The eighth wonder

[billanole]

The Overseas Highway: The US' 'floating' highway

Stretching 113 miles into the open ocean, this engineering marvel linked the far-flung Florida Keys to the mainland and forever changed Florida.

www.bbc.com

So in 1885, Flagler connected a series of disjointed railroads along Florida's Atlantic Coast from Jacksonville, at Florida's northern end, to Miami, near the state's southern tip. Miami should have been the end of the line, but when the US began construction on the Panama Canal in 1904, Flagler saw tremendous potential for Key West – the US' closest piece of land to the Canal and the deepest port in the Southeast US. The bustling hub was already flourishing thanks to the cigar, sponging and fishing industries (Key West was Florida's largest city until 1900), but the island's remote location made it difficult and expensive to move goods north.
Therefore, Flagler decided to extend his track 156 miles south to Key West, mostly over open sea. This so-called Key West Extension was considered impossible by many of his contemporaries, and his vision was labelled "Flagler's Folly" by his critics. Between 1905 and 1912, three hurricanes battered the construction site, killing more than 100 workers. Undeterred, Flagler pushed ahead. It took seven years; $50m ($1.56bn today); and 4,000 African American, Bahamian and European immigrants to build the railroad – all of whom had to contend with alligators, scorpions and snakes as they toiled in harsh conditions.
When the railroad was finally completed in 1912, it was called "the eighth wonder of the world". On the train's inaugural run, a wood-burning locomotive arrived at Key West from Miami carrying the then-82-year-old Flagler, who stepped out of his private luxury carriage car (which is on view at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach) and allegedly whispered to a friend, "Now I can die happy. My dream is fulfilled."

 

[PoopandBoogers]

Funny I was just thinking about Flagler this morning and how cool it would be for HBO to do a historical fiction show on Flagler and his building of the FL east coast rail system all the way down to the Keys. The shit they must've seen and gone through; with all sorts of shady characters, villians, heros, rich, poor, former slaves, bandits, former confederates and union soldiers, immigrants, Native Americans, snakes, panthers, malaria, hurricanes, mosquitoes, etc. Holy hell what an ordeal.

As a related aside, a few days ago I was walking over a local bridge and looked up the name of the guy who it was named after. He happened to be a Dutch immigrant who was one of the founders of the area, during contruction in 1919, the bridge was nicknamed "Kouwen-Hoven's Folly", but he showed them up and it was completed in 1921. I've always wondered if he knew Flagler, as his bridge is only a 3 min walk, a short few hundred feet from the railroad.

Heritage - Indialantic Living

www.indialanticliving.com

 

[Chuck C]

 

[lucas80]

I'm surprised the death toll during construction wasn't higher.

 

[stillh8unlv]

Everyone should drive US 1 to Key West in a convertible at least once in their life. It is truly beautiful

 

[billanole]

Funny I was just thinking about Flagler this morning and how cool it would be for HBO to do a historical fiction show on Flagler and his building of the FL east coast rail system all the way down to the Keys. The shit they must've seen and gone through; with all sorts of shady characters, villians, heros, rich, poor, former slaves, bandits, former confederates and union soldiers, immigrants, Native Americans, snakes, panthers, malaria, hurricanes, mosquitoes, etc. Holy hell what an ordeal.

As a related aside, a few days ago I was walking over a local bridge and looked up the name of the guy who it was named after. He happened to be a Dutch immigrant who was one of the founders of the area, during contruction in 1919, the bridge was nicknamed "Kouwen-Hoven's Folly", but he showed them up and it was completed in 1921. I've always wondered if he knew Flagler, as his bridge is only a 3 min walk, a short few hundred feet from the railroad.

https://www.indialanticliving.com/heritage[/U

Another interesting tale would be the Ed Ball story. His St Joe Paper Company became the largest land in Florida after decades of acquisition. My dad had ancestors who lost big holdings to Ball during the depression when he paid past due taxes on their timberland inland from East Point.

A Million Acres

St. Joe's CEO Peter Rummell is only beginning to find out what he's against as he reinvigorates the massive old company.

www.floridatrend.com

In an aging mansion on the outskirts of Tallahassee, in a dusty storage closet off an upstairs bathroom, sit a dozen or so cases of Old Forester whiskey, some bottles dating from the 1940s. Both mansion and whiskey are the property of The St. Joe Co.; the liquor was the personal cache of the late Ed Ball, the company's legendary tight-fisted chief executive who drank a toast every night to his enemies' demise - usually several. "I find four to six highballs very relaxing," said Ball, who spent 40 years buying up railroads, banks and huge swaths of north Florida pine forests, making the St. Joe Paper Co. the state's largest landowner in the process. It's no accident that Ball's whiskey sits untouched; the managers who ran the company after Ball died in 1981 didn't disturb much of anything about St. Joe. Both its massive north Florida land holdings - all 1.1 million acres - and its cash, now more than $500 million, languished over the years as other parts of the state and other companies boomed.
Ball's liquor still lies unopened, but his company has put on some new clothes and headed for the party, escorted by chairman and chief executive officer Peter S. Rummell, the former real estate chief for the Walt Disney Co. who cut his teeth developing high-profile Florida communities such as Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach and Celebration near Orlando. Since a group of activist shareholders and outside directors that included Jacksonville businessman Herbert Hill Peyton mounted a push that installed Rummell last year, the new CEO has frenetically set about reshaping Ball's creaky behemoth as a major regional - even national - real estate developer, and has set in motion a plan that could remake the whole northwest corner of the state.

Gone is the old St. Joe Paper Co. name, replaced by the St. Joe Co. with a new ticker symbol [NYSE-JOE] and a new logo, a stylized bird taking flight. Gone also are all but one of the company's previous seven top managers, replaced with high-priced new blood. More notable, the bespectacled Rummell has catapulted the company into a series of partnerships, acquisitions and real estate ventures, including three massive residential real estate developments in the Panhandle that the company will try to carry out simultaneously. Among the other deals: Rummell's $12 million purchase of Arvida, one of Florida's most storied residential community builders, and the $90 million pending acquisition of the Prudential Florida realty brokerage.