Henry Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railway changed life in Southeast Florida. A century ago, it made its way over the waters of the Keys.
By Nancy Klingener
As early as the 1830s — within the first decade of Key West’s settlement — town boosters were suggesting that the island should be connected to the Florida mainland by rail. The first survey of a route was finished in 1866. The first franchise was obtained in 1883.
But it took the money, political power, experience and determination of Henry Flagler, the oil tycoon turned magnate, to undertake and complete the unlikely, difficult, expensive and life-altering enterprise that was the Florida East Coast Railway Key West Extension.
The “Overseas Railroad” was completed in January 1912 and this month Key West and the entire Florida Keys are celebrating its centennial.
It’s a bittersweet anniversary in many ways; the Keys are still connected to the mainland but the railroad is gone, undone by the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, a Category 5 storm that swept across Islamorada, killed more than 400 people and washed out the tracks in numerous places.
In the midst of the Depression, the FEC did not rebuild; many of the railroad bridges were repurposed for the Overseas Highway.
Still, the reminders of the railroad remain throughout the Keys, from the original bridges to the restored camp on Pigeon Key, the island in the bend of the old Seven Mile Bridge.
According to John Blades, executive director of the Flagler Museum at Whitehall in Palm Beach, Flagler had been thinking about extending his Florida East Coast Railway to Key West “for at least 15 years before he officially announced his plans in 1905.” Flagler was 75 years old.
“His grand vision for developing this part of the world had long included the Bahamas and Cuba,” Blades said. “So, his primary motivation seems to have been about realizing that vision rather than living to profit from its completion. In fact, one could argue that all the evidence points to the fact that Henry Flagler’s motivation for all his development was about realizing a grand vision rather than making money, since simply reinvesting his earnings from Standard Oil in more Standard Oil stock would have made him many times more money than his development in Florida was ever likely to.”
Flagler had already changed Florida’s eastern mainland coast by bringing his railroad — and building luxury hotels along the way — south from St. Augustine, through Palm Beach to Miami.
The tiny community of Linton went from being a few widespread settlers to the prosperous farming community of Delray Beach.
“The idea of making a good living in agriculture is probably why most settlers came,” said Dottie Patterson, archivist at the Delray Beach Historical Society. “Flagler’s company invested in a pineapple canning plant and helped the townspeople in several other ways. The railway was essential to the economy and was the most important impetus to settlement and a growing, improving town.”
Key West had already seen prosperity, from the shipwreck salvaging and cigar manufacturing industries but the Over-Sea Railway led to the first real development along the rest of the Keys.
And it provided a shipping connection to the Caribbean and, more importantly, to the Panama Canal, which was under construction at the same time.
Flagler’s crews endured the challenging conditions of building a railroad across muck, marl, mangroves and, in some places, open water — while also coping with heat, humidity, mosquitos and disease.
And then there were the hurricanes — catastrophic storms in 1906 and 1909 killed 132 men and altered the building plans when it became clear that the fill for the railroad bed would wash out and longer bridges were needed in some areas.
The statistics are astonishing. When completed, the Over-Sea Railway included 22 miles of filled causeway and 18 miles of bridges. Almost 18 million cubic yards of material was moved.
Fleets of boats were built, for everything from dredging to housing workers to ferrying dignitaries along the project.
An estimated 200,000 piles were driven into Florida Bay. Key West itself grew by 400 acres to create the railroad yard, the area now known as Trumbo Point that serves as the island’s Coast Guard base.
One of Key West’s most prominent citizens, Jefferson B. Browne, wrote a history of the island on the occasion of the railroad’s reaching Key West and one of the last chapters extols the achievement, citing “the magnificent genius and Roman courage of Henry M. Flagler, who in building this road has made use of a construction rivaling that of the aqueducts of ancient Rome, which will last long after the accretions of centuries shall have filled the space between the islands, and in the aeons to come, the archeologist will marvel as he uncovers these remains of a vanished and forgotten civilization.”
LINKS
Flagler Centennial: www.flaglerkeys100.com/
Key West Museum of Art & History, which is hosting an exhibit, “Flagler’s Speedway to Sunshine”: www.kwahs.com/
Flagler Museum at Whitehall, which has an exhibit called “First Train to Paradise” through Jan. 8: www.flaglermuseum.us
Read Together Palm Beach County, which has Les Standiford’s book Last Train to Paradise on its selection list: http://readtogether.palmbeachpost.com/
The Monroe County Public Library in Key West, which will also be reading Standiford’s book for its One Island One Book program, including an online readalong: www.oneislandonebook.blogspot.com
The Monroe County Public Library’s online collection of 700 images of the railroad:
www.flickr.com/photos/keyslibraries/sets/72157624587492499/
IF YOU GO
What: Author Les Standiford presents his book First Train to Paradise: The Building of the Over-Seas Railroad as part of the 27th Annual Whitehall Lecture Series.
Where: Henry M. Flagler Museum, 1 Whitehall Way, Palm Beach
When: 3 p.m., Jan. 29
Cost: $28/includes museum admission
Information: Call 655-2833 or visit www.flaglermuseum.us.
Comments