embedded in the golden, shifting sands. By 10 a.m., it was chugging at 15 miles per hour across the most famous and spectacular of the Extension's 40-plus spans, popularly known as the Seven Mile Bridge. Around dawn on the second day, the same train continued south for 156 miles into America's most tropical region on the new "Key West Extension"-a single line of rail track that soared above the mangrove swamps and coral specks of the Keys, the wild archipelago that carves a delicate arc through the turquoise shallows for 150 miles south of Miami, between the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. ![]() nightly, the locomotive whistled down the Atlantic coast in a mere 36 hours to balmy Miami, while passengers dined on Floridian seafood and succulent fruit. In January of 1912, the tail end of the Gilded Age, travelers could flee the northeastern winter by heading to New York's Penn Station and purchasing a luxury sleeping compartment on the Havana Special train. A century ago, a journey to the Florida Keys felt like an adventure plucked from the pages of Jules Verne. ![]()
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