Robert Whitcomb: What let Flagler revolutionize Florida

A 1913 advertisement extols the many advantages of traveling on the Florida East Coast Railway, the "New Route to the Panama Canal".

From a talk I gave on March 17 to a Florida group

— Robert Whitcomb

‘When looking back at Henry Flagler's life, George W. Perkins, of J.P. Morgan & Co., reflected,

 "But that any man could have the genius to see of what this wilderness of sand and underbrush was capable and then have the nerve to build a railroad there, is more marvelous than similar development anywhere else in the world."

My interest in railroads goes back to dim memories of taking the train to see relatives in Florida, other parts of the South and the Midwest as a child.  Traveling in those Pullman compartments was exciting! I wrote a master’s thesis on East Coast railroads while in graduate school. And I’ve been fortunate to live in places with passenger trains, mostly in the Northeast but also when we lived in Europe in the 1980s. I love passenger trains and I’m happy to see that they’re making a comeback in Florida.

The dramatic story of the Florida East Coast Railway has been told many, many times and is easily available, especially in Palm Beach. So I’ll just give a brief chronology of it and then, of more interest to me, anyway, talk about the social and economic conditions that presaged it and kept it going for so long.

The story of Henry M. Flagler, the railway’s founder, is astonishing: From 1885 to 1913, Flagler built an empire in Florida of cross-promotional railroads, hotels, resorts  and steamship lines (with close connections to his trains). His vision led to the creation of many communities, and the great expansion of some already existing ones, such as Jacksonville, from northeast Florida all the way down  to Key West, most famously Palm Beach and Miami.  And his work led to a huge expansion of commerce in the state, most notably tourism and agriculture. No wonder you see his name everywhere: Consider Flagler College, Flagler County, Flagler Memorial Bridge, Flagler Beach, etc., etc.

There were other great Florida early developers, mostly notably Henry Plant on the state’s west coast, but Flagler was the most important.

Henry Morrison Flagler was a partner of John D. Rockefeller in the creation, in 1867, in Cleveland,  of Standard Oil, one of the greatest Gilded Age corporate behemoths. Of course, Flagler became very rich in the process. He also became very expert in railroad engineering and economics because Standard Oil  obviously had to ship its petroleum long distances. The oil was first used primarily for kerosene, followed by oil to run trains, among other things (!), gasoline and other petro products.\

In 1878 he traveled with his first wife, who, like many others in those pre-antibiotic days, had tuberculosis, to winter in Jacksonville. It was then that the potential of Florida, which at that time had a small population and not much of an economy, as a winter resort and  year-round agricultural area, started to jump out at him.

Then, after she died, in 1881, he married one of her caregivers, who, by the way, turned out to be crazy.

With this new spouse, he traveled  in 1882 to St. Augustine, which he found charming,  if a bit bedraggled, and lacking in good hotels and  easy and reliable transportation to get there. He saw the promise of Florida and was determined to achieve it. So he gradually withdrew from active management duties at Standard Oil to pursue his Florida interests.

In 1885, he began building the big Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine. To start to address the region’s transportation issues, he bought railways, most importantly the Jacksonville, St. Augustine & Halifax Railroad, and converted the latter to standard gauge from narrow gauge, which made it much more efficient. This railroad was  extended to the south and in 1895 was renamed the Florida East Coast Railway-Flagler System, which revolutionized life on the east coast of Florida.

Meanwhile, he was building up Saint Augustine as a major resort town,  including developing three more hotels, and he built more hotels southward toward Daytona, which he reached in 1889.

Then in 1892, he started extending his line much further south. He was encouraged in this effort by the State of Florida’s providing HUGE grants of land to encourage railroad expansion and other development. He took advantage of owning  land that had massive potential for developing  agricultural, timber, phosphate and other operations – much of the products of which ended up being shipped on his railroad. Pure synergy. Of course, much swamp-draining work was necessary in the process.

By 1894, his railroad reached West Palm Beach, from which he looked east to the big resort opportunities of Palm Beach island. So he built the first version of the Breakers there, as well as the Royal Poinciana.

In 1896 Flagler’s railroad reached  then-tiny Miami, which he proceeded to turn into a major winter resort and agricultural area, with big hotels.  A major incentive  for developing South Florida was that  two hard freezes that ravaged the citrus and vegetable  crops in most of Florida in the winter of 1894-95 did not affect the area south of Palm Beach. So not only did that make Miami more alluring for winter visitors than, say, Daytona, it promoted the agricultural development of South Florida.

Flagler relentlessly worked to create full-fledged towns  that would bring more people and commerce to his businesses. These people included farmers to grow and ship produce, most of it to the north, laborers to develop the area and staff for hotels and resorts. He built schools, brought in utilities, arranged for stores to be built,  created parks and even financed churches and cemeteries. It was a mix of enlightened self interest tinctured with philanthropy. Synergy, synergy, synergy!

Meanwhile, he had long been fascinated by the prospect of extending the Florida East Coast Railway to Key West. One of his hopes was that that little city, which for a time had been – bizarrely -- the biggest in Florida, could be turned into a major  international port, especially with the coming of the Panama Canal. It never happened, although Miami, which Flagler had a great role in developing, became a major international port. Flagler long saw South Florida as a key area for hemispheric trade, but Miami, not Key West, turned out to be the linchpin.

The first train on what was called the Key West Extension, ran in 1912. Flagler died the next year, with his dream fulfilled.=

The extension was one of the engineering marvels of the age but the great Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 did so much damage that it was abandoned. Now, of course, you can drive on the extension’s exact route.

In any event, the railway went on to prosper with a growing number of passengers, most of them drawn by the sun from the affluent but cold Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Upper Midwest states, and a hefty freight business, much of it to carry the stuff produced on land granted to the railroad by the state and then sold off for agriculture.

The railroad mostly prospered until the late ‘20s, when the crazily speculative Florida land boom burst; two hurricanes in South Florida didn’t help either. Florida’s railroads suffered mightily, and the Florida East Coast Railway went into bankruptcy protection in 1931. In any event,  freight and passenger operations continued, with, it should be said, long-haul trains from New York and the Midwest continuing to use its tracks.

But FEC passenger train service ended in 1968 after very nasty labor disputes. Still, the railway freight business continues and,  as I note below, there’s a new FEC passenger train connection.

Of course, the coming of America’s automobile culture and associated construction of many more and better better roads from the 1920s on, and especially the Interstate Highway System in the late ‘50s, took a big bite out of the Florida East Coast Railway. 

At the same time,  longer life expectancies, the expansion of the middle class, the introduction of Social Security payments and the decades in which corporate pensions (now disappearing except for upper management) were common helped drive a huge increase in people retiring in Florida. When will it end?

Let’s look at  some of the factors that enabled Flagler to build his railroad and associated developments in Florida, in addition to the state giving him lots of land for his railway and for associated development.

First was the great wealth he was able to accumulate as a result of the American industrial revolution, which gave him  piles of money to spend to build his Florida empire. Part of this technological and economic revolution was development of better  steel track and  the aforementioned standardized  railroad-track gauge. Coal-powered earth-moving equipment to drain swamps and build road beds were also essential, as was the revolutionary effect of the development of machine tools  in  – The first machine tools were invented.

A machine tool is a machine for handling or machining metal or other rigid materials, usually by cutting, boring, grinding, shearing, or other forms of deformation.

These included the screw cutting lathe, cylinder boring machine and the milling machine. Machine tools made the economical manufacture of precision metal parts possible, although it took several decades to develop effective techniques. Machine tools were obviously very important in train and track making, among other things.

Indeed, Flagler’s Florida empire wouldn’t have happened without what’s called the Second Industrial Revolution, also known as the Technological Revolution.

Advances in manufacturing and production technology enabled the widespread adoption of technological systems such as telegraph and railroad networks, gas and water supply, and sewage systems. The enormous expansion of rail and telegraph lines after 1870 allowed a vastly increased movement of people and ideas. Then came electrical power and telephones.

The Second Industrial Revolution was also, of course, accelerated by rapidly increasing use of oil, the source of Flagler’s wealth.

A synergy between iron and steel, railroads and coal  (and petroleum) developed at the beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution. Railroads allowed cheap transportation of materials and products, which in turn led to the production of cheap rails to build more railways. Railroads also benefited from cheap coal for their steam locomotives.  Virtuous circle!

Meanwhile, Flagler had learned before his Florida projects how to use the law for maximum benefit. He was an expert in partnership and incorporation laws and in using the U.S. Constitution’s new 14th Amendment, which affirmed equal protection of the laws to all persons, to protect businesses from many lawsuits and even criminal prosecutions. This was especially after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the 1886 that said that companies had legal protection as “persons’’—a still controversial ruling.=

Also  very helpful  to furtherance of his Florida projects was the discovery that mosquitoes spread such diseases as yellow fever and malaria as part of the development of germ theory. Draining swamps near Flagler’s developments and the use of such early pesticides as kerosene (made by Standard Oil!) made promoting Florida as a resort and retirement place easier. And that Florida is flat, while meaning that its wet subtropical climate would produce a lot of swampland, also  cut construction costs. Among other things, he didn’t need to build tunnels or do a lot of blasting.

As I implied above, improvements in train engineering and standardization (especially of track gauge) made passenger and freight trains much faster as well as more reliable and comfortable. This made growing and shipping produce, lumber, turpentine,  etc. ,to the north much more profitable. Mining and shipping phosphate, of which Florida had a lot as the pile of limestone that it is, was also developed into a major industry. Then there was the expansion of electricity, which enabled safe and bright lighting in buildings and railway cars as well as such  new luxuries as fans. Before air conditioning as we know it began on trains, in the 1930s, some passenger trains had primitive cooling systems involving having fans blow are over blocks of ice from New England.

And we shouldn’t underestimate the role of the development of luxurious Pullman sleeper cars and dining cars that were sometimes as good as fancy restaurants. While trains were getting faster, it still was a trip of two or three days from the Northeast and Midwest, and so comfort was important and the Gilded Age nouveau riche had the money to pay for it.

By the way, it’s hard to exaggerate the effect on residential and business development in Florida of modern air conditioning from the 1930s on. But at least electric fans were a start.  Anyway, obviously without air conditioning, Florida’s Congo-like summer climate would have kept many winter residents and businesses from becoming year-round ones.

Very important, of course, was the developing role of  new refrigeration technologies in preserving the vast amount of produce grown and shipped from Florida by train – a big business for Flagler.  At first ice blocks from northern lakes were used on the freight cars. Refrigerated railroad cars created a national industry in vegetables and fruit that could now be consumed far away. The sale of this stuff was a bonanza for  Flagler’s empire, which included vast acreages  of land that could sold off and  turned into large farms.

Flagler’s interest in developing  vast tracts   for agriculture on land that the state had given him along the route of his railroad was heightened by the development of improved fertilizers (much of which used Florida-mined phosphate!) and better equipment to cultivate and harvest  crops.

Fast trains were essential for meeting the burgeoning demand of the rich and middle class in the North for fresh vegetables and fruit in the winter – demand created in part by the arrival of modern advertising.

At the same time, improvements in paper making, presses  and inks made producing free-standing brochures and flyers, as well as ads in newspapers and magazines, touting the attractions of Florida that much easier.

Indeed, Flagler was a brilliant salesman. He took out ads in northern publications, and planted  news stories about the development of “America’s Riviera’’. And he bought or started newspapers in Florida to tout its wonders, as a vehicle for real estate  and travel ads and so on. He was one of the early geniuses in mass marketing to America’s rapidly expanding consumer society, in which people learned about, and wanted, a far wider variety of products and services than ever before.

The growing sophistication in the late 19th Century of modern building construction materials, for example, steel-reinforced concrete, also greatly aided Flagler’s construction projects, especially his resort hotels up and down Florida’s East Coast. Indeed, his Ponce De Leon Hotel in St. Augustine is said to have been the first large poured-concrete building project.

He had learned at Standard Oil the benefits of using state-of-the art equipment and building materials. While the initial cost was higher than using mediocre stuff, the longer-term benefits for efficiency and marketing made his emphasis on quality the right choice.

As I keep noting, the State of Florida gave Flagler’s vast acreages of undeveloped land (8,000 acres per mile of track south of Daytona) in return for extending his railroad, and the development that followed. The state gave other Florida railroads lots of land, too, but Flager proved to be the most adept at using it. His company then made piles of money from marketing this land for resorts, year-round residential communities, agribusiness and other lucrative businesses. Without these land grants his empire would have been much, much smaller. By the way, it could be said that Florida was the first place in the world where building resorts and  winter and retirement communities  became major industries.

And, dating back to his experience in the grain and then  oil business, Flagler was an expert in making secret deals. An example is his quiet purchase of land, using dummy companies, that he wanted to develop since the price would obviously go up a lot if owners knew someone as rich as Henry Flagler was interested in a tract. It reminds me of how Disney quietly bought up land for Walt Disney World, whose development and opening I covered back in the early ’70s. And Flagler was an expert in buying distressed enterprises – most notably northern Florida rail lines – at cheap prices and turning them around.

With the goal of transforming Florida’s east coast, Flagler would ride his own railroad in disguise in an effort to discover properties that could be developed into resorts and entire communities. The disguise obviously was to avoid tipping off landowners of his plan and thus drive up prices.

 And the coming of oil-fueled locomotives, to replace coal, after the turn of the 20th Century, made train travel cleaner and more efficient in getting people to and fro the Flagler empire.

Electricity and the rapid adoption of indoor plumbing made staying in  winter resort hotels much more alluring, and the faster trains from the 1880s on made it much faster to get there from, say New York. Flagler himself had a keen eye for the aesthetics of hotel and other buildings, inside and out, and of the high marketability of new creature comforts, including such recreational attractions as swimming pools, tennis courts and golf courses.

The Industrial Revolution was creating a class of rich folks who had the means to travel from (mostly) the Northeast and Upper Midwest to the resort hotels built and promoted by Henry Flagler and his Florida East Railway. Previously, most of them had mostly thought of going to luxurious SUMMER resorts relatively close to such wealth centers as New York, such as Newport.

But faster and more trains made it much easier than it had been to travel to Florida for its winter pleasures. The hotels promoted the Florida East Coast Railway and vice versa as Pullman sleeping cars, as well as dining cars, became more and more luxurious. And it became a status thing for your friends up north to know that you spent time in Flagler System hotels and perhaps later, with development of services and infrastructure spawned by the railroad, in your own capacious place in South Florida. Starting in the ‘20s, showing up back north with a tan became seen as a sign of status and wealth. (No one worried about skin cancer, sadly.)

And such increasingly popular sports associated with wealth as golf, tennis and yachting could, unlike in the North, be enjoyed in Florida in the winter – another promotional tool! Facilities for these sports were provided at the great resort hotels.

The Spanish-American War, in 1898, by bringing many troops from other parts of the country to Florida for the first time, further expanded national interest in the state.

Now to the labor  situation during Flagler’s empire building – a situation that was generally very favorable to a mogul like Flagler. For one thing, unions were weak in America then, and in some places, including Florida, virtually nonexistent, and, anyway, state and local governments usually sided with owners/managers, and not with average workers.

Indeed, there were dark sides to Flagler’s empire building. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, Flagler, like many industrialists, virtually all of whom were white, across the South, leased African American convict labor from the state. Convicts helped extend his Florida East Coast Railway (FECR) from West Palm Beach to Miami, cleared the land for his Royal Palm Hotel in Miami and graded the rail lines running from the mainland to his FECR extension across the Keys.

Industrialists like Flagler  also used another system of forced labor that mostly targeted African Americans: debt peonage. A federal statute outlawed peonage, but in practice, it overlapped with convict labor. Convicts held beyond their sentences became debt peons, forced to labor to pay off debt owed to their lessor-turned-employer. Escaped peons were often arrested for vagrancy and leased out as convicts.

Convict lease laws in almost every Southern state provided a means for authorities to arrest freed people for such pseudo-crimes as vagrancy, lease them to private companies and force their labor.

Convict leasing generated revenue and provided a tool to intimidate and control black citizens. For businesses, the state offered vulnerable laborers who could be brutalized at whim, with chains, hounds, whips, sweat boxes, stringing up  workers by the thumbs. Sanitary conditions were often terrible, and medical attention scant.

White immigrant workers, especially in the gigantic project to extend the Florida East Coast Railway to Key West, often also had it bad:

Flagler worked with Northern labor agencies to lure new immigrants to work on his railroad extension to Key West in often very dangerous conditions that included extreme heat and humidity and disease-carrying mosquitoes, not to mention hurricanes.

Workers were often refused passage off the Keys unless they worked off hefty transportation, boarding and commissary fees while men who had been promised positions as cooks, foremen or interpreters were compelled to work as laborers. Those who refused to work were sometimes denied food. Foremen often carried guns, and some sick laborers were beaten and threatened with death if they didn’t work.

Cheap labor indeed!

It’s hard to know how much Flagler knew of these conditions – obviously he knew something. In some ways, he was a kindly and  charitable character.

Flagler’s empire building was also aided by the climate of political corruption of the Gilded Age. He had the money to bribe  state  and local politicians to make it easier for him to do his projects. (He even apparently bribed the Florida Legislature and Governor to pass a law in 2001 that made incurable insanity grounds for divorce so he could divorce his insane second wife in order to marry his third wife.) 

First came the rich, but the Industrial Revolutions, mostly after the turn of the 20th Century, also created a middle class that, with careful saving, could afford to visit Florida. Few could afford to stay in Flagler’s grand hotels but could pay for the innumerable other accommodations (some built by Flagler) that sprang up to no small degree because of the creation of the Florida East Coast Railway. Many of these folks liked it so much they decided to move here. Sadly, many of them lost their shirts in the implosion of the Florida land boom in the late  ‘20s but the population kept growing….

Of course, the coming of America’s automobile culture and associated construction of many more and better roads from the 1920s on, and especially the Interstate Highway System, took a big bite out of the Florida East Coast Railway, as did the use of big trailer trucks to carry Florida products.

At the same time,  longer life expectancies, the expansion of the middle class, the introduction of Social Security payments and the decades in which corporate pensions (now disappearing except for upper management) were common helped drive a huge increase in people retiring in Florida. It’s hard to predict how long  might continue.

In any event, it’s nice to know that Brightline passenger trains were running on the Florida East Coast Railway before the pandemic shut it down.  It’s supposed to reopen in the fall.

This is good news for Florida. It needed a modern (for the time) rail system developed in the late 19th and early 20th Century because it was underdeveloped and poor. Now it needs one to reduce the choking car congestion that’s a result of the development jump-started by Henry M. Flagler.