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In an office, Ivy Lee was meeting with Charles M. Schwab, who was at the time one of the richest men in the world and chairman of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, one of the largest shipbuilding steel companies in the world. Schwab was obsessed with finding ways to increase his company’s efficiency and, in his quest, decided to hire Ivy Lee, a
... See morebut it was only the beginning of Flagler’s involvement with railroading in Florida. Shortly afterward, he bought another Jacksonville short line and extended it directly eastward to Jacksonville Beach and its environs, where he constructed a series of coal and lumber docks that made Jacksonville a major port.
Les Standiford • Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean
When talks with existing line owners proved fruitless, Flagler did what anyone with his resources might: he ponied up half a million dollars and bought the railroad.
Les Standiford • Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean
With the Commodore’s money, the two lively young ladies published the first edition of their newspaper, Woodhull Ö Claflin’s Weekly, on May 14, 1870. And what a paper it was! PROGRESS! FREE THOUGHT! UNTRAMMELED LIVES! BREAKING THE WAY FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS? heralded the masthead. The paper, whose articles were written by a number of gentlemen
... See moreArthur T. Vanderbilt • Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt
Goaded by the outspoken Plant’s vow to “outdo” him, Flagler considered what he might play as a trump card. In a letter written to the Miami Herald many years later, Jefferson Browne, a Key West resident and onetime president of the Florida Senate, recalls being taken aside by Henry Flagler during the grand opening of the Tampa Bay Hotel. During
... See moreLes Standiford • Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean
But Flagler’s railroad across the ocean never earned a dime of profit, and it is difficult to imagine how a businessman as bright as he was ever thought it would. Flagler managed to fabricate excuses for his endeavor, one of them being that some would come to call a World Wonder. And while tourists made use of the line, freight shippers—the bread
... See moreLes Standiford • Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean
By the 1880s and 1890s, it supplied its own coke and iron ore, its own pig iron, and much of its own rail and lake shipping facilities, and it maintained its own sales force. How, therefore, to compute profits on steel? First, one had to tot up the costs for the coke, the ore, the shipping, and everything else. But in the absence of normal invoices
... See moreCharles R. Morris • The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy
Although the reorganization of the Standard did not involve any new capital—shareholders simply exchanged one form of security for another—its imitators, like the Cotton Oil Trust, the Linseed Oil Trust, the Lead Smelting Trust, the Whiskey Trust, and others, usually needed cash and issued large volumes of new shares, as did a later series of
... See moreCharles R. Morris • The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy
An 1889 act of the Florida legislature set aside some 10 million acres of land to be deeded to entrepreneurs willing to build new railway lines and thereby bolster the state’s economic infrastructure. As a result, Flagler was able to lay claim to eight thousand acres for every mile of track he built. In the end, he would control more than two
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