Les Standiford. Last Train to Paradise. Broadway, 2002.
Just a little over a hundred years ago, engineers and workers built a railroad from Miami to Key West. It was called the railroad across the sea. Last Train to Paradise tells the fascinating story of this project and its mastermind, Henry Flagler.
Flagler at one time was partner with John D. Rockefeller, and next to him, the richest man in the world. He has been called the Man who Invented Florida. Standiford gives us a bit of Flagler’s background and how he almost singlehandedly began the development of the state of Florida.
Though he made his fortune in oil, Flagler began building railroads in Florida. An Ohio native who moved to New York, he used to winter in Jacksonville. Jacksonville is in Northern Florida next to Georgia. That is where the railroad in the 1890s ended. Once he visited St. Augustine and thought this historic oldest city in the United States would attract visitors if they could get there easily. He built a railroad from Jacksonville to St. Augustine and a luxury hotel in the city to attract wealthy visitors.
He would do the same with his Florida Eastern Coastal Railway (FEC) all the way down the coast including Daytona, Palm Beach, and ultimately Miami. Back then, Miami was Fort Douglas and had a population of around 300. He built a hotel there, and newsmen and soldiers used it as a port to get to Cuba during the Spanish-American War. More people began to settle there. The rest would become history.
Standiford notes that Flagler refused to have Miami renamed for himself. Instead, he insisted it be given a Native American name, so they named it Miami, after a tribe in Flagler’s natal state of Ohio. We note that today there is a county in Florida named after Flagler, but that came after his death.
It is hard to imagine, but in 1900 the most populous city in Florida was Key West. It had a population of 20,000 and was only accessible by boat. Still, it held military significance as the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico with a couple of forts and a Navy base. Flagler thought it could have potential both as the closest point to Cuba, then a popular tourist destination, and potentially a port for handling traffic to and from the proposed Panama Canal.
Flagler’s vision seemed impossible. Most of the Florida Keys were and are small coral islands. The highest point anywhere is a mere sixteen feet above sea level. At one point there is a distance of seven miles between two keys. The undertaking was remarkable. In some ways it was more of a challenge than the Panama Canal. As long as people could safely dig, the canal could be created. The Suez Canal had been done. People had built canals for centuries. Building a bridge across the sea itself was another matter.
Last Train to Paradise names two other heroes, two engineers who both served as the railroad’s project managers: Joseph Meredith and Charles Krome. Meredith designed much of the construction methods and route. Krome would take over when Meredith, a diabetic, passed away. We also read about the struggles and obstacles the construction workers themselves had to overcome.
The project began in 1906 and was finished in 1912. Among other things, the workers on the railroad had to contend with three hurricanes. The first one taught people about some things that worked well and other things that did not. Although they were significant hurdles, they also showed how the railway could withstand such forces. In spite of the natural and political obstacles, the octogenarian Flagler lived to see its completion.
Lessons learned would eventually lead to the building of the Route 1 Highway to Key West in the 1930s. The railroad no longer exists, but the highway most certainly does.
Standiford keeps the readers interested by telling the story in a novelistic manner. Standiford mostly writes novels, though he has done some nonfiction. (We mentioned a film based on his The Man Who Invented Christmas on these pages.) The Florida book gets its title because it begins by telling the harrowing story of the last train ever to ride on this Key West track.
The story starts in 1935 with not only the train but a big WPA project building the Key West Highway. That Labor Day, September 3, saw the most powerful hurricane ever to hit the United States. The winds were stronger than those of most tornadoes, and it set a still-standing record for the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded in the U. S.
Because the storm was so powerful, it was much tighter. It virtually wiped out everything on land in the Middle Keys, especially Matecumbe Key. Ernest Hemingway was living in Key West at the time and wrote about the destruction he saw there. Like many others, he helped with rescue efforts.
Hemingway wrote on the hurricane for New Masses, a Communist publication. Hemingway would become less sympathetic toward Communism after observing them in the Spanish Civil War. Still, he warned John Dos Passos about criticizing them openly. If that happened, he told him, most New York publishers would have nothing to do with him. Dos Passos did not heed Hemingway’s advice and critics and publishers largely ignored his later works. Hemingway was more careful to keep his opinions to himself. Things have not changed much in the world of publishing.
To tell much more would give too much away, but the federal bureaucracy had not learned some of the lessons from the railroad builders thirty years before. This is more than just a story of Florida development and a historical engineering project. There is a lot of action—not only concerning heavy construction but about survival when nature pushes its worst.