There is no land in all the Keys that rises more than sixteen feet above sea level, and most of it lies far below that, at an average of three or four feet.

“Flagler’s is not only an excessive modesty but a personality so elusive as to be unseizable. . . . He has no intimates.”

A number of those shipwreck survivors were introduced to the beauties of the atoll-like paradise in such a manner, and many of them stayed on to make a life there. The bounteous local waters supported thriving industries in fishing, shrimping, sponge diving, and even turtle raising.

“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

The threshold wind speed for such a storm is 155 miles per hour, and a tidal surge of eighteen feet can be expected to come ashore in advance of those winds. Only two storms of such intensity have struck the United States in the twentieth century. One was Camille, which came ashore near Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1969, with winds of approximately 175

And yet, even without its visionary at the helm, the Key West Extension managed to roll on, struggling through good economic times and bad, occasionally assailed by critics, yet always a favorite of travelers drawn to the American tropics, to Key West, and beyond. By the 1930s a round-trip ticket from Miami to Havana cost as little as twenty-four

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…

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Before long, through service was established between New York City and Knight’s Key, Florida. Mondays through Saturdays, frigid Northern passengers could board the New York and Florida Special at 2:10 P.M. of a murky and snowbound Manhattan afternoon. At 7:30 A.M. on the third day following, they could wake up in a berth of a Pullman car and raise

Flagler, who had never traveled to Europe, who had never been so far as California, found himself at age fifty-five, somehow arrived in Florida, in St. Augustine, and the result was transforming. “It was the oldest city in the United States,” wrote Edwin Lefevre in Everybody’s. “He saw the old slave market, he saw the old Spanish fort; he saw the