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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,
... See moreLes Standiford • Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean
Desperate for any ready source of cash, the right-of-way was sold to the state shortly after the disaster for $640,000, a sorry return indeed on a project that had required nearly $30 million, seven years, and the labor—and in quite a few cases, the lives—of a…
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Les Standiford • Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean
Even today, experts presume that it would take a minimum of twenty-four hours to evacuate the Keys, and that is with a major highway running from Miami to Key West, two access bridges linking Key Largo to the mainland, and a carefully networked system of civil defense and sophisticated early-warning systems in place, none of which existed on that
... See moreLes Standiford • Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean
By the 1890s, Texas was settled into the fabric of the nation, or mostly anyway. A Jim Crow industrialist class ruled. Texas wealth was concentrated in the port city of Galveston. But in 1900, Galveston suffered the deadliest natural disaster in US history, a hurricane that left somewhere between 6,000 and 12,000 people dead, a fourth of the people
... See moreImani Perry • South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation
Flagler’s next birthday would be his eighty-second, and those closest to him had come to feel that the only thing keeping the old man alive was his dream of seeing the project completed.
Les Standiford • Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean
The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History
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Flagler spared no expense to make his new wife happy. As she had once remarked that she had always wanted “a marble palace,” Flagler built one for her: a mansion overlooking Lake Worth, which they named Whitehall, and which was to become a fabled center of the Palm Beach social scene.
Les Standiford • Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean
In short order he had bought up a large section of unproductive orange groves, had hired himself a New York architect, and embarked upon the building of a lavish Mediterranean-themed hotel—the Ponce de Leon—in St. Augustine.