Flagler and Plant, The Men Who Built the Peninsula

Two men in the eighteen eighties looked at the Florida peninsula, a largely roadless subtropical wilderness with almost no hotels, no reliable transportation, and a white population that still barely topped three hundred thousand, and saw a winter paradise waiting to be sold to the wealthy of the Northeast. Their names were Henry Flagler and Henry Plant, and between them they built the physical infrastructure of modern Florida. Henry Plant was first.

A Connecticut freight magnate who had built the Southern Express Company during the Civil War era, Plant acquired a tangle of broken Georgia and South Carolina railroads after Reconstruction and pushed them south. By eighteen eighty-four his tracks had reached Tampa. He followed the railroad with his signature hotels, vast, eccentric structures designed to make the rich feel they had arrived somewhere extraordinary.

The Tampa Bay Hotel, finished in eighteen ninety-one, cost more than three million dollars and rose from the palmetto scrub with Moorish minarets and cupolas that still define the Tampa skyline as Plant Hall at the University of Tampa. Henry Flagler came from the other direction. A co-founder of Standard Oil with John D.

Rockefeller, Flagler arrived in Saint Augustine in the winter of eighteen eighty-three and found the accommodations unsatisfactory. His response was to build the Ponce de León Hotel, two years of construction, five hundred forty rooms, the largest poured-concrete building in the United States at its opening in eighteen eighty-eight. Then he bought a railroad and began pushing it south.

Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway reached Palm Beach in eighteen ninety-four, Miami in eighteen ninety-six, a city that did not exist before his rails arrived. He kept going. In nineteen oh five, when he was seventy-five years old, Flagler announced he would extend his railroad across one hundred fifty miles of open water, island-hopping across the Florida Keys to Key West.

The Overseas Railroad, called the Eighth Wonder of the World at its completion in nineteen twelve, carried its first passenger train on January twenty-second of that year, three weeks after Flagler turned eighty-two. He died sixteen months later. A hurricane destroyed significant portions of the railroad in nineteen thirty-five, and the roadbed was converted into the Overseas Highway that drivers travel today.