Florida City and Flagler's Last Railroad

The building that houses the Florida Pioneer Museum here in Florida City was not always a museum. It was the station agent's home for the Florida East Coast Railway, built in nineteen oh four in a Philippine-influenced tropical style ordered by the railroad's owner, Henry Flagler. The fact that this house exists at the end of the Florida peninsula tells you something remarkable about the ambitions of one of the nineteenth century's most powerful men.

Henry Flagler came to Florida in the eighteen eighties already rich. He was John D. Rockefeller's original partner in Standard Oil, and he had made a fortune large enough to reshape an entire state. Beginning in eighteen eighty-six, Flagler systematically built the Florida East Coast Railway southward from Jacksonville, constructing palatial hotels at each new terminus to create demand for the line he was extending. First Saint Augustine, then Palm Beach, then Miami, which scarcely existed before Flagler's railroad arrived in eighteen ninety-six.

But Flagler was not finished. At the age of seventy-five, he made the most audacious decision of his life: he would extend the railroad across one hundred and twenty-eight miles of open water, island chain, and hurricane-battered Keys all the way to Key West, which was at that moment the largest city in Florida and a major port for trade with Cuba and the Caribbean.

Construction began in nineteen oh five. Engineers built forty-two bridges, including the magnificent Seven Mile Bridge over open ocean. Hurricanes killed workers. Costs ran to more than fifty million dollars of Flagler's own money. On January twenty-second, nineteen twelve, Henry Flagler, aged eighty-two and nearly blind, rode the inaugural train into Key West and stepped onto the platform to the cheers of a city that had waited six years for its mainland connection.

He died the following year. The railroad he built was destroyed by the Labor Day Hurricane of nineteen thirty-five, but the road that replaced it, US Route One, runs over the same bridges to this day.