For Sale —American Paradise

by Willie Drye

  Only a few white settlers lived between Tampa and Key West before the Civil War. But Fort Dallas, an outpost of the US military from the Seminole Wars, which were fought sporadically between 1816 and 1858, remained as a settlement near the shores of the Biscayne Bay after the struggle ended. The Everglades covered most of southern Florida, and the Glades were inhabited by the handful of Seminoles who had eluded US troops sent to subdue them or drive them out.

  The Civil War could easily have started in Florida several months before Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, in April 1861.

  By 1860, the long-simmering dispute about the extension of slavery into US territories had become unresolvable. South Carolina furiously severed its political connection with the United States government on December 20, 1860.

  Mississippi left the Union on January 9, 1861, and Florida seceded on January 10. That same day, Lieutenant Adam Slemmer, in charge of US forces in Pensacola, moved his federal troops into Fort Pickens on Santa Rosa Island, a barrier island just offshore from the city.

  Colonel William Chase, a West Point–educated army engineer who had decided to cast his lot with the Confederacy, led troops to Fort Pickens and demanded that Slemmer surrender. Slemmer refused, and Chase contemplated storming the fort, an act that surely would have sparked war. But he decided against it, and Fort Pickens became one of the few US forts in the Confederacy to remain in Union hands for the entire war.

  After the Civil War ended in 1865, the reunited nation—or at least the victors—got down to the serious business of becoming wealthy. Ulysses S. Grant, the former Union general who finally figured out a way to beat Confederate general Robert E. Lee, was elected president in 1868—although Texas, Mississippi, and Virginia had not been readmitted to the Union and did not vote in that presidential election.

  Author Oliver Carlson noted that President Grant “ushered in that hustling period of the 1870s, when the dominant dream of America was to get rich.”

  The Reconstruction era gave rise to “new Americans” who were “primitive” and “ruthless” souls who didn’t trouble themselves with scruples. They were “a race of buccaneers,” Carlson said.

  While the Old South languished in poverty, mythologized its bloodily defeated “Lost Cause,” and endured military occupation by US troops, men such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Flagler, and “a tribe of other swindlers and railroad wreckers, rascals one and all,” amassed huge fortunes in the final decades of the nineteenth century.

  “But to the man in the street, these were heroes to be cheered for their audacity,” Carlson wrote. “Those who grumbled at their ways were told, ‘You’d do the same thing if you only had the chance.’”

  In 1867, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act over the veto of President Andrew Johnson, and the former Confederate States were occupied by Union troops and placed under military rule. That same year, author Harriet Beecher Stowe—whose book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, supposedly was cited by President Abraham Lincoln as the cause of the Civil War—bought property on the St. Johns River near Jacksonville and built a winter home there. Her twofold purpose was to build a school for African Americans and allow her son to take advantage of the Florida climate to recover from severe wounds he’d suffered as a Union soldier during the war.

  Stowe also wrote a book about Florida called Palmetto-Leaves. She echoed Jacob Motte’s rhapsodic description of Florida. “No dreamland on earth can be more unearthly in its beauty and glory than the St. Johns in April,” she wrote.

  But she also was aware of Florida’s faults, comparing its climate to “an easy, demoralized, indulgent old grandmother, who has no particular time for anything, and does everything when she happens to feel like it.”

  Stowe cautioned newcomers to Florida. “Don’t hope for too much,” she warned, and don’t expect “an eternal summer.”

  “For ourselves,” she wrote, “we are getting reconciled to a sort of tumble-down, wild, picknicky kind of life—this general happy-go-luckiness which Florida inculcates.”

  If Florida was a woman, Stowe wrote, she would be what today would be called a “hot mess”—a brunette, dark and attractive, with beautiful skin and “a general disarray and dazzle, and with a sort of jolly untidiness, free, easy, and joyous.”

  Florida tourism got another boost in 1869 when Dr. Daniel G. Brinton, who had served as a surgeon in the Union Army of the Potomac during the Civil War, wrote A Guide-Book of Florida and the South for Tourists, Invalids and Emigrants. Brinton praised Florida’s winter climate, saying it was “in some respects unsurpassed by any portion of the United States.”

  He was effusive in his praise of Fort Dallas and Biscayne Bay.

  “Undoubtedly the finest winter climate in the United States,” Brinton wrote, “both in point of temperature and health, is to be found on the south-eastern coast of Florida. It is earnestly to be hoped, for the sake of invalids, that accommodations along the shore of Key Biscayne and the mouth of the Miami [River], will, before long, be provided, and that a weekly or semi-weekly steamer be run from Key West thither.”

  He backed up his praise of the healthful winters with a quote from Dr. R. F. Simpson, an army surgeon who had served at most of the antebellum military bases in Florida. Simpson said Biscayne Bay “has a climate, in every respect, perhaps, unsurpassed by any in the world.”

  In 1873, another New England Yankee came to Florida and was enthralled. Massachusetts-born author and journalist Edward King took an extended tour of the old Confederacy and wrote a series of stories about each Southern state for Scribner’s Magazine. The stories later were collected into a book, The Great South: A Record of Journeys, published in 1875.

  In his essay about Florida, King praised the climate and tropical beauty of “our new winter paradise.”

  “In the winter months, soft breezes come caressingly; the whole peninsula is carpeted with blossoms, and the birds sing sweetly in the untrodden thickets,” he wrote. “It has the charm of wildness, of mystery; it is untamed; civilization has not stained it.”

  In the eight years since the Civil War had ended, King noted, Florida had become a haven for winter-weary Northerners and those suffering from tuberculosis and other debilitating diseases.

  King noted that Florida’s Silver Spring, south of Gainesville, was attracting fifty thousand tourists a year in the early 1870s. And he was charmed by Palatka, a “cheery, neat” town on the St. Johns River south of Gainesville and about thirty miles inland from St. Augustine.

  King drew a languid, lyrical sketch of Palatka and its waterfront.

  “Little parties lazily bestow themselves along the river bank, with books or sketching materials, and alternately work, doze or gossip, until the whistles of the ascending or descending steamers are heard, when everybody flocks to the wharves,” he wrote. “At evening a splendid white moonlight transfigures all the leaves and trees and flowers; the banjo and guitar, accompanying [N]egro melodies, are heard in the streets; a heavy tropical repose falls over the little town, its wharves and rivers.”

  George Colby, a twenty-seven-year-old New Yorker, was a different kind of restless dreamer who came to Florida in 1875. He was not drawn by Florida’s mild winter climate or sent there to recover from illness. Colby claimed to have been led there by a spirit guide he called Seneca, who wanted him to establish a community of like-minded spiritualists in the Florida wilderness.

  Seneca was quite specific about where he wanted Colby to establish this community: It would be near a spring that discharges into the St. Johns River and seven pine-covered hills overlooking a group of lakes.

  In early November 1875, Colby, supposedly following Seneca’s instructions, set out in a mule-drawn wagon through the woods of interior Florida. Soon he found seven pine-covered hills overlooking some lakes near Blue Spring. He chose this spot to establish Cassadaga, a small village of spiritualists near DeLand.

  Ulysses Grant lef
t the White House in 1877 after serving two terms; however, his staunchest supporters wanted him to seek a third term in 1880, after his Republican successor, President Rutherford B. Hayes, announced he would not seek reelection. Despite the fact that serving a third term would break George Washington’s sacred precedent of serving only two terms, Grant did not discourage the idea.

  But Grant’s supporters started worrying that voters would tire of the former and possibly future president as he made a cross-country trip in 1879. They convinced him to get out of the country for a while. Grant set off for Cuba and Mexico.

  In early January 1880, Grant and his family reached Florida, en route to Havana. He was impressed, and realized that Florida had great potential.

  “I am very much pleased with Florida,” he wrote in a January 18, 1880, letter to a friend. “The winter climate is perfection, and, I am told by Northern men settled here, that the summers are not near so hot as in the North, though of longer continuance. This state has a great future before it.”

  A month later in Havana, he complained about the “sultry” weather in Cuba, “just such as we run from at home in the Dog Days.” Florida was a much better winter resort than muggy Havana, he wrote.

  Florida appealed to different passions in politicians and businessmen. Their dreams focused on figuring out a way to package and sell the state’s most abundant asset—lots and lots of undeveloped land—for huge profits.

  Florida’s leaders thought they could pull the state out of the postwar wreckage and political chaos in the former Confederate States by giving twenty-two million acres—more than half the state—to railroad companies and then issuing state bonds to pay for laying track. They assumed that railroads would lure business investments that would in turn create jobs and prosperity. But industry wasn’t interested, and the money to pay off the bonds didn’t come.

  Desperate to prevent the state from defaulting on its ill-conceived bonds, Governor William Bloxham made one of history’s biggest land deals. He persuaded wealthy Philadelphia industrialist Hamilton Disston to buy four million acres—an area larger than the state of Connecticut—at 25 cents an acre. Disston’s first payment of $500,000 in May 1881 kept the state solvent.

  Disston boasted that he’d turn Kissimmee, a scrubby little cattle town in central Florida near Orlando, into a “magic city.” He also expected to greatly increase his wealth in the process.

  But Disston badly miscalculated the amount of money, work, and plain old good luck he’d need to make his venture pay off. He struggled for more than a decade, but the deep economic depression that followed the Panic of 1893 finally put him under. Despondent because of his huge losses, Disston shot himself.

  He had no way of knowing, however, that his huge land purchase had laid the foundation for Florida’s economic salvation, because it did eventually attract the railroads, and they were willing to lay their own tracks. A few years after the unhappy, unlucky Disston was laid to rest, there were five thousand miles of rails in the state.

  Thanks to the railroads, Dr. Brinton’s guidebook, and Yankee writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edward King, northern physicians were prescribing winter trips to Florida for their patients who suffered from lingering, debilitating diseases. In 1878, a plutocrat who was amassing one of the great fortunes of the nineteenth century took his ailing wife to St. Augustine, hoping the gentle climate there would restore her frail health.

  That visiting tycoon was Henry Flagler. He was as much of a dreamer as any of the others who found their way to Florida in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. But unlike the others, Flagler had the means to reconfigure an entire state in the shape of his dreams. After Flagler was gone and new dreamers seeking overnight fortunes were pouring into the state at the peak of its wild, untamable land boom in 1925, W. L. George would note that Florida “is still conscious of Flagler, looks back to him much as Noah may have looked back to Adam.”

  Flagler, the son of a poor Presbyterian minister, was an oddity among the great fortune-gatherers of America’s Gilded Age. He believed that great wealth could only be acquired by hard, even obsessive work and self-sacrifice, and he rejected taking money from enterprises he considered immoral.

  Flagler’s father earned $400 a year as a minister. When he was fourteen, Flagler decided it was time to strike out on his own to ease his father’s financial burdens.

  He set out on foot, carrying only a carpetbag for luggage. Eventually, he arrived in the small town of Republic, Ohio, about thirty miles southeast of Toledo. He had five cents in silver, four copper pennies, and a French five-franc coin.

  He went to work in a country store for $5 a month plus board. “I worked hard and saved my money,” he said in a 1907 newspaper interview with journalist James B. Barrow of the Norwalk (Ohio) Reflector.

  A few years later, Flagler took his meager savings to nearby Bellevue, Ohio, and went into the business of buying and selling grain. He met John D. Rockefeller, who sold grain on commission in Cleveland. Rockefeller became Flagler’s agent for wheat sales.

  Flagler also bought an interest in a distillery—a perfect place to sell his grain for a nice profit. But the son of the Presbyterian minister was uneasy about making money from whiskey, and he soon sold his interest.

  Still, Flagler did quite well as a grain merchant and accumulated a small fortune of $50,000—more than $750,000 in twenty-first-century dollars. He decided to take his capital to Saginaw, Michigan, and go into the business of manufacturing salt.

  It was one of the few bad decisions Flagler ever made. After three years, his $50,000 investment was gone and he owed another $50,000 in unpaid wages to his employees.

  He borrowed money from in-laws—at 10 percent interest—to pay off his debts, and moved on to Cleveland to reenter the grain business.

  By now, his old associate John D. Rockefeller was a partner in an oil refining business. Once again, Flagler borrowed money from an in-law and bought a partnership in the business in 1867. Three years later, they dissolved the partnership and organized the Standard Oil Company.

  “We worked night and day, making good oil as cheaply as possible and selling it for all we could get,” Flagler said.

  Standard Oil grew like a weed. Years later, Rockefeller said Flagler had been the brains behind the company’s rapid and profitable growth.

  Perhaps heeding the advice of a physician who believed in Florida’s healing powers, Flagler took his wife, Ida Harkness Flagler, to St. Augustine in 1878, hoping to restore her failing health. The city’s graceful antiquity charmed Flagler, and it was a visit he would remember.

  Flagler remarried after Ida died in 1881. Remembering the charms of St. Augustine, Flagler took his new bride to the city for their honeymoon. But while the city impressed him, he was unimpressed by St. Augustine’s hotels.

  So, with the same inspiration that had enabled him to turn Standard Oil into a profit-spewing giant, Flagler hit upon an idea. If he liked St. Augustine, other visitors likely would as well. If he didn’t think much of the hotels, neither would other well-heeled worldly travelers. So he’d build a hotel that would satisfy the discerning and expensive tastes of these visitors.

  And he had another idea. He could build and own the means of transportation that could bring hundreds of those visitors to St. Augustine every day—the railroad.

  This formula was one Flagler would repeat for two decades—extending his Florida East Coast Railway down the state’s Atlantic coast, and building sumptuous hotels along the way. His first hotel, the sprawling, 544-room Ponce de León Hotel, opened in St. Augustine in 1885.

  That same year, young Thomas Edison was attending the World Industrial and Cotton Centennial in New Orleans when he heard that bamboo grew to towering heights near Fort Myers on the Florida Gulf Coast. Since bamboo was used as the filament in his incandescent lightbulbs, he decided to go to Fort Myers to take a look.

  Edison, thirty-eight years old and recently a widower, decided to build a winter home in
Fort Myers. He would spend winters there for six decades, and his presence would help to transform Fort Myers from a rustic village where cattle roamed the unpaved streets into a bustling city.

  By the last decade of the nineteenth century, more dreamers and schemers were finding their way to Florida. One of them was Cyrus Teed, a doctor, who claimed that he was visited by an angel in 1870 in his laboratory in Utica, New York.

  Teed said that the angel—blonde, beautiful, and dressed in a gorgeous gold-and-purple gown—had explained to him that conventional science was wrong about the nature of the universe. The sun and the orbiting solar system didn’t exist, she said. The Earth actually was hollow, and the universe existed inside it. The continents were on the inner walls of the hollow sphere, and the sun and heavens were suspended in the center of the sphere.

  Teed, who started calling himself “Koresh,” thought such a revelation was worthy of a religious movement, but he had trouble attracting followers until 1886, when he spoke to the National Association for Mental Sciences in Chicago. Koresh explained his theories, and his audience was amazed. They elected him president and gave him a free hand to reshape the organization as he wished. Soon it became the Koreshan Unity.

  Koresh’s followers eventually made him a wealthy man, but Chicago newspapers were skeptical of the self-proclaimed religious leader, “whose brown, restless eyes glow and burn like live coals.” And Koresh was branded a home-wrecker and reportedly was nearly lynched by angry Chicago husbands whose wives had succumbed to his charismatic appeal and joined his group.

  Teed started looking into Florida real estate, and, with winter approaching, he bought about three hundred acres near Fort Myers in November 1894. The seller was an immigrant farmer named Gustave Damkohler, who was dazzled by Teed’s plans to build the utopian city of New Jerusalem, where, he predicted, ten million people of all races would live in harmony.

  The winter of 1894–95 began as a typically mild Florida winter. But before it ended, bitterly cold weather would change the course of Florida’s history.