Henry Flagler and the Gateway City

In eighteen seventy-eight, Henry Morrison Flagler arrived in Florida for the first time. He was in his late forties, one of the founding partners of Standard Oil, and one of the richest men in America. He had come south for his wife's health, and what he found in Florida was a state of enormous latent potential and almost no infrastructure.

The roads were sand tracks. The towns were small. The rail lines stopped well short of the places he wanted to go.

Most wealthy men would have noted the inconvenience and gone somewhere better-equipped. Flagler built a railroad. Jacksonville in the eighteen eighties was the de facto gateway to the Florida interior.

Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway began there, and it was in Jacksonville that passengers from the north changed trains and felt for the first time that they had truly arrived in Florida. The transformation Flagler's railroad brought to Florida is almost impossible to overstate. He connected Saint Augustine, Palm Beach, Miami, and eventually Key West to the national rail grid.

He effectively invented the winter tourism industry that would shape Florida's economy for the next century. Jacksonville, standing at the hinge point of that system, grew as the railroad grew. It remains today one of the major rail and logistics centers of the southeastern United States, a position it owes in part to the fact that a Standard Oil millionaire decided, in a Florida winter nearly a century and a half ago, that inadequate infrastructure was a problem worth solving with his own money.