FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Like bones picked clean by carrion feeders, the skeleton stretches mile after mile southward through the Florida Keys, feet anchored in coral rock, empty arms raised high above the threatening seas, the Sun-Sentinel reports. Nearly 70 years after its destruction, remnants of this “Eighth Wonder of the World” are silhouetted still in the rising and setting sun, a rusting reminder of the birth and death of one man’s preposterous dream, the extension of the Florida East Coast Railway from Miami all the way to Key West.
Let others call oilman and railroad magnate Henry Morrison Flagler a robber baron. Writer Les Standiford prefers terms such as giant, inventor of Florida, visionary who fashioned the most fanciful notion into fateful reality.
“Compare him to the CEOs of Tyco and WorldCom and Enron. If he’s a robber baron, what do we call them? Sure, he tried to make a buck. But not by stealing from the shareholders. He built a state,” says
Standiford, leaning back in his chair in his office at Florida International University in North Miami.
“I’d trade you a dozen of the defrocked CEOs of today for one robber baron like Henry M. Flagler.”
Not that Standiford thinks the megamillionaire of the turn of the last century would have made an interesting companion on a lazy afternoon. His greatest challenge in writing Last Train to Paradise ($24, Crown) was trying to discern the inner stirrings of this very public man.
“I think if you met Flagler, you wouldn’t be too sure about him,” says Standiford. “He was not a conversationalist. His deeds spoke for him.”
And nothing spoke louder than the project called Flagler’s Folly, the railroad built across the ocean.
In Last Train, Standiford brings to life the man and his obsessive project, an unprecedented undertaking that took seven years and more than 100 lives and consumed anywhere from $27 million to $40 million or more. It’s a story of high drama filled with nature’s fury, and the resolve of one man to accomplish what others said could not be done.
Flagler was quite simply a visionary with ambitions larger than life. Partner of John D. Rockefeller in the legendary Standard Oil, the largest corporation in the world at the time, Flagler was a millionaire long before he fell in love with Florida. But once seduced by the shimmering waters and swaying palms, the hard-driving, sometimes ruthless son of a Presbyterian minister could not ignore the possibilities.
“Florida,” says Standiford, “reawakened the romance in him.” And stirred an unrelenting desire to build a string of glamorous cities along the state’s east coast, gems to be linked by Flagler’s iron rails.
As an extended nonfiction, Last Train marks a notable departure for Standiford, author of the popular John Deal mysteries.
In fiction, everything is invention, characters and situations are plucked from the imagination. But in nonfiction, the writer is stuck with the historic facts.
“Clearly, the story is laid out. But as I’ve often told my students,” says the director of FIU’s acclaimed creative writing program, “you can have a story shape given to you, but until you have a handle on the character and what makes that character go, you’re not ready.”
Man vs. hurricane
The idea for the book came up when Standiford’s agent, after a day trip to Key West, inquired about the puzzling structures he saw protruding from the island waters. Standiford explained those were the remnants of the overseas railroad. What happened, asked the agent. “Did it go broke?”
“Not exactly,” replied the author. “It was blown away in the worst hurricane ever to hit the United States.”
Sounded like a book, his agent said. One that Standiford should write.
“I’m a novelist,” declined Standiford. But the notion festered, and six months later, ignited by his preliminary research, Standiford wrote out a proposal.
What he had begun to grasp is the magnitude of Flagler’s audacious venture. “It was conceived at a time when nothing like it had ever been done.” In fact, nothing Flagler achieved in his lifetime, however remarkable, would compare to this singular accomplishment.
Standiford had no interest in a mere recounting of historical facts. However interested one might be in railroads or in Gilded Age characters, those aspects alone would never sustain Standiford’s passion through the months of writing.
Standiford knew he had a book he wanted to write when he realized the story lay in the tragic dimensions, in the juxtaposition of “the destruction of the railroad by the forces of nature against … the hubris of a human being who thought he could do the impossible.”
That realm of the impossible is, he reminds us, reserved for the gods. “Anytime you get a human being mucking around there the end is preordained.”
During his year and a half of research (a period in which he produced another Deal novel, Deal With the Dead), Standiford made several visits to Whitehall, Flagler’s Palm Beach home. Now the Henry Morrison Flagler Museum, it is a vivid testament still to Flagler’s grandiosity.
“If you could build a house like that,” says Standiford, “it would suggest to you that building an impossible bridge was just a slightly larger leap.”
Standiford was especially drawn to a small bathroom above a staircase where Flagler took a tumble in 1913, and shortly thereafter died. One theory suggests the pneumatically powered door on the room may have swept the frail 83-year-old Flagler off his feet and “into the sudden void.”
Intrigued by the room and the speculation, Standiford persuaded the curator “to go dig up the keys and unlock the door and leave me alone there.”
The door still has the same closure. “I let it swing shut behind me, and I tried to imagine how it must have been. It was one way of trying to bring him alive and make him real in my own mind.”
Flagler’s death came a little over a year after the completion of the Florida East Coast Railway extension to Key West, a venture begun when he was 75.
Some say the fervor to see his impossible dream realized is all that kept Flagler alive in his last years. In the end, the Key West extension drained more money out of Flagler’s pockets than did all his hotels or the hundreds of miles of tracks laid between Jacksonville and Miami.
Raked by storms
The way to really appreciate what Flagler achieved, says Standiford, is to drive down U.S. 1, drive the 156 miles from Miami to the Southernmost City, the most populous and prosperous city in the state when Flagler decided to link it to the mainland. Before there was an asphalt ribbon conveying visitors southward there was a rail line. Imagine the hardships — the heat, mosquitoes, lack of potable water and all the other hazards inherent in that trailblazing.
As many as 4,000 laborers at a time were engaged in the tedious work, often toiling around the clock for $1.50 a day.
Housing had to be established, first on boats and then land. Food, water, equipment, everything had to be shipped in.
“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.”
As if the often turbulent and deep waters were not enough to contend with, three times — in 1906, 1909 and 1910 — hurricanes tore away completed sections of the project.
Undeterred, Flagler and his crew pushed on until the final link was opened in January 1912, seven years after what some called “a crackpot notion on the face of it” began.
Travelers could now board a train in New York and wind up two to three days later (after crossing the Seven Mile Bridge, the world’s longest continuous bridge at the time) in Key West. From there some would continue on by steamer to Havana.
Despite the vitriolic critics and naysayers, Flagler had prevailed. The rail extension would hold for more than two decades, brought down finally by the Labor Day hurricane of 1935, a hurricane with winds well in excess of 200 miles an hour, one of only three recorded category 5 hurricanes in the United States. The winds were so strong it was impossible to stand or keep one’s footing. Survivors spoke of a phenomenon they called ground lightning. Generated, Standiford writes, “by the wind lifting millions of sand granules into the air, where their clashing created eerie static charges.”
More than 600 World War I veterans were on upper Matecumbe Key working on the Overseas Highway when warning came of the hurricane. Unlike the housing of the earlier FEC rail workers, the federally employed road crews were quartered primarily in tents and hastily assembled temporary structures.
Standiford thinks that had the workers been under the supervision of the far more experienced FEC officials rather than bureaucrats with the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, fewer lives would have been lost.
As it was, hundreds were impaled on wind-born lumber, drowned, decapitated, crushed or washed out to sea. Bernard Russell, a survivor interviewed by Standiford, told of losing 63 members of his family that night.
Standiford vividly re-creates the horror of the storm as well as the heroic but failed effort of an FEC engineer to rescue the doomed workers. When the wind stopped and the floodwaters receded, most of Flagler’s bridges still stood though the roadbeds were washed out.
Nevertheless, rail travel to Key West ended. The FEC, already financially hurting, went into receivership. Though always popular with the passengers, the line was never profitable. The trade Flagler envisioned, of goods funneling through the ports of Key West and onto rail cars to be carried northward, never materialized.
What the visionary was not wrong about, however, was the allure of Florida. We followed in Flagler’s slipstream.
“I came down on Spring Break from a snowy, blustery March in Ohio,” says Standiford. “I took a look around at the waving palm trees and, like Flagler, said a man would have to be a fool to live anywhere else.”
There are other similarities between the author and his subject. Both grew up in modest circumstances. “I think that gave me some inkling of where he was coming from.”
Like Flagler, Standiford feels he’s been able to do “exactly what I’ve wanted to do.”
And like Flagler, “I like to think I’m building things I can leave behind that will give pleasure, [in the form of] these books and, of course, my teaching.”
What Flagler did a century ago couldn’t and wouldn’t be attempted today.
“People would see in a trice the potential for ecological catastrophe,” says Standiford.
But even if that were not the case, “Dreaming up a railroad to Key West is the stuff of another era, and its undertaking is the work of another kind of man.”
That it ultimately proved to be the folly some claimed, matters not.
“All works of men eventually crumble and turn to dust,” notes Standiford. “That doesn’t mean the effort wasn’t worthwhile. It doesn’t mean we can’t be inspired by the work. … If no man attempted heroic actions, what kind of world would it be?”
Standiford thinks the American frontier “was closed down on the Florida Keys” when a man who should have been content to sit back and enjoy his incredible wealth instead attempted in the waning years of his life “one of the most daring engineering feats ever undertaken.”