CHAPTER TWO
THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO, FRIGHTENED PEOPLE SPENT MANY WINTER NIGHTS shivering and staring fearfully into the cold darkness beyond the fires at the entrances of dank, smoky caves that were their homes. Surely, they thought, there must be a place somewhere beyond the firelight where life is easier—a warm, idyllic place of lush year-round vegetation, where food is abundant and clothing is optional, where they wouldn’t have to spend all of their waking hours just trying to keep their bellies filled and worrying about when they would die.
And so in some way approximating this, the human dream of finding a paradise was formed. That dream became as essential to human existence as air and water: Life shouldn’t be this hard; there must be a better place somewhere, and one day I’ll find it.
The vision of paradise in this life or beyond eventually became enshrined in the world’s major religions. Its usual depiction was a lush garden where there was no toil, no struggle, no death, and no worry, only perpetual peace and contentment.
As civilizations developed, the longing for a paradise spanned eras and cultures. The immortal Greek warrior Alexander the Great is said to have sought the gates of Paradise in the fourth century BC. Medieval European Christians longed to find the legendary kingdom of Prester John, said to contain a fountain whose waters made people young again.
Tales of a fountain in a land somewhere to the north whose waters restored youth circulated among pre-Columbian residents of Cuba, Mexico, and Central America. Adventurers determined to find this wondrous fountain set out in small canoes. When they didn’t return, the friends they’d left behind assumed they’d found the fountain and did not want to leave the land of eternal youth.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Renaissance explorers crossed unknown seas and traveled thousands of miles from the comfort and familiarity of their homes because they thought they would find a place where living was easier.
Juan Ponce de León went in search of such a place in 1513. He’d lost a political power struggle to a well-connected rival and had been unseated as the Spanish governor of Puerto Rico, so he set out with three ships and a band of conquistadores to find a better place.
In early April 1513, Ponce de León landed in a lush, subtropical world. It’s doubtful that he was the first explorer to set foot in this land, but he claimed naming rights for Spain. It was the Easter season, called Pascua Florida, or “Festival of Flowers” by the Spanish. So to honor the season, Ponce de León named his landing place La Florida—Place of Flowers. The explorer is thought to have landed near present-day Cape Canaveral, where, more than four centuries later, a new breed of explorers would ride fireballs into the heavens.
Ponce de León went ashore for a few days; then, thinking that La Florida was an island, he sailed southward, intending to circumnavigate it.
For about two months, Ponce de León’s ships hugged the coast of the peninsula. Legend has it that along the way he sailed into the mouth of the present-day St. Lucie River, about one hundred miles south of Cape Canaveral in present-day Martin County. He is said to have dropped a stone cross into the St. Lucie to claim the area for Spain.
Ponce de León’s name is inextricably linked with his alleged search for a mystical fountain whose waters would restore youth to anyone who drank from it. But historians generally think that, like most Europeans who came to the New World four hundred or five hundred years ago, he was more interested in finding gold, slaves, and converts to Christianity.
Ponce de León and his three ships continued their explorations in the waters around Florida into the summer of 1513. Then, leaving one ship to continue exploring, Ponce de León returned to Puerto Rico.
He led another expedition to Florida in 1521, this time intent on establishing a Spanish colony. Ponce de León and about two hundred would-be colonists landed on the southwest coast of Florida, probably near present-day Charlotte Harbor. The Calusa Indians, however, wanted nothing to do with European settlers. They attacked the Spaniards and drove them off. Ponce de León received a nasty wound to the thigh from an arrow that may have been dipped in poison.
The conquistador and his ships left Florida and sailed for Havana. But Ponce de León’s wound would not heal. Eventually infection set in. There was nothing Spanish doctors could do, and he died soon after arriving in Havana.
Juan Ponce de León would not be the last person to come to Florida seeking a better life and be bitterly disappointed.
In the summer of 1559, Spain sent another expedition to Florida, this time under the conquistador Tristán de Luna y Arellano, who led a company of men intent on planting a colony at what is now Pensacola, at the western tip of the Florida Panhandle. But it was a rough summer on the Gulf of Mexico. On September 19, 1559, a powerful hurricane swept in from the Gulf and devastated the settlement.
The colonists hung on for a while after the hurricane, but when a Spanish ship arrived a year later and offered passage to Cuba to anyone who wanted to leave, most of the colonists left. The Spanish government soon abandoned the colony.
A hurricane would deposit more visitors on a Florida beach in 1696. Jonathan Dickinson had been a planter in Jamaica until he converted to the Religious Society of Friends, better known as Quakers.
Dickinson and his family left Jamaica in August 1696. Accompanying him were Robert Barrow, an elderly leader of the Friends, and Dickinson’s slaves. They sailed on the Reformation for Philadelphia to join William Penn’s experiment in religious freedom in the colony of Pennsylvania.
On the night of September 23, 1696, a hurricane tossed the Reformation aground on what is now Jupiter Island, in present-day Martin County.
About two dozen castaways, including Dickinson’s party and the crew of the Reformation, were shipwrecked in a strange and savage land. Their impression of Florida was quite different from that of Juan Ponce de León’s Place of Flowers.
Dickinson later wrote that “the wilderness country looked very dismal, having no trees, but only sand hills covered with shrubbery palmetto, the stalks of which were prickly, there was no walking among them.”
The nearest outpost of European civilization was the Spanish settlement at St. Augustine, about 250 miles up the coast. Today the trip from Jupiter Island to St. Augustine can be driven in about four hours. In 1696, it was weeks away on foot.
Nevertheless, Dickinson and his party trudged northward up the beach. Along the way they were alternately helped and harassed by Indians. They were terrified when they saw the tracks of large animals in the sand. Aggressive, stinging insects constantly buzzed around them.
“We had little comfort,” Dickinson wryly noted later.
Despite the fears and discomforts and the deaths of two members of their party along the way, Dickinson and his group maintained a resolute faith that God would see them safely through their perilous journey. Six weeks later they tramped wearily into St. Augustine. In April 1697, they finally reached Philadelphia.
In the early nineteenth century, Dr. Jacob Motte, a US Army surgeon, was another reluctant visitor to Florida. The United States had acquired La Florida from Spain in 1821, and it became the US Territory of Florida.
The Seminole Indians caused problems with American efforts to settle Florida, and the US government wanted to kick them out of their home. In 1832, Seminole chiefs signed an agreement to leave Florida and move west, but a few Seminole leaders refused to comply with the treaty and disappeared into the trackless Everglades.
Motte, who was Harvard-educated and accustomed to the comforts and refinements of civilization, accompanied US Army troops sent to Florida in 1837 to drive out the stubborn Seminoles. He later wrote about his experience in Journey into Wilderness, in which he articulately explained his fascination and disgust with the strange land of Florida.
Florida, Motte wrote, “is certainly the poorest country that ever two people quarreled for.” The climate was impossibly uncomfortable, too warm even in winter and impossibly hot in the summer.
It was “a most hideous region,” and the only creatures who could live in such a setting were Indians, alligators, snakes, and “every other kind of loathsome reptile.”
Common sense seemed to dictate that the Seminoles should keep Florida, Motte said.
But at times, Motte, the weary, miserable soldier far removed from his customary comforts, was dazzled by Florida’s wild tropical beauty.
In late January 1838, Motte’s unit moved from Fort Pierce a few miles down the coast to the headwaters of the St. Lucie River in present-day Martin County. The landscape enchanted him, and he wrote about it in gushing prose. Instead of a nasty swamp fit only for Seminoles and snakes, Motte saw “picturesque clumps of cypress trees and willows, ornamentally clothed with long hanging moss, gracefully and fantastically disposed in festoons, forming fairy-looking islets reposing in verdant loveliness on the bosom of the water.”
Instead of a lair for loathsome reptiles, it was the habitat “for the genii of those unearthly regions, which come nearest the description of that fabulous place, that we read of, which was neither land, water, nor air,” Motte wrote.
The deeper the soldiers went into the wilderness, the more rhapsodic Motte’s descriptions became. “Nothing, however, can be imagined more lovely and picturesque than the thousand little isolated spots, scattered in all directions over the surface of this immense sheet of water, which seemed like a placid inland sea shining under a bright sun,” he wrote. “Every possible variety of shape, colour, contour, and size were exhibited in the arrangement of the trees and moss upon these islets, which, reflected from the limpid and sunny depths of the transparent water overshadowed by them, brought home to the imagination all the enchanting visions of Oriental description.”
Motte “felt the most intense admiration, and gazed with a mingled emotion of delight and awe” at the ethereal landscape.
Florida became the twenty-seventh state in March 1845. It is a quirky state geographically, simultaneously the southernmost continental state and yet, in some ways, it was only marginally a part of the antebellum Old South that bordered it to the north. It is the only state that both touches the Atlantic Ocean and sprawls across two time zones. Its easternmost city, Palm Beach, overlooks the Atlantic, but if you head due north from Florida’s westernmost city, Pensacola, you will eventually arrive in Chicago. It’s a 540-mile trip down the state’s eastern coastline from Fernandina Beach near the Georgia border to Key West, only ninety miles from Havana, Cuba.
Only a few white settlers lived between Tampa and Key West before the Civil War. But Fort Dallas, an outpost of the US military from the Seminole Wars, which were fought sporadically between 1816 and 1858, remained as a settlement near the shores of the Biscayne Bay after the struggle ended. The Everglades covered most of southern Florida, and the Glades were inhabited by the handful of Seminoles who had eluded US troops sent to subdue them or drive them out.
The Civil War could easily have started in Florida several months before Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, in April 1861.
By 1860, the long-simmering dispute about the extension of slavery into US territories had become unresolvable. South Carolina furiously severed its political connection with the United States government on December 20, 1860.
Mississippi left the Union on January 9, 1861, and Florida seceded on January 10. That same day, Lieutenant Adam Slemmer, in charge of US forces in Pensacola, moved his federal troops into Fort Pickens on Santa Rosa Island, a barrier island just offshore from the city.
Colonel William Chase, a West Point–educated army engineer who had decided to cast his lot with the Confederacy, led troops to Fort Pickens and demanded that Slemmer surrender. Slemmer refused, and Chase contemplated storming the fort, an act that surely would have sparked war. But he decided against it, and Fort Pickens became one of the few US forts in the Confederacy to remain in Union hands for the entire war.
After the Civil War ended in 1865, the reunited nation—or at least the victors—got down to the serious business of becoming wealthy. Ulysses S. Grant, the former Union general who finally figured out a way to beat Confederate general Robert E. Lee, was elected president in 1868—although Texas, Mississippi, and Virginia had not been readmitted to the Union and did not vote in that presidential election.
Author Oliver Carlson noted that President Grant “ushered in that hustling period of the 1870s, when the dominant dream of America was to get rich.”
The Reconstruction era gave rise to “new Americans” who were “primitive” and “ruthless” souls who didn’t trouble themselves with scruples. They were “a race of buccaneers,” Carlson said.
While the Old South languished in poverty, mythologized its bloodily defeated “Lost Cause,” and endured military occupation by US troops, men such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Flagler, and “a tribe of other swindlers and railroad wreckers, rascals one and all,” amassed huge fortunes in the final decades of the nineteenth century.
“But to the man in the street, these were heroes to be cheered for their audacity,” Carlson wrote. “Those who grumbled at their ways were told, ‘You’d do the same thing if you only had the chance.’”
In 1867, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act over the veto of President Andrew Johnson, and the former Confederate States were occupied by Union troops and placed under military rule. That same year, author Harriet Beecher Stowe—whose book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, supposedly was cited by President Abraham Lincoln as the cause of the Civil War—bought property on the St. Johns River near Jacksonville and built a winter home there. Her twofold purpose was to build a school for African Americans and allow her son to take advantage of the Florida climate to recover from severe wounds he’d suffered as a Union soldier during the war.
Stowe also wrote a book about Florida called Palmetto-Leaves. She echoed Jacob Motte’s rhapsodic description of Florida. “No dreamland on earth can be more unearthly in its beauty and glory than the St. Johns in April,” she wrote.
But she also was aware of Florida’s faults, comparing its climate to “an easy, demoralized, indulgent old grandmother, who has no particular time for anything, and does everything when she happens to feel like it.”
Stowe cautioned newcomers to Florida. “Don’t hope for too much,” she warned, and don’t expect “an eternal summer.”
“For ourselves,” she wrote, “we are getting reconciled to a sort of tumble-down, wild, picknicky kind of life—this general happy-go-luckiness which Florida inculcates.”
If Florida was a woman, Stowe wrote, she would be what today would be called a “hot mess”—a brunette, dark and attractive, with beautiful skin and “a general disarray and dazzle, and with a sort of jolly untidiness, free, easy, and joyous.”
Florida tourism got another boost in 1869 when Dr. Daniel G. Brinton, who had served as a surgeon in the Union Army of the Potomac during the Civil War, wrote A Guide-Book of Florida and the South for Tourists, Invalids and Emigrants. Brinton praised Florida’s winter climate, saying it was “in some respects unsurpassed by any portion of the United States.”
He was effusive in his praise of Fort Dallas and Biscayne Bay.
“Undoubtedly the finest winter climate in the United States,” Brinton wrote, “both in point of temperature and health, is to be found on the south-eastern coast of Florida. It is earnestly to be hoped, for the sake of invalids, that accommodations along the shore of Key Biscayne and the mouth of the Miami [River], will, before long, be provided, and that a weekly or semi-weekly steamer be run from Key West thither.”
He backed up his praise of the healthful winters with a quote from Dr. R. F. Simpson, an army surgeon who had served at most of the antebellum military bases in Florida. Simpson said Biscayne Bay “has a climate, in every respect, perhaps, unsurpassed by any in the world.”
In 1873, another New England Yankee came to Florida and was enthralled. Massachusetts-born author and journalist Edward King took an extended tour of the old Confederacy and wrote a series of stories about each Southern state for Scribner’s Magazine. The stories later were collected into a book, The Great South: A Record of Journeys, published in 1875.
In his essay about Florida, King praised the climate and tropical beauty of “our new winter paradise.”
“In the winter months, soft breezes come caressingly; the whole peninsula is carpeted with blossoms, and the birds sing sweetly in the untrodden thickets,” he wrote. “It has the charm of wildness, of mystery; it is untamed; civilization has not stained it.”
In the eight years since the Civil War had ended, King noted, Florida had become a haven for winter-weary Northerners and those suffering from tuberculosis and other debilitating diseases.
King noted that Florida’s Silver Spring, south of Gainesville, was attracting fifty thousand tourists a year in the early 1870s. And he was charmed by Palatka, a “cheery, neat” town on the St. Johns River south of Gainesville and about thirty miles inland from St. Augustine.
King drew a languid, lyrical sketch of Palatka and its waterfront.
“Little parties lazily bestow themselves along the river bank, with books or sketching materials, and alternately work, doze or gossip, until the whistles of the ascending or descending steamers are heard, when everybody flocks to the wharves,” he wrote. “At evening a splendid white moonlight transfigures all the leaves and trees and flowers; the banjo and guitar, accompanying [N]egro melodies, are heard in the streets; a heavy tropical repose falls over the little town, its wharves and rivers.”
George Colby, a twenty-seven-year-old New Yorker, was a different kind of restless dreamer who came to Florida in 1875. He was not drawn by Florida’s mild winter climate or sent there to recover from illness. Colby claimed to have been led there by a spirit guide he called Seneca, who wanted him to establish a community of like-minded spiritualists in the Florida wilderness.
Seneca was quite specific about where he wanted Colby to establish this community: It would be near a spring that discharges into the St. Johns River and seven pine-covered hills overlooking a group of lakes.
In early November 1875, Colby, supposedly following Seneca’s instructions, set out in a mule-drawn wagon through the woods of interior Florida. Soon he found seven pine-covered hills overlooking some lakes near Blue Spring. He chose this spot to establish Cassadaga, a small village of spiritualists near DeLand.
Ulysses Grant left the White House in 1877 after serving two terms; however, his staunchest supporters wanted him to seek a third term in 1880, after his Republican successor, President Rutherford B. Hayes, announced he would not seek reelection. Despite the fact that serving a third term would break George Washington’s sacred precedent of serving only two terms, Grant did not discourage the idea.
But Grant’s supporters started worrying that voters would tire of the former and possibly future president as he made a cross-country trip in 1879. They convinced him to get out of the country for a while. Grant set off for Cuba and Mexico.
In early January 1880, Grant and his family reached Florida, en route to Havana. He was impressed, and realized that Florida had great potential.
“I am very much pleased with Florida,” he wrote in a January 18, 1880, letter to a friend. “The winter climate is perfection, and, I am told by Northern men settled here, that the summers are not near so hot as in the North, though of longer continuance. This state has a great future before it.”
A month later in Havana, he complained about the “sultry” weather in Cuba, “just such as we run from at home in the Dog Days.” Florida was a much better winter resort than muggy Havana, he wrote.
Florida appealed to different passions in politicians and businessmen. Their dreams focused on figuring out a way to package and sell the state’s most abundant asset—lots and lots of undeveloped land—for huge profits.
Florida’s leaders thought they could pull the state out of the postwar wreckage and political chaos in the former Confederate States by giving twenty-two million acres—more than half the state—to railroad companies and then issuing state bonds to pay for laying track. They assumed that railroads would lure business investments that would in turn create jobs and prosperity. But industry wasn’t interested, and the money to pay off the bonds didn’t come.
Desperate to prevent the state from defaulting on its ill-conceived bonds, Governor William Bloxham made one of history’s biggest land deals. He persuaded wealthy Philadelphia industrialist Hamilton Disston to buy four million acres—an area larger than the state of Connecticut—at 25 cents an acre. Disston’s first payment of $500,000 in May 1881 kept the state solvent.
Disston boasted that he’d turn Kissimmee, a scrubby little cattle town in central Florida near Orlando, into a “magic city.” He also expected to greatly increase his wealth in the process.
But Disston badly miscalculated the amount of money, work, and plain old good luck he’d need to make his venture pay off. He struggled for more than a decade, but the deep economic depression that followed the Panic of 1893 finally put him under. Despondent because of his huge losses, Disston shot himself.
He had no way of knowing, however, that his huge land purchase had laid the foundation for Florida’s economic salvation, because it did eventually attract the railroads, and they were willing to lay their own tracks. A few years after the unhappy, unlucky Disston was laid to rest, there were five thousand miles of rails in the state.
Thanks to the railroads, Dr. Brinton’s guidebook, and Yankee writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edward King, northern physicians were prescribing winter trips to Florida for their patients who suffered from lingering, debilitating diseases. In 1878, a plutocrat who was amassing one of the great fortunes of the nineteenth century took his ailing wife to St. Augustine, hoping the gentle climate there would restore her frail health.
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.
“The humblest citizen in all the land when clad in the armor of a righteous cause is stronger than all the whole hosts of error that they can bring,” Bryan said.
His stirring speech called for everyday working Americans to stand up against “the encroachments of aggregated wealth” and demanded that the “humbler members of our society” receive the benefits they had earned for helping to create the nation’s prosperity.
“We will say to the Republican Party in this campaign,” Bryan intoned in the closing of his speech, “‘you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold.’”
There was a moment of silence as Bryan ended his speech and prepared to step down from the podium. Then twenty thousand delegates exploded into applause.
“Then from the remotest wall to the speaker’s stand, from end to end of the gigantic hall, came like one great burst of artillery the answer of the convention,” the Newark (Ohio) Daily Advocate reported. “Roar upon roar, crash upon crash of fierce, delirious applause.”
The delegates stood on their chairs, threw hats into the air, and waved handkerchiefs, “tossing like whitecaps on the winter sea,” the Advocate said.
“The orator was literally whirled off his feet and borne on by the struggling masses of his frantic friends,” the Advocate said. “From that hour, Hon. Wm. J. Bryan was as good as nominated for President, despite the efforts of leaders and friends of other candidates to stop the tremendous tide.”
Bryan would lose the election to Republican William McKinley, and he would lose two other attempts at the White House in 1900 and 1908. But three attempts at the presidency would establish Bryan as a staunch advocate and spokesman for the common man, make his name a household word, and lay the groundwork for a profitable career in Florida real estate a few decades later.
Bryan paid his first visit to Florida in 1898, when unrest in Cuba finally brought Spain and the United States to war. Cuban rebels who wanted independence from Spain had been clashing with loyalists for years. And some, including Cuban poet and patriot José Martí, had been planning and organizing their efforts against Spain in Cuban communities in Tampa and Key West.
In January 1898, rioting erupted in Havana. On January 24, the United States dispatched the powerful battleship USS Maine from Key West to Havana, hoping that a show of force would cool passions.
On the evening of February 15, about half an hour after a US Marine bugler had blown the mournful notes of “Taps” aboard the Maine, there was a muted explosion in or near the battleship. Then came a second explosion, powerful enough to lift the ship’s bow out of the water and toss the massive turret of one of its ten-inch guns off the deck.
More than 260 American sailors were killed. Historians are still arguing about whether the explosion was caused by a bomb planted by Spanish loyalists hoping to provoke a war with the United States or by volatile gases that ignited in the battleship’s coal bunker. But after an investigation, American officials decided the deadly blast had been caused by a bomb planted by Spanish saboteurs.
Goaded on by sensationalistic newspaper stories about the explosion of the Maine and Spanish atrocities in Cuba, the United States declared war on Spain in April 1898.
The US Navy immediately took the war to the Pacific Ocean. On May 1, an American fleet under Commodore George Dewey destroyed a Spanish fleet of warships in Manila Bay in the Philippines.
But the US Army was much slower to gear up for war. The United States had not had a major mobilization of troops since the end of the Civil War. When war on Spain was declared, the US Army had only about twenty-eight thousand men under arms. It would take time to field a force against Spain. And because of Florida’s proximity to Cuba, it was a logical place for the army to prepare 125,000 new soldiers for battle.
It made sense to train troops in Jacksonville and Tampa, two cities with excellent harbors where troops and war matériel could easily be moved in and out. It made less sense to station troops in Miami, which, even with Flagler’s railroad, was still little more than a settlement and did not have a harbor comparable to Tampa, Jacksonville, and Key West.
An army inspector filed two reports saying that Miami was not a good place to put soldiers, but Miami residents believed their frontier town would be a target for Spanish ships, and Flagler thought it would be good for his railroad to have an army base there.
So troops were sent to Miami.
The city was still a frontier village with a few hundred residents in April 1898. The town started changing, however, when the troops came. Money and people poured in. Many soldiers weren’t impressed with South Florida in the summer, however; a Louisiana soldier described Miami as “a waste wilderness as can be conceived only in rare nightmares.”
American military leaders thought Tampa would be a good place to assemble and train troops for an invasion of Cuba. The declaration of war on Spain and the call for 125,000 recruits had stirred patriotic passions in young American men, who flocked to recruiting stations. Soon they were pouring into Tampa, at the time a city of about twelve thousand.
Commanding General of the Army Nelson Miles was dismayed by the conditions when he arrived in Tampa in June 1898. All was chaos. Miles pronounced the confusion “inextricable.” But eventually, American troops were ready to invade Cuba.
William Jennings Bryan volunteered his services to the US Army, and in July, he arrived in Jacksonville as a colonel commanding a regiment of troops from Nebraska. The war moved quickly once American troops invaded Cuba in mid-June, so the conflict ended with Bryan still in the army camp in Jacksonville.
Still, Bryan would not forget his first trip to Florida.
Julia Tuttle died the same month the war ended, and about half the land in Miami went to her heirs. The executor of her will, Harry Tuttle, wasn’t as fussy about booze as his mother had been. In 1900, he sold a lot inside the city limits without the “no alcohol” clause.
The new owner promptly opened a saloon.
The railroads continued to bring wealthy visitors to Florida who liked what they saw and bought property. Louis Comfort Tiffany and William Luden, the cough drop millionaire, were among the super-rich who built huge houses in Miami.
When Flagler sat down to talk with journalist James Barrow in 1907, he was only a few days past his seventy-seventh birthday, and had recently started his most ambitious—some would say craziest—project. In those long-ago days before labor unions, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency, he was extending his railroad from Miami, 128 miles down the remote, ecologically fragile Florida Keys to Key West, the nation’s southernmost city.
It was a Herculean undertaking that would require unheard-of feats of engineering.
But Flagler didn’t intend to stop at Key West. The bustling maritime city of about twenty thousand—accessible only by boat, and about as much Caribbean as American—was only ninety miles from Havana, Cuba. Flagler intended to extend rail passenger and freight service to Cuba. Tourists could board a train in New York and ride to Key West, where the passenger cars would be loaded on a special ferry for the crossing to Havana. When the ferry arrived in the Cuban capital, departing passengers would board the passenger cars for the return trip to Key West and points north.
The frugal minister’s son who had set off on his own as a teenager with a handful of coins in his pocket was worth somewhere around $60 million—about $1.5 billion in twenty-first-century dollars. Flagler recalled the early days when he was broke and in debt and trying to recover and learn from his mistakes.
“I carried a lunch in my pocket until I was a rich man,” he told Barrow. “I trained myself in the school of self-control and self-denial.”
Flagler acknowledged that the self-imposed frugality hadn’t been easy, but it was better than working for someone else.
“It was hard on [me], but I would rather be my own tyrant than have someone else tyrannize over me,” he said.
His nineteenth-century upbringing as the son of a poor-but-honest preacher had had a dramatic influence on his attitude toward great wealth.
“If money is spent for personal uses, to promote idleness, luxury, and selfishness, it is a curse to the possessor and to society,” Flagler told Barrow. “Wealth brings obligation, moral and governmental. It has but one legitimate function, and that is its employment for the welfare of the nation. The man who builds a factory or digs a mine serves his country.”
It was a properly moral Victorian attitude of noblesse oblige. And he expressed another old-fashioned opinion about acquiring great wealth: It took an awful lot of hard work and self-sacrifice, and required a single-minded, almost fanatical devotion.
“To succeed may cost one’s health, or it may mean separation from one’s family and friends and banishment to the desert, the mine, or the forest,” he said. “But no matter the way and no matter the price, success always demands unremitting toil, self-denial, and enthusiasm.”
Henry Flagler would live just long enough to see his railroad to Key West—called the Overseas Extension—completed in 1912. He died after taking a bad fall a year later at his magnificent home in Palm Beach.
Flagler’s construction crews employed hundreds of men to clear the right-of-way and lay the tracks for the railroad down Florida’s east coast. Among the men who hired on was Joe Ashley, a backwoodsman who was a highly skilled trapper and marksman.
Joe Ashley brought his family from the state’s Gulf Coast and joined Flagler’s construction crew in 1904, the year Flagler made the decision to extend his railroad to Key West. Among Joe Ashley’s sons was eleven-year-old John, who had inherited his father’s remarkable skill as a marksman with a rifle and a pistol. John preferred to spend his time in the wilds, trapping otters. The skills the youngster was developing would serve him well in another, more lucrative occupation in a few years.
In 1905, Flagler’s work crews began clearing the right-of-way to lay rails to the tip of the Florida peninsula, where they would start building bridges and laying tracks across the Florida Keys. Florida’s mild winters and rail connections to populous northeastern cities were getting more attention across the country. The January 1906 edition of National Geographic magazine noted that southern Florida was “the only truly tropical land” that was connected by rail to the eastern United States. “It is indeed a wonder that when cold weather comes, this region is not completely overrun with people,” writer John Gifford said.
As the first decade of the new century ended, Florida was not running over with people, but it was starting to get noticed. The 1910 US Census showed that the state’s population had increased from just over 528,000 in 1900 to about 753,000 in 1910.
The population increase for Dade County—which included Miami—was especially impressive. In 1900, when Dade County extended one hundred miles up the coast from Miami, its population was about 4,600. Ten years later, Dade’s boundaries had been shrunk to create Palm Beach and St. Lucie Counties to its north. But even within the diminished boundaries, Dade’s 1910 population had more than doubled in a decade, to just under 12,000. And the combined population of the new counties that occupied Dade’s old boundaries was approaching an additional 9,700 newcomers.
Americans were beginning to realize that an earthly version of Paradise lay at their doorstep. Florida was a long way from being tamed, but the tangled, unearthly wilderness that had terrified Jonathan Dickinson and alternately disgusted and enthralled Jacob Motte did not seem quite so wild and impenetrable anymore. As the first decade of the new century ended, more newcomers were coming to Florida, bringing their dreams, ideas, and money. As they worked to carve an idyllic paradise out of the wilderness, a homegrown gang of opportunistic thieves—daring, ruthless, clever, and intimately familiar with the wilds of southern Florida—were determined to grab as much of the new wealth as they could carry away to their hideout, deep in the Everglades.
After all, they told themselves, they were entitled to it.