Rails over the Ocean

It took 4,000 labourers 7 years to build a 120 mile railroad connecting mainland Florida with the city of Key West. The project was financed by Henry Flagler, fabulously wealthy founder of Standard Oil and cost more than $50 million.  Flagler was a master of manipulating markets and freezing out competitors and until the advent of Anti-Trust legislation, he and Rockefeller were well on the way to establishing undisputed control of the entire American market for oil and gas. On the plus side he was an attentive husband and in middle age accompanied his ailing spouse to Florida in search of a cure in warmer climes. At which point his interest in fossil fuels declined in favour of a new passion for developing resort hotels and transport infrastructure to expand the market for Florida tourism.  The system of “convict leasing” enabled local prisons to supply him with a regular source of (literally) captive labour for his projects.  In a weird parody of the Manifest Destiny, Flagler’s army of contractors relentlessly drove south, clearing wilderness, draining swamps, dredging channels, building roads and luxury hotels on a steady advance via St. Augustine and Palm Beach that ended in Miami.

The connection to Key West was planned to move freight that had travelled via the new Panama Canal northwards to customers across America but the anticipated traffic never materialised. The postcard view above shows a vast but relatively passive crowd gathered at Key West in January 1912 to greet the arrival of the first regular service on the new extension to the Florida East Coast Railway. In the 1920s there was a daily train from New York to Key West timed to connect with a ferry to Havana. Key West to Miami was a 4½ hour trip thanks to a 15 mph limit on all the oversea sections.  Maintenance was a constant drain on resources and the railroad was on the verge of insolvency when fate intervened in the form of the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 that overwhelmed the railroad beyond repair. In a final indignity, surviving sections of the infrastructure were commandeered to support a new Overseas Highway that survives to the present day. It had lasted for 23 years. Flagler died in 1913, just over a year after the railroad was inaugurated. If Flagler had not declined the honour of renaming Key Biscayne, there would be no city of Miami today - only Flagler and Flagler Beach, Flagler Dolphins, Flagler Vice, Flagler Art Deco …

 

To Key West in Postcards

The Florida town of Key West is at the southernmost point in the continental United States at the end of a chain of small islands linked by a causeway. It is closer to Havana (106 miles) than it is to Miami (127 miles). Other than an association with Ernest Hemingway (who had a home there from 1931-39), its distinction is its location. Visitors to places situated at extremities are frequently moved to send postcards home and the industry was quick to supply them in copious amounts.

There was a time when it was connected to the mainland by rail. The Overseas Railroad to Key West operated from 1912 to 1935 when it was destroyed in the Labor Day Hurricane – forty miles of track was washed away on September 2nd. With no funds to rebuild, it was abandoned by its owner, the Florida East Coast Railway. There being no compelling economic case for the railroad, most of the track-bed was converted to road use and designated US Route 1 – the Overseas Highway.

The Overseas Highway made a frequent postcard subject in the inter-war era of the linen card. The endless perspectives, big skies, gaudy sunsets and expanses of tropical blue seas lent themselves to the saturated colour of the linen postcard. For those without a motor vehicle, the Greyhound bus (the bus that goes to sea) was the only way to travel and they too turn up on postcards. One view of Pigeon Quay shows a queue of traffic driving off to sea with no seasickness as the caption has it. Amazingly it includes a pair of nonchalant pedestrians – difficult to believe they’re walking the entire 127 miles.