Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean

dining area, and a small food preparation area with an icebox and a wood stove.

A memorial was built by the Works Progress Administration in memory of the victims, atop a crypt containing the remains and ashes of about three hundred. The structure, in Islamorada at MM 81.5, was unveiled before a crowd of five thousand on November 14, 1937, by nine-year-old hurricane survivor Fay Marie Parker. “Dedicated to the memory of the ci

By the time the Panama Canal was opened in 1914, much had changed in Key West. Most of the cigar factories had moved northward to Tampa, lured by subsidies dangled by local business leaders. A peaceful Caribbean political situation had led to a substantial decrease in size of the Navy base. And the conversion of many oceangoing steamships from coal

As one writer of his time once put it, Henry Flagler went down to Florida “with its palms and red poinsettias, its white beaches and blue water, and so to speak, began life all over again.” A joke of the day had it that the…

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

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…

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

The principal cargo of the ships proved to be pineapples, most of them brought up from Cuba during the six- to eight-week season. Thirty-five hundred carloads of the fruit passed through Key West each year, and unemployed workers enjoyed a bonanza each “Pineapple Day” when a new shipment arrived.

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

With his railroad extended very nearly to the southern tip of Florida and Miami already growing into a city, it is inarguable that Flagler had reached another plateau of accomplishment in 1898. He was sixty-eight years old, and while his investments in Florida had not prospered to the degree that those in the oil business had, he was still one of t

The Galveston Hurricane of 1900, the deadliest in history, with some eight thousand lives claimed, packed winds in the 150-mile-per-hour range; while Andrew, in 1992, the costliest hurricane in history, with $25 billion in damages, was also officially labeled a Category 4, 155-mile-per-hour storm. Given what was coming at them on Labor Day of 1935,

“As it is,” he told Carrere, “I have got to finish the work out of my income and I cannot expect to live long enough to do that.” As a result, Flagler confided, he had taken an unprecedented step, a secret “known to but one other person.” After talking the matter over with Krome, Flagler had gone into debt for the first time since the project had b