How Flagler's Oil Money Built a Railroad Across the Sea and Then a Hurricane Took It

On January 22, 1912, an 82-year-old Henry Flagler stepped off his private car in Key West, 128 miles out into the Gulf, at the end of a railroad that ran from island to island across open water. Standard Oil money paid for nearly all of it: the hotels in St. Augustine and Palm Beach, the town of Miami, the camps on Pigeon Key, the Long Key Viaduct and the Seven Mile Bridge. Three hurricanes hit the work in 1906, 1909 and 1910. The fourth, on Labor Day 1935, came ashore on the Upper Keys at about 185 mph, knocked a rescue train off the track at Islamorada and killed 423 people, 259 of them World War I veterans. The state bought what was left for 640,000 dollars, and US 1 still runs on Flagler's piers today. Sources we used: • Wikipedia — Overseas Railroad, Henry Flagler, Seven Mile Bridge, 1935 Labor Day hurricane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Rai... • NOAA National Hurricane Center — HURDAT2 best track, 1935. https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/hurdat/ • Encyclopaedia Britannica — Henry M. Flagler. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry... Old photographs come from Wikimedia Commons, each file named with its author in a separate comment; the rest are public domain. Credit for licensed images: Florida Keys Public Libraries and Florida Keys History Center (BY 2.0), Jerzystrzelecki (BY 3.0), Andrew Bone (BY 2.0), Herbert wie (BY-SA 4.0), Sharon Hahn Darlin (BY 2.0). Map layers: Sentinel-2 cloudless by EOX under CC BY 4.0, Terrain Tiles, US Census boundaries.