The Forgotten King of Florida's West Coast: Henry Plant

On the west bank of the Hillsborough River in Tampa, 13 silver minarets rise over the University of Tampa. They are the surviving shell of the most extravagant hotel Florida's Gulf coast ever saw, and the man who raised it, along with the western half of the state around it, is almost entirely forgotten today. His name was Henry Bradley Plant. While Henry Flagler built his railroads and resort palaces down Florida's Atlantic coast, Plant did the same work on the Gulf side, in the same years and to the same design. He laid more than 2,000 miles of track, ran steamships to Havana and Key West, dredged a deep-water port out of a mudflat, and made a city out of a fishing village of fewer than a thousand people. Flagler's name now marks a county, a college, and a good part of Palm Beach. Plant's marks a small farming town and a university hall that thousands of students walk through without ever learning whose palace it was. This documentary traces how the empire was built: a first fortune founded on the Confederacy's wartime express business, railroads bought for pennies out of the ruins of the postwar South, and a Moorish palace of silver minarets raised as an advertisement rather than a business. It carries the story to its strangest hour, when Plant lobbied to route the invasion of Cuba through his own single rail line and port. That summer, 30,000 soldiers, a fleet stalled in the bay, and rotting supplies on the docks laid bare exactly where his machine could break. What followed is the heart of the mystery. Plant's will tried to hold the empire frozen and whole for a grandson of four, and his own widow and son broke it in court. The system was folded into a larger railroad within three years of his death, and his name was scraped from the maps and the timetables. In the next generation the fortune dwindled to the point where the family's grandest Manhattan mansion was handed to Cartier in exchange for a pearl necklace. The one thing that outlasted all of it was the palace he never meant to keep. Copyright & Fair Use Notice This video is a non-commercial, educational history documentary produced for research and for purposes of commentary, critique, and analysis. Certain archival photographs and video clips appear here under the Fair Use doctrine (Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act), including use for commentary and criticism, news reporting, instruction, scholarship, and research.