Last Train to Paradise (12 page)

The burgeoning steamship service required docks, a ferry terminal, a customs office, a post office, and a floating hotel to accommodate passengers during the inevitable layovers occasioned by schedule delays and heavy weather. One worker housed in Camp No. 10 on Key Vaca was overheard to say, “Building this railroad has become a regular marathon.” The remark struck a chord in his fellow workers, who dubbed their camp “Marathon,” the name by which the nearby town, the second-largest in the Keys, is known today.

These were heady times in the Middle Keys, to be sure, but it was also a time of great uncertainty for Lower Keys and Key West residents, as well as for those who wondered if Flagler would finally give up on his impossible task and be content to stick with the docks near Marathon as his terminus.

In a
New York Times
interview, Joseph Parrott made emphatic denials that the company was abandoning its plans to reach Key West. In that interview he also forcefully denied wild rumors that project manager Joseph Meredith had been fired and that a notorious swindler—former Army captain Oberlin M. Carter, who had embezzled millions from the Savannah Harbor Works project—had been hired to take his place.

Parrott’s assurances that the company was simply gathering steam for a final push did not convince everyone, however. W
ILL
F
LAGLER
Q
UIT?
went the headline of one local editorial, and residents south and west of Knight’s Key debated long and hard whether Flagler, his flag firmly planted in the Keys now, his steamers sailing proudly on to Cuba, would be fool enough to tackle the next insurmountable obstacle in his way: seven miles of open water that separated the railway’s present terminus and the next thing resembling dry land in the chain.

16

Seven Miles of Hell

As usual, those who doubted Henry Flagler’s resolve were bound to be disappointed. His legal troubles had been a significant distraction (his legal fees alone were estimated at more than eighty thousand dollars), his health had not been good, and even Meredith’s key assistant, William Krome, had begged off the project for a time, citing his own exhaustion. But the downtime following the completion of the Long Key Viaduct allowed Flagler an opportunity not only to rest and deal with the bothersome ancillary matters, but also to stabilize passenger operations on the completed leg of the Extension, and to undertake another massive staging operation for what would be the most exhausting portion of the entire project.

Following the court’s dismissal of the Department of Justice charges in November of 1908, Flagler ordered supplies to be stockpiled on the Lower Keys and his crews back to work at full speed, with their sights set on the most mighty task to date: the Seven Mile Bridge.

When word reached Key West that work was under way again, the response was giddy. “Key West looks northward to the fast approaching bands of steel which will bind her to the mainland and dreams of the not far distant day when she shall be a large and bustling and important city, the metropolis of the Southern Seas,” gushed an eager correspondent for the hometown
Key West Citizen.

And if Flagler was not quite so fulsome, he had plenty to be pleased with in early 1909. Work on the Long Key Fishing Camp had been completed, and guests were already clamoring to register before its scheduled opening in early January. Work on the first bridge pier south of Knight’s Key was completed in February, and his vice president and confidant, William H. Beardsley, informed him in early April that actual costs of construction for the first quarter were running less than half of what project supervisor Meredith had estimated.

But yet again, and just as matters were finally looking up, tragedy stuck. The slightly built Meredith, as it turns out, was diabetic, a condition he had revealed to no one. With his frail constitution taxed from the outset by the rigor of the project and the demands of the climate, he had finally begun to weaken early in 1909, the end result of four years of grueling work beneath the tropical sun.

While Meredith had not complained, Flagler had noted that his project manager was not operating with his normal vigor, and sensed that something was wrong. For weeks he had been urging Meredith to go north for a rest, and had even coaxed William Krome back to work on the project to fill in while Meredith took some time off. Though others on the job site understood that Meredith had been feeling rocky from time to time, no one was prepared for what was to happen.

On the fourteenth of April, Flagler had paid Meredith a visit in Marathon, where they discussed the progress of the work. In his diary, Flagler noted that Meredith was looking better than he had in a while, and supposed that his supervisor was on the mend. When Flagler left to return to St. Augustine, Meredith went to Key West on business, but hardly had he arrived than he was taken ill. When fellow workers realized just how weak and disoriented he was, a doctor was summoned, who ordered Meredith taken immediately back to Marathon, where he could be transferred to the company’s hospital in Miami by train.

By the time he arrived in Marathon, however, Meredith was too weak to be moved, and it was decided that he be taken on to Miami by boat. It was Tuesday morning before the ship carrying Meredith arrived in Miami, and by then he had slipped into what doctors discovered was a diabetic coma. He died early that same afternoon, on April 20, 1909.

It was a blow that struck at the morale of the entire workforce and echoed all the way to Flagler’s offices in St. Augustine. For more than four years, ever since Flagler had uttered the fateful order “Go to Key West,” Meredith had been the human engine who drove the otherworldly effort.

In a ceremony worthy of a war hero, Meredith was laid to rest in a Miami cemetery, and Flagler would keep a news clipping concerning his project supervisor’s death in his effects until the day he himself died. During the services, all Florida East Coast Railway operations, including rail traffic, were halted for five minutes. His gravestone was decorated with a bronze plaque with wording approved by Flagler:

In memory of Joseph Carroll Meredith, Chief Engineer in the construction of the Key West Extension of the Florida East Coast Railway, who died at his post of duty, April 20, 1909. This memorial is erected by the railway company in appreciation of his skill, fidelity, and devotion in this last and greatest work of his life.

At that moment, with his chief engineer gone, Flagler could easily have been forgiven for accepting the advice of the naysayers. What lay ahead, said one writer, was more than daunting: “So far as can be seen, it is a matter of launching a railroad straight at the blank horizon of the Atlantic.” Perhaps Flagler himself wavered: should he cut his losses, retreat to Knight’s Key, and base his operations there?

But retreat—or surrender—was not in Henry Flagler’s nature. He turned to Meredith’s second-in-command, William J. Krome, the strapping young civil engineer who had led the ill-fated mapping expeditions through the wilds near Cape Sable; without hesitation, Flagler offered him the project manager’s job. Krome, who had returned to work only two weeks before, accepted on the spot.

Though Krome was only thirty-two, he had been well seasoned, working alongside Meredith every step of the way. “Mr. Krome is a very efficient man,” Flagler wrote to a friend on April 22, “and we have no anxieties about his being able to prosecute the work successfully.”

Even if Flagler was as confident as he sounded, however, common sense would have dictated that Krome, a graduate of the University of Illinois and Cornell and a member of the respected Society of American Engineers, would have his own private reservations. The “work” most immediately at hand involved the building of a bridge more than 35,000 feet long, or nearly four times the length of the daunting Long Key Viaduct. With the necessary approach work figured in, the span was almost nine miles long from tip to tip. Nothing remotely like it had ever been attempted before, and Krome would have been a fool not to consider the myriad possibilities for disaster that lay in his path.

One of the first difficult decisions that Krome had to make was whether or not to continue work on the bridge and the remaining track down the Lower Keys through the upcoming hurricane season. Prudence suggested he send his crews home once summer came and take up the work again late in the year, once the neighboring seas had cooled and the engine fueling storm development had essentially been shut down.

But with Flagler now seventy-nine, and rumors of his precarious health still circulating, Krome worried that his chief might not live to see the project finished. Whether it was simply devotion to the cause and to his employer, or whether Krome might also have doubted that the project would continue with Flagler out of the picture, is difficult to say. In any case, Krome finally made his announcement: despite the risks, the project would continue through the summer and fall.

In a letter to Flagler, Krome let his apprehensions be known, but also laid out his contingency plans, in case the worst should come to be:

No man has ever passed through one of the West Indian hurricanes and boasted that he had no fear of it. Indeed, lack of fear is dangerous. The responsibility resting upon the engineers for the safety of the men and for the preservation of equipment is heavy. There is no harbor along the entire line of the grade that is safe from hurricane. We must be ready for it when it comes; we must have the workmen well in hand to prevent panic. We must have done all we could to save our machinery and camp outfit. We have found it more economical to sink our floating equipment in the most protected waters and raise it and repair it when the storm has passed.

Flagler took Krome’s warnings to heart. Telegraph wires were strung from Miami “down the grade” to the work camps so that timely weather bulletins could be relayed to supervisors. Men were no longer housed—even temporarily—in the precarious floating dormitories, but in sturdily constructed barracks on shore. Women and dependents were required to leave the keys sites by August. An evacuation plan was established, with rescue trains ready to be mobilized at a moment’s notice throughout hurricane season.

And meanwhile the arduous work continued, exacerbated by the draining heat of summer and the unrelenting swarms of mosquitoes. While preliminary groundwork on the approaches to the Seven Mile Bridge had gotten under way as early as 1906, the building of the span itself had been postponed while engineers studied how best to go about it.

With Meredith gone, the task fell to Krome and his cadre of engineers, chief among them C. S. Coe, who had recently been promoted to Division Engineer. Coe, a Minnesota native and graduate of the University of Minnesota, had worked as a railroad construction engineer specializing in bridges for eighteen years when Flagler tapped him to join the Extension project. In his time with the FEC, Coe had performed the yeoman’s work demanded of everyone on the project, including oversight on the building of bridges over Jewfish Creek, Tavernier Creek, Snake Creek, and the broad channel connecting Lower Matecumbe Key and Long Key. But it was his work on the Long Key Viaduct that focused full attention on his abilities.

Coe had been assigned responsibility for the survey of the waters in the Knight’s Key Harbor, where the temporary terminus and steamship docking facilities were constructed, and he was in charge of building the extension and four thousand feet of complicated trestlework that curved out from the main line so that rail passengers could be delivered directly to the dockside. He had also been put in charge of the design and construction of one of Flagler’s pet projects, the Long Key Fishing Camp. When the time came to tackle the mammoth Seven Mile Bridge project, Coe was Krome’s choice to oversee the task.

After considerable study and survey work, Coe and Krome determined that varying water depths and other factors dictated that the massive bridge would actually be built in four rather distinct sections, and in two completely different styles. The first section, the Knight’s Key Trestle, would link the tip of Knight’s Key with Pigeon Key, a dot of land about a mile offshore, where an auxiliary work camp could be established and staging undertaken for the next link in the crossing. A short second section, referred to as the Pigeon Key Trestle, would be built over the shallows west of Pigeon Key to join with the fourteen-thousand-foot main segment, the Moser Channel Bridge, which would include a 253-foot section that could be swung aside to allow the passage of tall ship traffic between the Atlantic Ocean and the waters of Florida Bay. The final two-mile section of the span, designated as the Pacet Channel Viaduct, would reconnect with land on Little Duck Key, at MM 40.

This multistaged design meant that the bridge would first curve a bit to the north instead of marching straight across the void, thereby missing some of the deepest water separating Knight’s Key and Little Duck. Interestingly, it was a strategy that had been suggested by Jefferson Browne in his 1894 essay.

The first three segments were to be constructed of steel deck girders laid atop a series of 546 concrete support piers, while the Pacet Channel segment, crossing waters that were barely deep enough for barges to float, was to be built in the spandrel arch style—210 of them—similar to those of the Long Key Viaduct.

The first step in the actual construction was for surveyors to complete the painstaking task of determining the locations of the piers and arch supports, another job complicated by the fact that all this work was taking place at sea. Since surveyors’ transits could not be used to sight levels on bobbing boats, platform after platform had to be built at five-hundred-foot intervals across the seven miles of ocean, each of them firmly anchored in bedrock. The platforms themselves had to be located out of the way, about two hundred feet south and east of the line the actual construction would take.

When the surveyors had completed their calculations and triangulated the necessary positions, they used flag and hand signals to direct workers in the precise placement of the initial piling for each of the 746 bridge supports. Once the initial pilings for each support had been set and their alignment checked (a tall wooden tower was constructed on Pigeon Key for this purpose), the other pilings could be plotted and driven down to bedrock.

All of the heavy construction equipment used at the time was powered by steam engines, which, in comparison to still-to-be-developed diesel, electrical, and hydraulic tools, were massive, noisy, and notoriously undependable. The image of a vintage steam locomotive thundering down a mountain pass, belching clouds of black smoke in its wake, might be a romantic vision in the modern mind, compared to the passage of a diesel or electrically powered engine, but imagine having to work on a yawing, heaving, pile-driving barge from dawn till dusk, never more than a few feet away from one of those roaring, foul-smelling behemoths.

Such engines also consumed great quantities of coal and fresh water, all of which had to be transported over great distances to the work site, along with most of the rest of the materials used in the construction. Each one of the bridge piers required enough sand, gravel, cement, lumber, and steel to fill a single five-masted schooner.

Most of the cement used for construction above the tide line was of domestic origin, much of it from New York. The cement used for submarine applications was brought from Alsace. Steel girders and track segments were fabricated in Pittsburgh, pine lumber came from Georgia and Florida, hardwoods from sources in the Midwest. Even the rock and sand used to mix concrete was imported from elsewhere because of concerns that the salt content of the local deposits would cause corrosion of the reinforcement rods.

And yet the very size and scope of such a task produces its own inescapable inertia: As any child knows, once the lumbering engine is set in motion, “I think I can” soon becomes “I know I can,” and Flagler’s crews were soon working at a record pace.