Sailing with Senara: who is this Flagler person anyway? .... from P

You cannot go anywhere in coastal Florida without bumping into the ghost of Henry Flagler. Flagler County, Flagler College, numerous Flagler Boulevards, Flagler Hospital, Flagler High School, Flagler Beach, etc. etc. We are again in Florida (Daytona Beach) for K’s annual week-long AP English essay scoring job. As we made our way here, by car this time, I started seeing Flagler’s name again. Thinking back to our sail through the Keys I remembered marveling over the old railroad structure which stretches all the way from the mainland to Key West. In Key West I visited the little museum dedicated to Flagler and his Florida East Coast Railway and realized that the old bones of this railroad tell an incredible story of American ingenuity and determination in the industrial age.

Flagler was a wildly successful oil “robber baron” in the classic mold whose wealth at the turn of the century rivaled, and some say surpassed, that of the Rockefellers. In 1889 he took an interest in the new southern frontier of Florida and purchased several independent railroads from Jacksonville to Daytona. In 1894 his company constructed a new rail service to West Palm Beach, opening it up to the new “gilded age” vacationers. By 1895 his rail reached the wild shores of Biscayne Bay where he dredged a channel and paved streets in town. The local citizens wanted to change the name of the town to “Flagler” but he declined the honor and encouraged them to stick with the ancient Indian name – “Miami.”

When Panama Canal construction began in 1905 he decided Key West was going to be the new terminal point of his railroad, and he began an incredible construction project to put a steam locomotive over 153 miles of open ocean – stringing it along from key to key. Historians now describe it as an “engineering challenge beyond that of the Panama Canal itself.” You can still see most of the structure of the forty-some rail bridges spanning the keys. In the late 1940s the U.S. government just paved over the rail bridges to create the first highway A1A through the keys, and it was heavily travelled by traffic right up until the new, wider highway bridges were built in the late 60s. One of the locals told me the bridge inspectors in the Keys regularly say that the old concrete piers (Flagler used imported German concrete mixed with fresh water) are now more structurally sound than the “new” bridge pilings. Apparently Flagler’s old concrete recipe holds up better against the effects of salt water than the modern stuff!

Flagler’s East Coast Railway project was fraught with disasters, and it became a true money pit. It employed 4,000 men for 15 years, endured 5 major hurricanes during construction, and was so expensive that one of the richest men in the world died in debt. Even after completion, the Great Hurricane of 1935 (also described as the storm of the century) destroyed all but 60 feet of the entire rail system. It also killed 700 people and pretty much wiped the Keys clean. Records indicate sustained wind speeds of 200 MPH, well above Hurricane Andrew. K and I visited a small but well done memorial to those killed in the Great Hurricane at Islamorada. Some people labeled the railroad “Flagler’s Folly” and indeed the railroad never recovered from the combination of severe hurricanes and the great depression. But the fact is, Flagler’s railroad opened up the swamps of southeastern Florida allowing the isolated locals access to civilization while literally paving the way toward progress in a wild territory that wasn’t yet a state. And Henry himself got to ride the first train into Key West when the last rail was laid in 1912. Of course that was the same spring when the Titanic sank. Progress always has its setbacks.