Last Train to Paradise (16 page)

20

Wonder to Behold

On the afternoon of January 21, 1912, almost seven years after work on the Key West Extension had begun, the project’s equivalent to the driving of the “golden spike” took place. At Knight’s Key, nearly fifty miles north and east of Key West, a bridge foreman threw a switch that closed off access to the trestle curving from the main line toward the temporary docks. For the first time, traffic was open across the Seven Mile Bridge—at the time, the world’s longest continuous bridge—and from there, all the way to Key West. The process of rail building that had begun in 1892 was complete. There were now 366 miles of FEC track linking Jacksonville with Miami, and 156 more connecting Miami with Key West.

That same morning Henry Flagler, now eighty-two, left his home, Whitehall, in Palm Beach. He was frail and his sight was failing, but nothing was about to stop him. Not after spending $12 million on a series of hotels, $18 million on his land-based railroad, and another $20 million or more on his “railroad across the sea.” On this day he would board his private railroad car at the West Palm Beach station for a 220-mile trip that would culminate in Key West and punctuate the dream of a lifetime.

Typically, the journey was not without its overtones of threat. While all rails and bridges were at last in place, and hurricane season was well past, this project would not end without another obstacle arising: the FEC’s firemen had picked this time to go on strike. As a precaution against sabotage in the notoriously volatile arena of railway labor dealings, shotgun-toting security men were posted along every mile of the route.

Despite the company’s fears, the first leg of the journey went without incident, and Flagler spent the night in Miami, a stopover planned so that he could arrive in Key West early the following day, fresh and rested. The
Miami Herald
reported that the
Extension Special
left the city that morning under especially brilliant skies, as if ordered by the fates.

Attached to the engine were five cars of FEC officials and invited dignitaries, the last being Flagler’s own sleeper, Car 91, which he had used to travel the rails since having it built in 1886. Car 91 was a copper-roofed pleasure palace of a railroad car, containing a Victorian-styled, wood-paneled lounge, sleeping berths for visitors, and a private stateroom with bath for Flagler. There was a copper-lined shower, a dining area, and a small food preparation area with an icebox and a wood stove.

Among the various guests on board with Flagler on the morning of January 22 was Assistant Secretary of War Robert Shaw Oliver, the personal representative of President Taft, sharing a ride that was so sought after that it took a last-minute call from William Krome to Flagler direct to get himself on board.

Among the ten thousand or more assembled in Key West to greet Flagler were emissaries of President Gómez of Cuba and of the governments of Italy and Portugal, as well as numerous Central and South American countries. While the
Extension Special
had actually been preceded down the line on the previous day by a scout train sent to test the rails, no one mistook the significance of this morning’s ceremony.

“[T]he railroad magnate has extended his rod, the sea has been divided,” wrote a reporter for the
Key West Florida Sun.

In his volume
Key West: The Old and the New,
published the day of the ceremony, longtime proponent Jefferson Browne said, “Henry M. Flagler’s railroad . . . is man’s last word on that marvelous style of construction and will echo through the ages to come,” adding, “Everything that went into the construction of this work obeyed his will. . . . The Greeks before Troy suffered no greater hardships, no greater heroism.”

And at 10:34
A.M.,
Henry Morrison Flagler, his back bent with age and his dim eyes brimming with tears, stepped out onto Car 91’s observation platform to an ovation the likes of which he had never encountered. He had “ridden his own iron” to Key West at last.

The mayor of Key West welcomed him with a fulsome speech and, on behalf of the citizenry, more than half of whom were present, presented Flagler with a gold and silver commemorative plaque bearing his likeness. Another golden tablet came “To Uncle Henry” from the men who had labored on the project those seven long years.

A military band played, and a children’s chorus of one thousand voices sang patriotic songs in Flagler’s honor. A choked-up Flagler turned to Parrott and whispered, “I can hear the children, but I cannot see them.” Parrott, nearly overcome himself, simply gripped his old friend’s arm and squeezed.

When finally called upon to speak, Flagler managed to rally. “We have been trying to anchor Key West to the mainland,” he said, “. . . and anchor it we have done.”

Then, gazing out over the vast assembly, he uttered what for Flagler was an outright effusion: “I thank God that from the summit I can look back over the twenty-five or twenty-six years since I became interested in Florida with intense satisfaction at the results that have followed.”

No one will ever know just what thoughts ran through Flagler’s mind as he stood before the crowds that day, of course. So many years had passed between the undertaking of the project and its completion that some sense of anticlimax would have been inevitable. After all, he had known for months now that the final rails would one day be laid and that the project that so many had turned away from and others had derided would become a reality.

T
HE
E
IGHTH
W
ONDER OF THE
W
ORLD,
headlines now bannered, such epithets as “Flagler’s Folly” long forgotten. He had arrayed before him thousands of grateful citizens, along with a multitude of foreign dignitaries and government officials come to pay homage to what had been accomplished solely because of his vision and his unswerving devotion to that objective. Few people in history have accomplished so great a task or lived to experience such a moment as Flagler did.

The man he’d hired to bring his dreams to fruition had died on the job and hundreds of other men had lost their lives as well, and despite all bromides otherwise, some weight of their passing had to have rested upon Flagler’s shoulders. Storms weathered, court fights fought, political enemies bested, impossible engineering problems solved, good men buried, rails joined at last. So many currents, so many thoughts and notions to meld and comprehend, after eighty-two years of life.

There’s no way to fathom how much of this had passed through his mind that day, but on his way off the platform Flagler placed a hand on Parrott’s shoulder and whispered, “Now I can die happy. My dream is fulfilled.”

The celebration in Key West went on through the day and evening, and lasted for days. An elaborate series of events posted in the official souvenir program written by George M. Chapin for the company included aviation meets, boat tours of the island and the railroad facilities, yacht races, five nights of fireworks displays, and more. An opera company from Spain gave a series of performances, as did a circus—“Publillone’s Great”—brought over from Cuba. A carnival was set up on the terminal grounds, and even the U.S. Navy had assembled an honoring flotilla of warships in the nearby harbor.

Several other trains carrying fare-paying passengers followed the
Extension Special
into Key West that day, including one advertised as the “New York to Havana Special,” which, company literature boasted, constituted the longest sleeping-car passage in the eastern United States. Passengers on that train were escorted directly from the platform to the
Governor Cobb,
waiting at dockside, which sailed for Cuba that same afternoon.

At a ball that evening, Florida’s governor, Albert Gilchrist, lauded Flagler yet again, issuing a proclamation that stated, “The building of this great oversea railroad is of nationwide importance, second in importance only to the construction of the Panama Canal.” President William H. Taft sent along a personal note of congratulations. But by this time Flagler was exhausted from the round of appearances and activities. The next day he boarded Car 91 for a return to his home in Palm Beach.

Given a bit of time to reflect on the events of the past few days, Flagler sat down on January 27 to compose a letter to Joseph Parrott, one that gives some insight into his state of mind:

The last few days have been full of happiness to me, made so by the expression of appreciation of the people for the work I have done in Florida. A large part of this happiness is due to the gift of the employees of the Florida East Coast Railway. . . . I beg you will express to them my most sincere thanks. I greatly regret that I cannot do it to each one in person.

The work I have been doing for many years has been largely prompted by a desire to help my fellow-men, and I hope you will let every employee of the Company know that I thank him for the gift, the spirit that prompted it, and for the sentiment therein expressed.

It was as much as Flagler would say about his feelings, and whatever lay in his heart of hearts matters less today than the legacy of his works themselves. It is the lesson of all heroic tales, after all. Not the doer, but the deed. Not the man, but all mankind.

21

Failed

If Henry Flagler was in fact motivated by visions of profit in building the Key West Extension, and if in fact profit is to be the rule by which that mighty effort is measured, then those who scoffed and called the endeavor folly from the outset were eventually proven correct. It is true that the Key West Extension became an instant hit with passengers, but freight traffic, which has always been the backbone of the railroad business, never materialized to the degree that Flagler had predicted.

He had invested somewhere between $27 million and $30 million to lay its 156 miles of track, more than half again what it had cost to run the railroad 350 miles down the mainland coast of Florida, all the way from Jacksonville to Miami. And even mainland operations, which enjoyed relatively busy freight traffic, were limping along, losing as much as $400,000 a year.

Expectations of a flood of imported goods to be hauled up from the Caribbean and Central and South America did not materialize, for the simple reason that there was very little to import, aside from what was already making its way to the United States through existing channels. It was a realization similar to that made by U.S. entrepreneurs following the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Iron Curtain. Projections of a massive burgeoning of trade between the West and the Communist bloc came to little, for those newly opened nations were producing virtually nothing of interest to highly developed nations and lacked the capital to import Western goods or create the technical or industrial infrastructure required for capitalist enterprise. Even in this modern age, the effort to jump-start such reciprocity stumbles and wheezes along, well into its second decade.

In addition, while Parrott and Trumbo had managed to get in place a docking facility suitable for maintaining passenger trade between Key West and Havana, Flagler’s dreams of a giant deep-water port with twelve massive covered piers eight hundred feet long and two hundred feet wide would never come to fruition. Without major docking and freight transfer facilities, steamers, then and after the opening of the Panama Canal, continued northward to New Orleans, Tampa, Jacksonville, and elsewhere.

The company did its best to increase freight traffic, though, by building three huge ferries constructed especially to haul freight cars. These 360-foot ships—the
Henry M. Flagler,
the
Joseph R. Parrott,
and the
Estrada Palma
—were the largest train ferries in the world at that time, and were fitted with standard-gauge rails in their holds. The ferries could back directly to the docks, where fully loaded freight cars could be shunted directly on board, as many as thirty-five at a time. It was a practice that Flagler himself had visualized, ever since his discussions with Canadian railroad baron Sir William Van Horne. If Van Horne’s ferries could transport rail cars over 112 miles of rough seas on the Great Lakes, then, Flagler reasoned, he could surely do the same on the hundred-mile passage between Key West and Havana.

The principal cargo of the ships proved to be pineapples, most of them brought up from Cuba during the six- to eight-week season. Thirty-five hundred carloads of the fruit passed through Key West each year, and unemployed workers enjoyed a bonanza each “Pineapple Day” when a new shipment arrived. Cars coming across the straits from Cuba were always greatly overpacked to save space and shipping costs, and the relatively fragile fruit had to be sorted into new containers before being sent along to its ultimate destination.

Going in the other direction, the cargo often consisted of U.S.-bred hogs, their pork considered a great delicacy in Cuba. The aroma that wafted from the resultant stockyards on Trumbo Island lent an entirely new aspect to close-quarters life on Key West, with nearby residents able to reckon what kind of day it was going to be by the direction the breeze intended to take.

Passenger traffic was another matter altogether, with a direct link between New York and Havana as amazing and enticing to travelers then as the opening of the London-to-Paris “Chunnel” became nearly one hundred years later. Soon after the
Extension Special
rolled into Key West, regular service to Havana began. As a Havana newspaper reported, “This train carried the latest design all-steel Pullman drawing room and Standard sleeping cars, is electrically lighted and equipped with electrical fans throughout. There is no change of cars between Key West and the Pennsylvania Station in the very heart of New York City.”

The schedule boasted that passengers could leave Havana at 10:30
A.M.
daily, except Sundays, and arrive in New York at 7:55
P.M.
on the second evening following, though, owing to weather and other delays, it was a promise more often honored in the breach. The Key West–Miami run was listed as requiring only four and one-half hours, not much more than it takes to drive today, but locals who rode the route often reported the journey required the better part of six or seven hours.

One retired office engineer for the FEC divulged something of the truth of the railroad’s policy. “Whenever a train was twenty-four hours late, it was never admitted,” he told an interviewer. “The bulletin board would read ‘One Hour Late,’ failing to state it was one day
and
one hour late.”

But in the tropics, delays are relative. Vacation travelers from the frigid Northeast hardly minded a train puttering across a bridge at fifteen miles an hour if it meant they could stare down from their windows at schools of dolphin rolling alongside through the waves. And even the prospect of sitting before the gate of a closed bridge, waiting and watching as a line of glowering thunderheads swept across a white-capped channel, was not without its drama.

As a writer of the day enthused, passengers could “watch the stately procession of southbound ocean steamers which pass . . . in the great tide of traffic to the West Indies, and to Central American and South American ports. Nor is it at all fanciful to suppose that if he is wise enough to carry along a fishing line and bait, he may find sport from the car platform should the train happen to halt on the Long Key or Bahia Honda viaduct.”

To those who had basked in Flagler resorts in Ormond Beach, St. Augustine, Daytona Beach, Palm Beach, and Miami, a trip along the Key West Extension with a few nights’ stopover at Long Key, a few more in Key West, topped off with a foray to Havana, was an undertaking that could countenance the languid approach and the demands of life in the isolated Keys. The
Havana Special
indeed operated as an express all the way from New York City to Miami, but from there southward, all bets were off, with the trains making as many as forty-three stops on the way to Key West.

Once rail service was established, the U.S. Post Office discontinued the use of boats to carry mail to the Keys, and every station down the chain had its postal operations. Other shippers followed suit, with regular stops required to off-load hard-to-come-by staples to Conchs and hardy settlers along the line.

One family living on Big Torch Key, far down the chain, had a Model T Ford truck delivered to the station at Ramrod. There was no way to get the truck across the channel separating Ramrod from their homestead on Big Torch. They used it solely to pick up what could now become regular deliveries of that fabulous substance known as ice. The homesteaders would load the big blocks onto the truckbed, then drive it down a road they’d hacked through the wilderness to a dock they’d fashioned, then transfer the load to a skiff to transport it to their home. Such were the small miracles made possible by the railroad across the sea.

But the ice runs to Ramrod and the passenger traffic on the
Havana Special
were scarcely the stuff of which railroad profits were made. In fact, there is little evidence that the FEC system as a whole was making much money, from its rail lines, at least. Associated land development, hotel operations, newspapers, and other Flagler enterprises in Florida did well enough, but it was nothing to compare with what Standard Oil had produced.

One Flagler refrain—“Go to Key West—” was to be replaced by another: “I would have been a rich man if it hadn’t been for Florida.”

Meanwhile, Flagler continued to work, traveling from his Palm Beach home to spend the summer at Satan’s Toe, near Mamaroneck on Long Island Sound, from where, despite his various infirmities, he commuted regularly to company offices in Manhattan. If he was disappointed in the fiscal performance of the Key West Extension, he wasn’t saying so publicly. In the fall, he and Mary Lily traveled back to Palm Beach, and on January 2, 1913, Flagler celebrated his eighty-third birthday at Whitehall.

Normally, he and his wife would have moved up the coast to St. Augustine by late February, where they would stay until the warm weather encroached. In mid-May, it was their practice to board Car 91, or sometimes one of Flagler’s yachts, to travel back to Mamaroneck. But this year the Flaglers prolonged their stay at Whitehall, closing down most of the enormous house and sending the staff away.

According to an account rendered by David Chandler, one of Flagler’s biographers, on the morning of March 15, Flagler went to use a bathroom on the main floor of the house normally reserved for staff and guests. The door to the bathroom opened outward, giving access to a narrow threshold that stood at the top of a short flight of stairs leading down to the bathroom itself. In keeping with Flagler’s fondness for the latest in conveniences, the door had been fitted with a powerful pneumatic device that would pull the door firmly shut behind him.

No one knows exactly what happened, of course, but it is possible to speculate:

Flagler, alone in this part of the cavernous mansion, moves gingerly inside the doorway of the guest bathroom and pauses at the top of the stairs. Perhaps he fumbles for the light switch on the wall just inside the door and to his right. Perhaps he feels a moment’s light-headedness and intends to call for help.

But, whether he has turned for help or is simply poised there for a moment before descending, the powerful pneumatic device Flagler has installed does its appointed duty, a bit too swiftly and surely.

The door whisks shut. And in its path is a frail and fragile man of eighty-three.

Like a tidal surge blasting through a channel in the Upper Keys, the rush of the heavy door is an implacable force. Flagler finds himself thrown forward, his feet flying from the top of the staircase into the sudden void. And then there is only darkness.

Chandler attributes this theory to Charles Simmons, a former director of the Flagler Museum, located in the building that was once Flagler’s opulent Palm Beach home, Whitehall. But current museum curator Sandra Barghini watches the same door swing shut, propelled by its powerful pneumatic closer, and simply shrugs. “Doctors say most old people break their hips just by walking,” Barghini says. “And
then
they fall.”

Regardless of just how it happened, it was not until several hours later that one of the few remaining servants discovered Henry Flagler sprawled unconscious at the bottom of the stairs, his hip fractured, his body battered and bruised. An orthopedic surgeon who happened to be staying at the nearby Poinciana Hotel was summoned and Flagler was revived. He was removed to a makeshift hospital room arranged in the Nautilus, one of the hotel’s beachside cottages that Flagler often used. There he lingered for two months, immobilized in bed by heavy sandbags and disoriented by painkilling drugs. Though he rallied briefly at times, it became clear that Flagler would never leave his bed again.

On the morning of May 20, 1913, with Mary Lily at his bedside, Henry Morrison Flagler died. His body was taken to St. Augustine for burial, after a simple service conducted in the Memorial Presbyterian Church, which he had built. Flagler’s pallbearers included Joseph Parrott, William Krome, James Ingraham, and William Beardsley, all men who had been with him through the immense task of the Florida East Coast Railway to Key West.

Duly noted: John D. Rockefeller did not attend Flagler’s funeral. There is no record that any member of the far-flung empire of Standard Oil did so.