Henry Flagler's retirement plan: develop Florida's east coast

Would Miami be as exotic if it had been named Flagler?

It’s hard to say, but the reality is, in the late 19th century, south Floridians nearly named their port city for the railroad magnate who made easy access there possible.

“He was offered to have Miami named after him. He didn’t want that,” said Edwin L. Lamont, docent for the Henry Morrison Flagler Museum in Palm Beach. “It was for two reasons. One, he truly was a humble man. I think the other reason is, this was the time of the yellow press, and to have your name on things like that, it was just more opportunity for the yellow press to take a shot at you.”

Flagler, who is considered one of Florida’s greatest pioneers, knew a lot about the press.

He was one of the founders of Standard Oil in the 1860s — along with John D. Rockefeller — and the company was certainly one of the most controversial and prosperous to have ever existed. Think of it as the amazon.com of the 19th century.

However, Flagler’s road to incomprehensible wealth with Standard Oil, and eventually his railroad and hotel empire in Florida, was not an easy one.

Born on Jan. 2, 1830, in Hopewell, New York, Flagler left home at age 14 to work with his half-brother in Ohio.

“He headed west to work in Western Ohio near Sandusky and worked with some distant relatives,” Lamont said. “That was his start in business. He was a clerk at a trading post.”

It was here he met his future wife, Mary Harkness.

In 1862, he and brother-in-law Barney York founded Flagler and York Salt Company in Saginaw, Michigan. This failed, largely due to the Civil War.

“The good news was the war ended,” Lamont said. “The bad news was, salt prices collapsed and at age 35 Mr. Flagler was bankrupt.”

He returned with his wife to her family in Ohio in 1866, where he reentered the grain business as a commission merchant with Harkness Grain Company.

The following year, thanks to a loan from his stepbrother, Flagler was able to partner with Rockefeller in an oil refinery business that eventually grew to become Standard Oil Corporation.

“It was small, but they were the largest in Cleveland,” Lamont said. “What happens next is they start acquiring other oil refineries. And this is the part of this that was somewhat controversial. They were brutal in their actions. If you were running an oil refining company that maybe wasn’t very profitable or didn’t have good assets they would buy you at literally dimes on the dollar. If you had one that had good managerial talent, had good assets, they’d pay proper value for you.”

By 1872, it was the leader in the U.S. oil refining business, producing more than 10,000 barrels per day.

“They were refining up to 70 to 90 percent of the oil in the 1870s, 80s and 90s,” Lamont said.

This made Flagler and Rockefeller immensely wealthy.

In 1877 Flagler and his family moved from Ohio to New York City. However, not long after, his wife became ill. It is believed she had tuberculosis based on her respiratory issues.

In 1879, Flagler decided to bring his ailing wife to Jacksonville because it was believed the Florida weather was helpful for consumptives.

“She did better here but it wasn’t a cure,” Lamont said. “He would have to return to New York for business. She would not stay here without him. Because of that she never made a second trip down here. She would pass away in 1881, never really recovering from the consumption she had.”

The following year, Flagler stepped back to take a secondary role in Standard Oil, but served as a vice president through 1908 and was part of ownership until 1911.

In 1883, Flagler married the woman who had been his wife’s caregiver, Ida Shourds, and they honeymooned in St. Augustine.

Flagler liked Florida, but he wasn’t impressed with Jacksonville’s or St. Augustine’s hotels or transportation systems.

“He decided he would make it more of a place that people of his caliber might come and visit,” Lamont said. “He saw there was great promise in Florida.”

Flagler built two hotels in St. Augustine starting in 1885 — the Ponce de Leon and the Alcazar.

His next task was tackling Florida’s poor transportation system.

“They said if you came by rail or you came by boat you wish you would have come the other way,” Lamont said.

Part of the reason why it was hard to get to Florida was because of a lack of ports and the different gages of railroad track.

In Florida at that time there was some railroad tracks that had been built around St. Augustine, and out toward Tampa, but it was a smaller gage than the national gage.

One of the things Flagler did was standardize the gage to a national one, making it easy to come from New York all the way to St. Augustine without having to switch trains.

Flagler continued to work his way south, building hotels along the way. He also built ports.

“His transportation systems included steam ships, opening up Havana, opening up Key West, opening up Nassau in the Bahamas,” Lamont said. “Mr. Flagler had two hotels in Nassau, and one of them is still there – the Colonial Hilton.”

Flagler’s first big obstacle was building a railroad bridge across the St. Johns River to gain access to the southern half of the state. As he worked his way down, he purchased the Hotel Ormond, just north of Daytona.

It was a feat of engineering to cut through the wilderness and marsh from St. Augustine to Palm Beach.

In 1894 he reached — and founded — Palm Beach and West Palm Beach. Here he built the Royal Poinciana Hotel and the Palm Beach Inn, later renamed the Breakers.

“He thought he was going to stop there, but he was challenged by a lady named Julia Tuttle,” Lamont said.

Tuttle was an old acquaintance of Rockefeller, and Flagler once worked for her father-in-law in Ohio.

Tuttle had purchased hundreds of acres of south Florida land in the late 1800s, and she wanted Flagler to bring his rail down to the city known as Fort Dallas along the banks of the Miami River that numbered less than 5,000 people at the time.

Flagler repeatedly refused her requests — until the Florida freezes of 1894 and 1895. The freezes destroyed the citrus crops, including on many of Flagler’s citrus farms in the east central Florida region, but the one place that didn’t freeze was Fort Dallas.

All of a sudden, Flagler was interested in negotiating with Tuttle.

“She would lose half her property, but she was a shrewd negotiator,” Lamont said. “Half her property meant that, think of a chess board, with the red and black squares, she got the red, he got the black. So if he built a road, developed a utility, did anything, he had to develop her property, too. So she actually made a pretty good deal.”

Tuttle has become known as the “Mother of Miami” for convincing Flagler to bring his railroad there, thus making it accessible, which led to rapid growth.

When the city was incorporated in 1896, the citizens offered to name it "Flagler," but he declined, persuading them to use an old Indian name, "Mayaimi."

And thus, the area that was called Fort Dallas became known as Miami.

In 1897, Flagler opened the Royal Palm Hotel on the north bank of the Miami River.

On Aug. 24, 1901, just 10 days after a messy divorce from his second wife was finalized, Flagler married a third wife named Mary Lily Kenan.

The couple soon moved into their new Palm Beach estate, known as Whitehall, a 75-room home.

Completed in 1902 as a wedding present to Mary Lily, Whitehall, which today is the Henry Flagler Museum, is a 60,000-square-foot winter retreat built along the prestigious Cocoanut Row.

“Henry Flagler and Mary Lily would come down to Palm Beach seasonally. They really established the Palm Beach season,” said Lauren Perry, Public Affairs director at the Flagler Museum. “They were only really here just after the Christmas holiday and they would stay through Washington’s birthday. So a couple of months out of the year taking advantage of the weather. Henry Flagler would use it as a place to entertain guests, business associates. He did keep an office in the house so he was able to work and oversee his businesses as he was down here.”

Flagler was cajoled one last time to continue on with his railroad, this time to Key West, which at the time was the most populous city in the state at roughly 20,000 people.

It was 128 miles away.

“Theodore Roosevelt had made a plan to finally get a Panama Canal built, so Mr. Flagler saw Key West as being the place closest to the Panama Canal’s Caribbean entrance and saw that from a revenue standpoint,” Lamont said. “So that was part of the reason. Plus, he was challenged. Flagler liked to build things. His idea of retiring was to go build something and he was challenged to do that by a state senator out of Key West, so he decided to take the plunge.”

In 1905, Flagler took on perhaps his greatest challenge. He had to build dozens of bridges. He had to complete dredging projects. He experimented in cements that would be water resistant.

The Florida Overseas Railroad was completed to Key West in 1912.

“Mr. Flagler said that was the most important event of his life,” Lamont said. “It was on the 22nd of January, 1912, Mr. Flagler arrived in his railroad car, and he would be greeted by approximately 10,000 people. He gave a speech to those 10,000 folks there.”

When the speech was done, he reportedly turned to one of the people in his group and said, “I can die happy at this point. My life is complete.”

The opulent No. 91 railcar on which he often rode can be walked through as part of a tour at the Flagler Museum.

Flagler died a little more than a year after reaching Key West, on May 20, 1913, at age 83 from injuries suffered falling down a flight of marble stairs.

During the previous 30 years, he had invested about $50 million in railroad, home and hotel construction in Florida, which would translate to roughly $1.5 billion in today’s dollars.

Flagler, who had built Memorial Presbyterian Church in St. Augustine to honor his first daughter who died giving birth to the first Flagler grandbaby, is entombed there, with his first wife Mary Harkness Flagler, their daughter Jenny Louise, and their granddaughter Marjorie.

“I believe he had more influence on this state than any other man had on this state,” Lamont said. “He is the father of modern Florida in my mind.”

Walters can be reached at twalters@floridatoday.com