Sublime

The storm of 1906 had concentrated its fury on the Upper Keys, where most of the work ongoing at the time had been centered. The hurricane of 1909 had blasted the Middle Keys, where work had similarly progressed by that time. In 1910, as if guided by an especially malevolent hand, the storm turned its greatest intensity upon the Lower Keys, where u

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.

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 tha

a man who lived as if the wild places of the hemisphere were his for the taking.

But we’ve known the power of the wild, the all-consuming demands of rain and snow and wind, the callousness of mountains and rivers. We’ve been cared for by strangers. We’ve felt part of something much

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 o