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

Given a bit of time to reflect on the events of the past few days, Flagler sat down on January 27 to compose a letter to Joseph Parrott, one that gives some insight into his state of mind: The last few days have been full of happiness to me, made so by the expression of appreciation of the people for the work I have done in Florida. A large part of

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…

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Flagler attributed much of the government’s animosity to a personal vendetta being carried out against him by President Theodore Roosevelt, whom he had once supported in a bid for the governorship of New York. Once elected to that post, however, Roosevelt had moved quickly to pass legislation taxing corporate franchises, an act that Flagler deemed

What had happened in the Upper Keys, along the stretch of the railway constructed according to more conventional standards, was another matter, however. Local residents and federal consulting engineers alike had from the first maintained that adding fill instead of bridges wherever possible had created the potential for disaster, and the effects of

Following the war, the Southernmost City once again became a thriving tourist destination, and though now the pirates and the wreckers are gone, as are the turtle-raising corrals and the sponge divers and the cigar factories and the Cuban rollers and their lectors, who read newspapers and novels aloud while they worked, and the blustery big-game-hu

As for predictions that Key West, “America’s Gibraltar,” would become a burgeoning center of commerce, Trumbo’s difficulties in finding space for so much as one steamship dock should have been a tip-off. Even before the railroad came miraculously to town, Key West was decidedly overbuilt, and the infrastructure for expansion simply did not exist. T

And at 10:34 A.M., Henry Morrison Flagler, his back bent with age and his dim eyes brimming with tears, stepped out onto Car 91’s observation platform to an ovation the likes of which he had never encountered. He had “ridden his own iron” to Key West at last. The mayor of Key West welcomed him with a fulsome speech and, on behalf of the citizenry,

The fact that the pilings were so enormous was one reason why the two men had been so troubled by the discovery that the 1910 hurricane had managed to move one out of place. But, as if spurred on by the realization that Flagler was weakening physically, Coe and Krome went back to work with a vengeance.

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.