Last Train to Paradise (11 page)

14

On Toward Key West

All the while that Flagler was laid low and the case against the FEC was wending its way through the federal court system, work had nonetheless gone forward down the Keys. Some sixteen miles of track already laid on Key Largo had been washed out by the hurricane of 1906 and had to be rebuilt. After that, Tavernier Creek, the channel between Key Largo and Plantation Key at MM 90, was spanned by a low-lying trestle about half a mile in length.

Plantation Key, referred to as “Long Island” by the original road builders, constituted another five-mile stretch of “web-footed” work for Meredith and his team: clearing the gnarly mangrove thickets and palmetto scrub; blasting in the shallow waters offshore for limestone fill to build up the roadbed; tamping, grading, and leveling; laying ties and rails; and filling the gaps with coarse riprap, followed every step of the way by the growling supply trains and the relentless clouds of mosquitoes that drank the blood of the workers as resolutely as the workers guzzled fresh water carted down in the huge cypress tanks.

After Plantation Key, and the building of another low-lying trestle to span Snake Creek, engineers had to contend with two tiny dots of land originally known as the Umbrella Keys. In his article describing the possibility of this route, Jefferson Browne had written, “Between some islands, short trestles will be necessary, but some of the passages could be filled with loose rock,” and a decade later, Meredith found himself doing that very thing.

Rather than bridge the narrow channel separating the Umbrellas, Meredith adopted Browne’s elegant if environmentally dubious suggestion. He simply increased the volume of quarrying and fill dredging, and thereby joined the two islands into one whole, which would eventually become known as Windley Key (MM 86). Because the Umbrellas’ formation offered a relatively thick layer of fossilized limestone and coral upthrust from the surrounding sea, and because there was no one around to protest, the tiny keys were quarried extensively for fill, both during the construction of the railroad and later, during work on the adjoining highway.

Any land in South Florida that rises high enough to escape regular dousing by salt water is likely to become a haven to hardwood outcroppings, and the Umbrellas were no exception. Work crews encountered dense stands of mahogany, torchwood, and ironwood (so hard that carpenters despaired of driving nails into its lumber) standing in their path, with their deep-burrowing roots and steely trunks providing yet another unforeseen challenge. The rare trees were felled and the dense wood used for fuel, but this was no logging operation. Whatever of the hardwood hammock wasn’t in the way survived for the most part, though quarrying the intricately patterned rock on Windley Key would never stop altogether.

Just south across another narrow channel from the newly formed Windley Key lay what the engineers and the surveyors referred to as Matecumbe, designating it as one fourteen-mile-long island, though a conservative estimate was that six of those miles consisted of marsh, creeks, and an open channel that separated what soon became known as Upper and Lower Matecumbe Keys. Though the work on the Matecumbes was difficult, it was essentially work of a familiar sort, no different from the chop, blast, and fill operations that had been in use all the way from Homestead south, and progress across the Matecumbes and its neighbor to the south, Long Key, was rapid.

While supplies to the southern camps, Long Key among them, were ferried in by barge and steamer, the FEC was using a pair of well-traveled 4-4-0 steam locomotives built in the 1880s to deliver supplies, equipment, and material, not to mention a fresh supply of labor, as the line moved steadily southward from Miami. A considerable amount of specialized equipment was built on site by FEC employees pulled from their normal postings: rolling camp cars with sleeping and dining facilities, machine-shop cars, portable blacksmith cars, and an oversized handcar dubbed “Bull Moose” by the workers.

When the barge-mounted excavators that Meredith had devised for working the shallows ran out of water to float upon, he had them lifted by crane aboard flatcars and hauled to the next workable spot. Because the roadbed at times traversed right-of-way that was some distance inland, a fair amount of temporary spur track was laid, often on wooden trestles that tacked out over the shallow reefs to where the limestone marl was being dredged from the sea bottom.

At one point Flagler’s general manager, Joseph Parrott, who served as staging master to Meredith and his corps of construction engineers, chartered every American steamship available for hire on the East Coast to haul hundreds of thousands of tons of coal, steel, lumber, machine tools, food, and medical supplies. The crushed rock needed to finish the roadbed filled some eighty steamer loads by itself.

The focal point of this stage of the work lay just south of the Matecumbes, on Long Key, where the first of the truly awe-inspiring bridges would have to be constructed, spanning an uninterrupted 2.68 miles of water before reaching a speck of land now known as Conch Key. Whereas all the bridges in the hundred miles or so of construction up to this point consisted principally of low-lying trestlework, this was the first undertaking that would tax the ingenuity of Meredith and his associates. Preparations for work on the Long Key Viaduct, as it was called, had been under way as early as 1906, but when the hurricane swept in, most of the preliminary work was washed away, and engineers had to begin again on what would be their most demanding task to date.

Long Key, the jumping-off point for the viaduct, was in many ways the perfect place to locate a staging area. At the south end of the island (MM 65.5) the choking mangroves recede, supplanted by natural sandy beaches, and the surrounding shallows extend seaward for a half a mile or more, offering striking views of an endless dappled turquoise and blue waterscape. Bathers, flats fishermen, and the just plain curious could walk through waters no more than knee-deep until they had scarcely any sight of land.

And it was here, nearly two-thirds of the way to his destination, that Flagler built a series of quaint, screened cottages for his white-collar workers, in an area that the writer Joy Williams would characterize as a virtual paradise: “Everywhere there is water, water that becomes sky, the shadows of rays like clouds moving across the blue. Water loves light. The light changes. Dawn and sunset break. Thunderclouds mass. The water is black, emerald, azure, sheer, and the vault of sky becomes the vault of water. Flocks of egrets fly bone-white across that impossible interstice . . . lovely litanies of colors and creatures, fishes and birds.”

Priscilla Coe Pyfrom, whose father, Clarence Coe, served as one of Flagler’s chief bridge engineers, described some of the professionals who came to live in the area camps and work with her father on the project: “Civil engineers started out at $125 per month . . . with room and board and, if needed, free medical attention. At that time they were glad to get a job. . . . Many of these fresh-faced young engineers had college debts to pay off.” And many were more than happy to avail themselves of home-cooked meals and hospitality from Coe’s wife, who assumed the role of mother-in-absentia, often cooking dinners and hosting weekend gatherings to bolster the spirits of those hardworking young men so far from home.

“It was still, with all its inconveniences, a wonderful life,” Priscilla Coe recalled. “We were given almost perfect conditions to grow up in: a mother at home to take care of our daily needs, a father who, though not rich, always had a job he adored doing with an income above average. . . . [W]e spent winters in Florida and summers on an Iowa farm. Who could ask for anything more?”

15

The Signature Bridge

One of those who asked for “more,” of course, was Henry Flagler. By this point in time, he had narrowed the focus of his project upon the completion of the first of the great bridges that would have to cross a truly formidable body of water on the way to Key West.

In Flagler’s eyes, the Long Key Viaduct was the essential link that would culminate the first phase of his “impossible” project. Once the viaduct was finished, it would connect with sixteen miles of track that had already been laid on Grassy Key, the next in the southwestward chain below Long Key, where yet another in a series of unforeseen developments had forced Flagler to announce a temporary terminus for the project.

One of Flagler’s key assumptions to the financial success of the Key West Extension had always been the establishment of a deep-water port in the southernmost city, one which could accommodate the vast amount of oceangoing steamship traffic on its way to and from the proposed Panama Canal. But Flagler’s plans were dealt a formidable blow in 1908 when the U.S. Navy refused to grant permission to dredge the waters of Key West Harbor to build up the huge dock area.

Though Flagler suspected that the influence of his old nemesis Roosevelt was responsible for the setback, his response was typically pragmatic. He dispatched a team of engineers to study the waters south of Knight’s Key, off Key Vaca, ostensibly to see whether or not his deep-water port might be relocated, possibly replacing Key West as the railway’s ultimate destination. It was news that both stunned and delighted Middle Keys residents, whose dreams of supplanting Key West as the most influential city in all of Florida were suddenly given life.

Meanwhile, Meredith, Coe, and others were hard at work on forging this last link between Knight’s Key and the nearly one hundred miles of track that snaked its way down the archipelago to languish just to the north. Renderings for the new bridge, with its more than 180 steel-reinforced concrete arches rising thirty-five feet above the water, resembled nothing so much as a great Roman aqueduct marching across the sea. The bridge was so striking in appearance that Flagler would come to call it his favorite of all those built on the line.

Spokesmen for the company were fond of quoting the statistics derived from the building of the viaduct: 286,000 barrels of cement were required for the arches and the pilings, much of it a special underwater-hardening type that would have to be imported from Germany. There were 177,000 cubic yards of crushed rock hauled down, some of it to be used to fill the inner chambers of the arches and create the actual railroad bed, the rest to be blended with the cement and 106,000 cubic yards of sand (enough to cover all of Miami’s famed South Beach) to make concrete. There would be 612,000 feet of pilings sunk to create the underpinnings of the span, over 5,000 tons of steel reinforcing rod laced through the superstructure of the arches, and more than 2,500,000 feet of timbers used to build the massive forms.

Yet the numbers, great as they are, give little sense of the difficulty that was involved in building that great chain of archways. “It is perfectly simple,” Flagler’s brave words surely echoed in the minds of the builders as they struggled. “All you have to do is build one concrete arch, and then another. . . .”

These arches were being built, however, not on dry land, but in the middle of an ocean that varied in depth anywhere from ten to thirty feet. For every one of those more than 180 arches, each spanning a distance of over fifty feet, a flotilla of barges and work boats had to be moved into place, whereupon the intricate process would begin.

William Mayo Venable, FEC division engineer, was the first to detail the nature of the work in a 1907 article for
Engineering Record,
a process that was later amplified upon by Dan Gallagher in a 1995 pamphlet, “Pigeon Key and the Seven Mile Bridge,” describing similar work farther down the line.

First, pilings had to be driven through sand and bottom muck into the bedrock to serve eventually as anchors for the arches themselves and to prevent side-to-side movement of the supports that might be occasioned by tidal surges. Sometimes a piling would reach bedrock quickly. Other times it would mean hours of deafening, precarious work, exacerbated by storms and squalls; currents that were always shifting the barges, tilting the heavy, steam-driven equipment out of place; and all the other surprises that nature seemed fond of springing in a place where such work had never before been undertaken.

At times, a piling being driven just a few feet away from one that had been stabilized would sink and sink into a sea bottom that suddenly seemed as porous as quicksand. Exasperated engineers could either keep on pounding, hoping to strike rock before reaching China, or simply give up, move their rigs a bit to one side or the other, and hope that this time they wouldn’t hit another hidden pocket.

After the pilings were finally secured, a rectangular wooden form or cofferdam was constructed about the cluster of pilings, the top of the form poking a few feet above the surface of the water, its base secured in the sea bottom and shored up by submerged sandbags piled around its perimeter. Once this preliminary form was secured in place, a layer of the special underwater cement (used because Venable and others feared that American cement might not resist the action of seawater; the reports of various cement tests take up several shelves in the Flagler museum holdings) was poured into its bottom, surrounding the pilings and forming a watertight seal two to five feet thick, depending on the size of the pier, and resting directly upon the ocean floor.

After the seal had been allowed to set for two or three days, water and debris would then be sucked out of the form by large, barge-mounted pumps, and leaks in the form patched, so that workers could build a second, more refined form inside the first. This form within a form would receive the latticelike network of reinforcement steel woven around and about the pilings and then the whole would be filled with concrete, to form a pedestal of sorts, its top projecting ten feet or so out of the water, and studded with a veritable hydra-head of steel reinforcement rod ends left waving in the air, to eventually tie into the last piece of the process.

In the final step, and after a week or so of hardening, a pair of these pedestals would be joined by yet another form, one built on land and transported to the site by barge, and this in the shape of an arch. Once the arch form had been set in place, more concrete would be poured atop it. The result was one gracefully curved, fifty-five-foot link in what would eventually become a breathtaking chain of arches across the sea.

However, because there was always the possibility that the contraction of the drying concrete span might place some stress on the piers at either end, the builders would skip over the next link in line, “hopscotching” their way along, joining one pair of piers with an arch, then leaving a gap, then joining the next pair of piers, and so on. From a distance it might have looked as if a series of giant croquet wickets had been plunked down in the ocean at regular intervals.

Once the alternating series of links had completely cured, the builders would go back and fill in the remaining gaps in the chain, thereby ensuring that the structure could not twist or weaken itself as it dried, and avoiding any interwoven stresses that could weaken the entire chain.

After all the arch-bottoms had been poured, wooden side-forms would be added along the chain, and the final pouring of concrete could be undertaken. That last step created the sides and top of the arch itself, and formed the actual base upon which ties and track would be laid. Once the final pour of concrete had hardened, the sides and the arch-bottoms, or “arch-rings,” as they were called, could be removed and used again.

It was tedious work that often went on around the clock, with generators and steam engines grinding incessantly, and involving an entire corps of divers outfitted in primitive Jules Verne equipment, fumbling about in murky and turbulent waters shot through with tricky currents that, despite Jefferson Browne’s observation—“the water in which the trestling would be built would be no rougher than that of any of our larger rivers”—could pull a man and his hundred pounds of weights out to sea in the blink of an eye.

As many as eight hundred men were working on the Long Key Viaduct at one time, according to Venable, most of them housed in the Long Key Camp, which was beginning to resemble a city in its own right. There was even a bakery on the premises, Venable noted, churning out one thousand loaves a day to feed the hungry workers.

Despite the daunting nature of the work, by January of 1908, less than a year and a half after construction had resumed in the hurricane’s aftermath, the Long Key Viaduct was completed. Flagler was delighted with the bridge’s miragelike appearance, but he had also realized that there was no way to appreciate its beauty and singular aspect as a passenger on the train itself.

As a result, Flagler had a photographer set up equipment on a barge out to sea, then had one of the first trains to cross the span halted midway across so that a series of dramatic photographs could be taken—proof positive, in his estimation, that the impossible had become reality. “This viaduct alone,” went the caption to one company rendering of the day, “is a monument to a whole lifetime of constructive skill and enterprise.”

It wasn’t long before a likeness of a smoke-belching train atop an aqueduct that spanned an ocean would become the enduring trademark of the entire Florida East Coast Railway system. To this day, the dramatic icon pops up throughout the Keys, festooning local businesses and working its way into the work of folk artists and painters inspired by the romance of the Keys.

“The track is thirty-one feet above high water,” enthused a travel writer who accompanied one of the first groups to make the crossing, “so that passengers in the railway trains may sit in the windows of Pullman cars in serenity and have an opportunity of seeing how the Atlantic Ocean looks in a gale.” Later, in a letter to his friend Hemingway, John Dos Passos would call the trip a “dream journey.”

Shortly after the viaduct was completed, Flagler had his palm-studded work camp on Long Key converted to a fishing camp, and built a terminal at which guests could depart the main line and ride a half-mile, narrow-gauge spur through a tunnel beneath the tracks and out to those inviting accommodations on the sandy beaches. He also had a proper hotel constructed directly on the water, and the compound would eventually become a world-renowned destination for the more sports-minded of the affluent set drawn to the Flagler resorts.

In time, Zane Grey would take up a recurring part-time residency at the Long Key Fishing Camp, working on his popular Westerns on a schedule he described as “an hour of writing in the morning, followed up by ten of fishing.” Grey’s enthusiasm and versatility as a sportsman remains legendary in the Keys. He is generally given credit for popularizing the practice of angling for sailfish on light tackle, and was one of the first championship fishermen to advocate the practice of releasing his trophy catches.

The completion of the Long Key Viaduct marked a significant milestone for Flagler. It meant that passengers could board a train at the Miami station and travel all the way to Knight’s Key (MM 47), for 106 of the 153 miles between that point and the proposed destination of Key West. Or they might board one of the FEC’s Pullman cars in Jacksonville and ride in comfort down 477 miles of Florida coastline. Even though much of the hardest work remained unfinished on the railroad across the sea, enough had been accomplished that it seemed Flagler’s “one arch after another” theory was not as outlandish as it originally seemed.

In February of 1908, regular passenger service between Miami and Knight’s Key began, though before he could institute it Flagler had to contend with a demon from his past. The timetable issued by the railroad for the new service enumerated stops at stations at Long Key, Grassy Key, Key Vaca, and Long Key Dock. But for years the train made an additional stop on Key Vaca that was never listed in the timetable.

A group of Conch settlers whose holdings blocked the extension of Flagler’s right-of-way down the narrow island had banded together, though in this case their object was not to drive up the price of the land that Flagler hoped to cross; they simply wanted their own stop along the new line. After protracted debate, Flagler gave in, perhaps moved by the fact that for once it wasn’t greed that was getting in the way of his railroad’s march. In any case, a deal was struck, and once a week, or whenever the Conchs hung out a signal flag, the trains of the FEC would grind to a halt at the unlisted station of Vaca.

It might have been an annoyance for the great man, but Flagler was always one to keep his sights on the larger picture. After considering his engineer’s surveys of the nearby reefs, he’d gone ahead with the dredging of a nineteen-foot-deep channel dug to allow better oceangoing access to Key Vaca and Knight’s Key, and instituted regular steamship service by the Peninsular and Occidental to meet the trains. Passengers could debark and go on to Key West by steamer, or take advantage of direct steamer passage to Havana, just 115 miles to the south.

Before long, through service was established between New York City and Knight’s Key, Florida. Mondays through Saturdays, frigid Northern passengers could board the
New York and Florida Special
at 2:10
P.M.
of a murky and snowbound Manhattan afternoon. At 7:30
A.M.
on the third day following, they could wake up in a berth of a Pullman car and raise a shade to look out the window at a stretch of blue ocean framed by glittering skies and waving palms, a steamship awaiting at a nearby dock. Six hours later the most adventuresome of those passengers could find themselves steaming beneath the lowering aspect of Morro Castle into breathtaking Havana harbor.

As had been the case wherever Flagler’s line had reached a terminus, however temporary, a veritable building frenzy began. Two work camps had been erected during the rush to finish Long Key Viaduct, along with engineering offices, a camp hospital, machine shops, a locomotive repair facility, executives’ cottages, recreational facilities, and a power plant.