Free Last Train to Paradise by Les Standiford Page A

a fortuitous decision for Flagler, but one that was to have implications that persist to this day, with the “haves” living in the palatial estates of Palm Beach itself, and the “have-nots” in what was originally conceived of as the service town of West Palm Beach. The literal distance is measured in a few hundred yards of water, but in social terms, the two municipalities are light-years apart.
    Meanwhile, work on both the railroad and the hotel continued with all dispatch, workers on each spurred by a race devised by Flagler. The hotel builders won out, finishing the largest wooden structure in the world in the early spring of 1894, barely nine months after it was begun. When the 540-room structure was opened, guests might pay in the neighborhood of forty dollars a day for double accommodations, one hundred dollars for a suite.
    Once again the hotel was a hit with the public, especially the moneyed public. Demand was so great that Flagler immediately commenced work on a second hotel, this set on the ocean side of the island and christened as the Breakers. Though the original Breakers structure was to be destroyed by fire a few years later, Flagler had the hotel rebuilt, and its successor remains today as popular a destination for the privileged as it was back then. Prominent among the first group of passengers to arrive, via a rail spur that Flagler had extended from the main station in West Palm Beach, were several members of the Vanderbilt family, along with a number of others on the register of the “Four Hundred,” the most exclusive set of its time.
    By this time, then, it seemed that everything Flagler touched would turn to gold. He was besieged with business proposals and pleas of every stripe. Hardly had he completed his line to Palm Beach than those who were aware of his charter rights were begging him to extend the rails southward to Miami, even though there was no Miami at the time.

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    The City That Flagler Built
    In the 1890s, all that existed where the modern metropolis of Miami sprawls today was a muddy settlement of fewer than five hundred souls. The place was called Fort Dallas at that time, after a long-abandoned military outpost that had been established in the 1830s where the Miami River empties into Biscayne Bay. The few hardy settlers who lived there near the turn of the century had been enticed by land speculation syndicates at work everywhere in the wild southern half of Florida, groups of businessmen who stood to make their fortunes by seeing such frontier lands settled.
    Those who moved to Fort Dallas to seek their fortunes were interested in encouraging others to join them, of course. Among the most active of those pioneers was a Cleveland, Ohio, woman named Julia Tuttle, who had fallen in love with the wild but exotic setting during a visit to her father’s homestead.
    When her industrialist husband died and her father bequeathed her his holdings in the area, Tuttle, then forty-one, performed an uncommon act of bravery: she pulled up stakes in Ohio and moved to Fort Dallas, intending from the outset to carve a city from the wilderness. She purchased a homestead allotment of her own from the Biscayne Bay Company—640 acres, including the site of the original fort—and went to work remodeling one of the original settlement structures into a home for herself and her two children.
    Mindful of what it would take to turn the sleepy settlement into a city, she approached Flagler’s rival Henry Plant about the possibility of extending his railroad from Tampa southeastward across the Everglades to Fort Dallas. Plant dispatched his chief of railroad operations, James E. Ingraham, to investigate the 250-mile route. In what became a virtual survival march, it took Ingraham and his men nearly a month to make their way across the soggy wilderness of south-central Florida, and while they were given a hero’s welcome by Tuttle and her friends, Plant, after hearing Ingraham’s report, dismissed the