For Sale —American Paradise (5 page)

That visiting tycoon was Henry Flagler. He was as much of a dreamer as any of the others who found their way to Florida in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. But unlike the others, Flagler had the means to reconfigure an entire state in the shape of his dreams. After Flagler was gone and new dreamers seeking overnight fortunes were pouring into the state at the peak of its wild, untamable land boom in 1925, W. L. George would note that Florida “is still conscious of Flagler, looks back to him much as Noah may have looked back to Adam.”

Flagler, the son of a poor Presbyterian minister, was an oddity among the great fortune-
gatherers of America's Gilded Age. He believed that great wealth could only be acquired by hard, even obsessive work and self-sacrifice, and he rejected taking money from enterprises he considered immoral.

Flagler's father earned $400 a year as a minister. When he was fourteen, Flagler decided it was time to strike out on his own to ease his father's financial burdens.

He set out on foot, carrying only a carpetbag for luggage. Eventually, he arrived in the small town of Republic, Ohio, about thirty miles southeast of Toledo. He had five cents in silver, four copper pennies, and a French five-franc coin.

He went to work in a country store for $5 a month plus board. “I worked hard and saved my money,” he said in a 1907 newspaper interview with journalist James B. Barrow of the
Norwalk
(Ohio)
Reflector
.

A few years later, Flagler took his meager savings to nearby Bellevue, Ohio, and went into the business of buying and selling grain. He met John D. Rockefeller, who sold grain on commission in Cleveland. Rockefeller became Flagler's agent for wheat sales.

Flagler also bought an interest in a distillery—a perfect place to sell his grain for a nice profit. But the son of the Presbyterian minister was uneasy about making money from whiskey, and he soon sold his interest.

Still, Flagler did quite well as a grain merchant and accumulated a small fortune of $50,000—more than $750,000 in twenty-first-century dollars. He decided to take his capital to Saginaw, Michigan, and go into the business of manufacturing salt.

It was one of the few bad decisions Flagler ever made. After three years, his $50,000 investment was gone and he owed another $50,000 in unpaid wages to his employees.

He borrowed money from in-laws—at 10 percent interest—to pay off his debts, and moved on to Cleveland to reenter the grain business.

By now, his old associate John D. Rockefeller was a partner in an oil refining business. Once again, Flagler borrowed money from an in-law and bought a partnership in the business in 1867. Three years later, they dissolved the partnership and organized the Standard Oil Company.

“We worked night and day, making good oil as cheaply as possible and selling it for all we could get,” Flagler said.

Standard Oil grew like a weed. Years later, Rockefeller said Flagler had been the brains behind the company's rapid and profitable growth.

Perhaps heeding the advice of a physician who believed in Florida's healing powers, Flagler took his wife, Ida Harkness Flagler, to St. Augustine in 1878, hoping to restore her failing health. The city's graceful antiquity charmed Flagler, and it was a visit he would remember.

Flagler remarried after Ida died in 1881. Remembering the charms of St. Augustine, Flagler took his new bride to the city for their honeymoon. But while the city impressed him, he was unimpressed by St. Augustine's hotels.

So, with the same inspiration that had enabled him to turn Standard Oil into a profit-spewing giant, Flagler hit upon an idea. If he liked St. Augustine, other visitors likely would as well. If he didn't think much of the hotels, neither would other well-heeled worldly travelers. So he'd build a hotel that would satisfy the discerning and expensive tastes of these visitors.

And he had another idea. He could build and own the means of transportation that could bring hundreds of those visitors to St. Augustine every day—the railroad.

This formula was one Flagler would repeat for two decades—extending his Florida East Coast Railway down the state's Atlantic coast, and building sumptuous hotels along the way. His first hotel, the sprawling, 544-room Ponce de León Hotel, opened in St. Augustine in 1885.

That same year, young Thomas Edison was attending the World Industrial and Cotton Centennial in New Orleans when he heard that bamboo grew to towering heights near Fort Myers on the Florida Gulf Coast. Since bamboo was used as the filament in his incandescent lightbulbs, he decided to go to Fort Myers to take a look.

Edison, thirty-eight years old and recently a widower, decided to build a winter home in Fort Myers. He would spend winters there for six decades, and his presence would help to transform Fort Myers from a rustic village where cattle roamed the unpaved streets into a bustling city.

By the last decade of the nineteenth century, more dreamers and schemers were finding their way to Florida. One of them was Cyrus Teed, a doctor, who claimed that he was visited by an angel in 1870 in his laboratory in Utica, New York.

Teed said that the angel—blonde, beautiful, and dressed in a gorgeous gold-and-purple gown—had explained to him that conventional science was wrong about the nature of the universe. The sun and the orbiting solar system didn't exist, she said. The Earth actually was hollow, and the universe existed inside it. The continents were on the inner walls of the hollow sphere, and the sun and heavens were suspended in the center of the sphere.

Teed, who started calling himself “Koresh,” thought such a revelation was worthy of a religious movement, but he had trouble attracting followers until 1886, when he spoke to the National Association for Mental Sciences in Chicago.
Koresh explained his theories, and his audience was amazed. They elected him president and gave him a free hand to reshape the organization as he wished. Soon it became the Koreshan Unity.

Koresh's followers eventually made him a wealthy man, but Chicago newspapers were skeptical of the self-
proclaimed religious leader, “whose brown, restless eyes glow and burn like live coals.” And Koresh was branded a home-wrecker and reportedly was nearly lynched by angry Chicago husbands whose wives had succumbed to his charismatic appeal and joined his group.

Teed started looking into Florida real estate, and, with winter approaching, he bought about three hundred acres near Fort Myers in November 1894. The seller was an immigrant farmer named Gustave Damkohler, who was dazzled by Teed's plans to build the utopian city of New Jerusalem, where, he predicted, ten million people of all races would live in harmony.

The winter of 1894–95 began as a typically mild Florida winter. But before it ended, bitterly cold weather would change the course of Florida's history.

On Christmas Day, the temperature climbed into the 80s in Orlando, the center of Florida's growing citrus industry. But the warm temperature would prove to be especially cruel for the state's orange and grapefruit trees.

A few days after Christmas, citrus growers gathered in Orlando's San Juan Hotel. On December 28, a cold front from the northwest pushed rain and plummeting temperatures into northern and central Florida. The following morning, the citrus growers awoke to a temperature of 24 degrees Fahrenheit in Orlando—stunning cold for Florida.

Had cooler temperatures prevailed in northern and central Florida earlier in December, the citrus trees would have started going dormant and thus been a little better prepared for the cold snap. Still, some oranges and grapefruit trees might have survived even the plunge into the mid-20s had the cold been brief. But the warm Christmas Day temperature followed by the sudden, brutal, and prolonged cold snap was the end of the citrus crop. Even the fruit that had been hanging on the trees at the time of the plunge in the temperature froze.

Panic spread through the San Juan Hotel. Around nine p.m. on the evening of December 29, a handsome, middle-aged man wearing a Stetson hat and a fashionable frock coat stepped out of the hotel to check the temperature. He looked at the thermometer and groaned aloud. Then he pulled out a pistol and put a bullet into his brain.

A few days into the New Year, temperatures warmed, and by late January the few trees that had somehow managed to survive the December freeze were recovering. But on February 7, 1895, an even colder icy blast dropped the temperature in northern and central Florida to 17 degrees. Manatees froze to death in the Sebastian River near Melbourne, and a bizarre icy appearance descended on the tropical landscape.

“It was a strange experience to walk over the frozen sand and see every little puddle covered with ice, on a trail overhung by the sub-tropical vegetation of a
Florida hammock with a north wind blowing in my face that chilled me to the bones,” Outram Bangs recalled in an article for
The American Naturalist
a few months later.

It would be years before the citrus crop recovered. And the twin freezes of December and February started a domino-like effect of failing businesses and then failing banks. Before the freezes, eight banks operated in Orlando and surrounding Orange County. Only one bank survived the economic chaos after the freeze.

While orange and grapefruit trees in Florida were being killed by icy weather, a vicious winter storm was forming off the Atlantic coast, and bitterly cold temperatures plunged much of the nation into a deep freeze. Dallas, Texas, reported a temperature of 0 degrees Fahrenheit on the morning of February 7, 1895, and towns in Colorado reported temperatures of 8 below. Railroad traffic was hopelessly snarled by ice and snow. In Memphis, a railroad flagman slipped on ice and fell in front of a moving train.

The storm slammed into New England with terrific force. It had been a long time since the old-
timers on Cape Cod had seen anything like the blizzard that walloped them with winds approaching hurricane strength on February 8, 1895.

But while the rest of the nation was shivering and cursing the cold, the temperature on Biscayne Bay near the tip of the Florida peninsula stayed above the freezing mark. Julia Tuttle, a shrewd local businesswoman and landowner who had been trying to persuade Henry Flagler to extend his railroad to Fort Dallas, decided to make one more try. Legend has it that she sent fresh flowers and orange blossoms to Flagler to impress upon him that while the rest of the nation was frozen, Fort Dallas and Biscayne Bay were untouched by the awful winter.

So as the nation dug itself out from the arctic blast of February 1895, two men made decisions that would have dramatic effects on Florida's future. In St. Augustine, Henry Flagler—with or without the orange blossoms from Tuttle—decided to extend his railroad to Fort Dallas. And in Massachusetts, Reverend Solomon Merrick, a Congregationalist minister who had ridden out the blizzard with his family on Cape Cod, decided he'd had enough of New England winters. He was going to move his family to a little settlement on the balmy shores of Biscayne Bay. His young son George would later figure prominently in Florida's development.

By April 1896, Flagler had extended his railroad to Fort Dallas. Along the way he'd built hotels in Jacksonville, Ormand Beach, and Palm Beach, as well as a second hotel in St. Augustine. He had also built a lavish mansion in Palm Beach for his third wife, Mary Lily Kenan Flagler.

Flagler also was working on a new hotel in the little settlement that had been named after the old Seminole Wars fort. The utilitarian military name had been changed to something more lyrical in July 1896. Taking its name from the river that flowed into Biscayne Bay, the settlement was now called Miami. And
in January 1897, the sumptuous hotel that inevitably followed Flagler's railroad opened—the Royal Palm Hotel. The yellow-and-white, six-
story hotel included
a swimming pool and docks for guests' yachts.

Flagler bought land from Julia Tuttle and the Brickell family, and he intended to build a city around his railroad. But before Tuttle sold the land to Flagler, she made him agree to an unusual clause she'd inserted into the deed to his new property. Before Flagler could resell the land, the prospective buyer had to agree not to buy, sell, or manufacture alcoholic beverages on the property. If a landowner violated this clause, the land immediately reverted to Flagler.

As soon as Miami was established, however, determined entrepreneurs set up saloons less than twenty feet from the new city limits. It was the beginning of a battle between “wets” and “drys” in the city that would continue for decades.

In the summer of 1896, as Miami started to transform itself from a drowsy, isolated tropical village, the United States was in the process of choosing its twenty-fifth president.

In Chicago, Democrats were divided about their nominee until a young Nebraska lawyer took the podium to address the crowd. When William Jennings Bryan, only thirty-six years old, finished, he had electrified the convention and galvanized the Democrats around his candidacy.

Bryan's oration became known as the “Cross of Gold” speech. It was an impassioned demand for fairness toward the common man, whose economic struggles were made immensely more difficult by the nation's adherence to the gold standard that was staunchly supported by the Republican Party.

Bryan wanted to make the United States into his vision of the Promised Land, where everyone, no matter how humble their circumstances, could enjoy a life of opportunity, comfort, and security. And when humble men united behind a just cause, they were invincible, he said.