FIRST THROUGH TRAIN ARRIVED AT 10.43 A.M. (Key West) 100 Years Ago Today

They called it "Flagler's Folly," the wondrous work of concrete, steel and wood stretching 128 miles from the Florida mainland to Key West, in a place where nature never intended for a railroad to run.

But exactly 100 years ago Sunday at 10:43 a.m., a 110-ton Schenectady-built locomotive, powered by steam heated by oil, rolled over the last length of track on a dusty and stark Key West, bearing the ailing man dubbed the island's savior, oil baron Henry Flagler. He was greeted by applause, cheers, band music and choirs of schoolchildren, this man whose final dream was realized by the completion of his Florida East Coast Railway's Key West extension.

A parade in Old Town today will mark the completion of the railroad, which launched an already prosperous city into a new era, linking it to the continental rest of the U.S. and promising a jumping off point for commerce headed to the Panama Canal and the island of Cuba.

"We'll be celebrating Flagler's great accomplishment, a very important landmark in the city's history," Key West spokeswoman Alyson Crean said. "It has definitely shaped who we are as a city. Before the railroad, everything had to be shipped in. It was one man's extraordinary expenditure to do something just because he could do it. It probably couldn't happen in any other age."

Only a handful of people who remember the railroad's inaugural arrival still live. But their memories have been tapped by event organizers and news media outlets all month in preparation for the grand centennial of the railroad's maiden run.

Lamar Louise Curry, 105, who now lives in Coral Gables, watched the railroad being built and was slated to take part in the arrival festivities. The then-5-year-old Curry was supposed to bear flowers as a gift for Flagler's wife, Mary Lily, when she disembarked from the train.

Years later she often road the Florida Keys Over-Sea Railroad.

"It was very exciting, because I looked out the window the whole time while we were on the trestle," she said. "So it was a wonderful occasion to ride over it."

Minnie Dameron, now 87, who also remembers riding the railroad as a girl, will be co-grand marshal of today's parade with re-enactor Artie Engler, who has been at railroad-related events this month representing himself as Flagler.

Dameron, who lived on Plantation Key as a girl, was on the train when it made its final journey, just before major damage occurred to its tracks from a 1935 Labor Day hurricane that rendered the railroad useless.

"My sister and I used to love to ride the train and look out the window," Dameron said. "But when we'd come to the Seven Mile Bridge, it looked like you were riding on the water, so we'd get scared and hold one another's hand."

The railroad was built at a cost greater than dollars.

Workers recruited from throughout the U.S., the Bahamas and other places worked in fetid swamps and risked yellow fever, although reports indicate they were fed well and that efforts were made to keep them happy and comfortable.

In 1906, a hurricane set adrift boats that were used as worker barracks, killing 135. A 1909 hurricane claimed 14 lives, and others died in general industrial accidents along the route.

A total of 42 million pounds of steel and 96,000 tons of concrete were used to build bridges and the track bed; 78,000 pilings were employed.

Flagler's arrival on the first train to reach Key West was chronicled by The Key West Citizen. The front-page story says the train arrived amid "the roar of bursting bombs, the playing of bands, the shrill screeches of whistles, the cheering of thousands of people and the waving of countless American flags."

Accompanying Flagler were personal envoys on behalf of President William Howard Taft, ranking Navy and Army officials and other "distinguished guests."

A poem by J.B. Killegrew, dedicated to Flagler, graced the front page as well.

"Far down the sunlit golden sands/Lie gleaming rails, the twin steel bands/Of Commerce spanning verdant isles/Running o'er the sea miles on miles ..."

Ships from Cuba, Portugal and various U.S. ports of call were in Key West's harbor 100 years ago this weekend to celebrate the railroad, including a Cuban gunboat called the Hatuey. Representatives of the Cuban government who had come to celebrate the event went to a ball thrown in their honor.

"Now I can die happy," Flagler is reported to have said once the railroad was finished.

Within 16 months, that statement became a prophecy, when the father of modern Florida died in his palatial Palm Beach home.

Today's parade starts at about 1 p.m. at Southard and Whitehead streets, takes a left from Whitehead to Angela Street, a left onto Duval Street and a left at Front Street, where it will end at the Custom House.

ABOUT THE OVERSEAS RAILROAD

The dream of one man changed the isolation of the Florida Keys for all time. Native New Yorker Henry Flagler, born in 1830 and educated only to the 8th grade, established the Standard Oil Company with John D. Rockefeller in 1870 and became a wealthy, well-respected businessman. In 1885 he purchased a short-line railroad between Jacksonville and St. Augustine and began extending the rails southward toward Miami, then only a small settlement.

Henry M. Flagler

Flagler's vision of his railroad project went beyond Miami, however. He wanted to connect the mainland with the deep port of Key West, a booming city of more than 10,000 people, in anticipation of the growing shipping commerce he thought would be generated by the opening of the Panama Canal in the early years of the 20th century. He may even have set his sights on eventually connecting Key West with Cuba.

The railroad extended to Homestead, at the gateway to the Keys, by 1904. The year 1905 saw the commencement of what many perceived as an old man's folly: a railroad constructed across 128 miles of rock islands and open water, under the most non-idyllic conditions imaginable, by men and materials that had to be imported from all over the world. Steamships brought fabricated steel from Pennsylvania; cement from Germany and Belgium for use as concrete supports below the water line; cement from New York state for above-water concrete; sand and gravel from the Chesapeake; crushed rock from the Hudson Valley; timbers and pilings from Florida and Georgia; and provisions from Chicago. Barges carried fresh water from Miami to the construction sites. Nothing was indigenous to the Keys except the mosquitoes and the sand flies.

Chief Engineer William Krome

By 1908 the first segment, from Homestead to Marathon, was completed, and Marathon became a boom-town. Ships brought their cargoes of Cuban pineapples and limes here, where they were loaded onto railway cars and sent north. (The railroad turnaround was at the present site of Knight's Key campground.) Railroad workers used Pigeon Key (see our Attractions chapter) as a base for further railway construction.

The 7-mile "water gap" between Marathon and Bahia Honda took some engineering prowess to overcome, and the completion of the project was severely hampered by several devastating hurricanes in 1909 and 1910. But on January 22, 1912, Henry Flagler, by then age 82, finally rode his dream from Homestead to Key West, across 42 stretches of sea, over 17 miles of concrete viaducts and concrete-and-steel bridges, over 20 miles of filled causeways and ultimately traversing 128 miles from island to island to the fruition of his vision. He entered Key West that day a hero. He died the following year probably never knowing that his flight of fancy changed the course of the Florida Keys forever.

Flagler in Key West

Flagler's railroad, called the Key West Extension, made Key West America's largest deepwater port on the Atlantic Coast south of Norfolk, Virginia. Trade with the Caribbean increased, and Key West flourished for 23 years, recovering from the loss of the sponge and cigar industries.

The railroad stop on Key Largo was called Tavernier and developed into a trading center for the Upper Keys. Pineapple farming faltered in Key Largo and Plantation Key from a combination of tapping out the nourishment in the thin soil and market competition from the shiploads of Cuban pineapples transported by railway car from the docks of Key West to the mainland. The railroad company built a fishing camp on Long Key that attracted sportfishing aficionados from all over, including camp regular, writer Zane Grey. Real estate boomed for a time, as people came to the Keys to homestead. The Florida East Coast Railroad Company completed construction of Key West's first official tourist hotel, the Casa Marina, in 1921. La Concha was built in 1928.

In 1923 Monroe County appropriated funds to construct a road paralleling the railroad. The bumpy rock road crossed Card Sound with a long area of fill and a wooden bridge. Half a dozen humpback bridges crossed the creeks and cuts on Key Largo. Extending the length of Key Largo, the road continued over Plantation Key, Windley Key and Upper Matecumbe. At the southern end of our island chain, a 32-mile narrow road connected Key West with No Name Key off Big Pine Key. A car ferry service provided the waterway link between the two sections of roadway, which traversed what we now call the Upper and Lower Keys.

Still, the journey across this 128-mile stretch from Homestead to Key West proved a rugged, dusty, insect-ridden, costly, all-day affair, and tourism did not flourish as hoped and expected. Fresh water remained a coveted, scarce resource in the Florida Keys. Cisterns saved the funneled rainwater, which was parsimoniously meted out. Salt water was used whenever possible, and wash days were also always bath days. Hardly a tourist mecca, this.

The Great Depression delivered a near-fatal blow to the Florida Keys with a one-two punch. The cigar industry had moved to Tampa, sponging went to Tarpon Springs and lighthouses had put an end to wrecking long before. The population of Key West dropped from 22,000 to 12,000. By 1934, 80 percent of the city's residents relied on government assistance. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration stepped in and commenced development and promotion of Key West as a magnet for increased tourism in the Keys.

To that end, developers began building bridges to connect the watery cavities between the Middle Keys to each other and to the two sections of finished roadway. A "bonus army" of World War I veterans was employed to accomplish this momentous task. However, in 1935 Mother Nature reasserted her authority and once again charted the destiny of our islands. On Labor Day, what today we would call a Category Five hurricane hit the Upper and Middle Keys, destroying much of Flagler's Railroad. Hundreds of lives were lost when the 17-foot storm surge hit the bridge-building crew working on a bridge at Islamorada.

Because of mismanagement and lack of foreign freight heading northward from Cuban and Caribbean ports, the railroad was already in receivership. The railroad chose not to rebuild, citing financial difficulties. It had by this time become cheaper to haul cargo by truck than by train. Ironically Henry Flagler’s own Standard Oil pressed the railroad into bankruptcy because of unpaid fuel bills. The county's Overseas Road and Toll Commission purchased the right of way from the Florida East Coast Railroad and converted the single track railway trestles, which remained intact after the hurricane, into two-lane bridges for automobiles. The highway from Homestead to Key West opened for traffic in 1938.

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