by Willie Drye
On Christmas Day, the temperature climbed into the 80s in Orlando, the center of Florida’s growing citrus industry. But the warm temperature would prove to be especially cruel for the state’s orange and grapefruit trees.
A few days after Christmas, citrus growers gathered in Orlando’s San Juan Hotel. On December 28, a cold front from the northwest pushed rain and plummeting temperatures into northern and central Florida. The following morning, the citrus growers awoke to a temperature of 24 degrees Fahrenheit in Orlando—stunning cold for Florida.
Had cooler temperatures prevailed in northern and central Florida earlier in December, the citrus trees would have started going dormant and thus been a little better prepared for the cold snap. Still, some oranges and grapefruit trees might have survived even the plunge into the mid-20s had the cold been brief. But the warm Christmas Day temperature followed by the sudden, brutal, and prolonged cold snap was the end of the citrus crop. Even the fruit that had been hanging on the trees at the time of the plunge in the temperature froze.
Panic spread through the San Juan Hotel. Around nine p.m. on the evening of December 29, a handsome, middle-aged man wearing a Stetson hat and a fashionable frock coat stepped out of the hotel to check the temperature. He looked at the thermometer and groaned aloud. Then he pulled out a pistol and put a bullet into his brain.
A few days into the New Year, temperatures warmed, and by late January the few trees that had somehow managed to survive the December freeze were recovering. But on February 7, 1895, an even colder icy blast dropped the temperature in northern and central Florida to 17 degrees. Manatees froze to death in the Sebastian River near Melbourne, and a bizarre icy appearance descended on the tropical landscape.
“It was a strange experience to walk over the frozen sand and see every little puddle covered with ice, on a trail overhung by the sub-tropical vegetation of a Florida hammock with a north wind blowing in my face that chilled me to the bones,” Outram Bangs recalled in an article for The American Naturalist a few months later.
It would be years before the citrus crop recovered. And the twin freezes of December and February started a domino-like effect of failing businesses and then failing banks. Before the freezes, eight banks operated in Orlando and surrounding Orange County. Only one bank survived the economic chaos after the freeze.
While orange and grapefruit trees in Florida were being killed by icy weather, a vicious winter storm was forming off the Atlantic coast, and bitterly cold temperatures plunged much of the nation into a deep freeze. Dallas, Texas, reported a temperature of 0 degrees Fahrenheit on the morning of February 7, 1895, and towns in Colorado reported temperatures of 8 below. Railroad traffic was hopelessly snarled by ice and snow. In Memphis, a railroad flagman slipped on ice and fell in front of a moving train.
The storm slammed into New England with terrific force. It had been a long time since the old-timers on Cape Cod had seen anything like the blizzard that walloped them with winds approaching hurricane strength on February 8, 1895.
But while the rest of the nation was shivering and cursing the cold, the temperature on Biscayne Bay near the tip of the Florida peninsula stayed above the freezing mark. Julia Tuttle, a shrewd local businesswoman and landowner who had been trying to persuade Henry Flagler to extend his railroad to Fort Dallas, decided to make one more try. Legend has it that she sent fresh flowers and orange blossoms to Flagler to impress upon him that while the rest of the nation was frozen, Fort Dallas and Biscayne Bay were untouched by the awful winter.
So as the nation dug itself out from the arctic blast of February 1895, two men made decisions that would have dramatic effects on Florida’s future. In St. Augustine, Henry Flagler—with or without the orange blossoms from Tuttle—decided to extend his railroad to Fort Dallas. And in Massachusetts, Reverend Solomon Merrick, a Congregationalist minister who had ridden out the blizzard with his family on Cape Cod, decided he’d had enough of New England winters. He was going to move his family to a little settlement on the balmy shores of Biscayne Bay. His young son George would later figure prominently in Florida’s development.
By April 1896, Flagler had extended his railroad to Fort Dallas. Along the way he’d built hotels in Jacksonville, Ormand Beach, and Palm Beach, as well as a second hotel in St. Augustine. He had also built a lavish mansion in Palm Beach for his third wife, Mary Lily Kenan Flagler.
Flagler also was working on a new hotel in the little settlement that had been named after the old Seminole Wars fort. The utilitarian military name had been changed to something more lyrical in July 1896. Taking its name from the river that flowed into Biscayne Bay, the settlement was now called Miami. And in January 1897, the sumptuous hotel that inevitably followed Flagler’s railroad opened—the Royal Palm Hotel. The yellow-and-white, six-story hotel included a swimming pool and docks for guests’ yachts.
Flagler bought land from Julia Tuttle and the Brickell family, and he intended to build a city around his railroad. But before Tuttle sold the land to Flagler, she made him agree to an unusual clause she’d inserted into the deed to his new property. Before Flagler could resell the land, the prospective buyer had to agree not to buy, sell, or manufacture alcoholic beverages on the property. If a landowner violated this clause, the land immediately reverted to Flagler.
As soon as Miami was established, however, determined entrepreneurs set up saloons less than twenty feet from the new city limits. It was the beginning of a battle between “wets” and “drys” in the city that would continue for decades.
In the summer of 1896, as Miami started to transform itself from a drowsy, isolated tropical village, the United States was in the process of choosing its twenty-fifth president.
In Chicago, Democrats were divided about their nominee until a young Nebraska lawyer took the podium to address the crowd. When William Jennings Bryan, only thirty-six years old, finished, he had electrified the convention and galvanized the Democrats around his candidacy.
Bryan’s oration became known as the “Cross of Gold” speech. It was an impassioned demand for fairness toward the common man, whose economic struggles were made immensely more difficult by the nation’s adherence to the gold standard that was staunchly supported by the Republican Party.
Bryan wanted to make the United States into his vision of the Promised Land, where everyone, no matter how humble their circumstances, could enjoy a life of opportunity, comfort, and security. And when humble men united behind a just cause, they were invincible, he said.
“The humblest citizen in all the land when clad in the armor of a righteous cause is stronger than all the whole hosts of error that they can bring,” Bryan said.
His stirring speech called for everyday working Americans to stand up against “the encroachments of aggregated wealth” and demanded that the “humbler members of our society” receive the benefits they had earned for helping to create the nation’s prosperity.
“We will say to the Republican Party in this campaign,” Bryan intoned in the closing of his speech, “‘you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold.’”
There was a moment of silence as Bryan ended his speech and prepared to step down from the podium. Then twenty thousand delegates exploded into applause.
“Then from the remotest wall to the speaker’s stand, from end to end of the gigantic hall, came like one great burst of artillery the answer of the convention,” the Newark (Ohio) Daily Advocate reported. “Roar upon roar, crash upon crash of fierce, delirious applause.”
The delegates stood on their chairs, threw hats into the air, and waved handkerchiefs, “tossing like whitecaps on the winter sea,” the Advocate said.
“The orator was literally whirled off his feet and borne on by the struggling masses of his frantic friends,” the Advocate said. “From that hour, Hon. Wm. J. Bryan was as good as nominated for President, despite the efforts of leaders and friends of other candidates to stop the tremen
dous tide.”
Bryan would lose the election to Republican William McKinley, and he would lose two other attempts at the White House in 1900 and 1908. But three attempts at the presidency would establish Bryan as a staunch advocate and spokesman for the common man, make his name a household word, and lay the groundwork for a profitable career in Florida real estate a few decades later.
Bryan paid his first visit to Florida in 1898, when unrest in Cuba finally brought Spain and the United States to war. Cuban rebels who wanted independence from Spain had been clashing with loyalists for years. And some, including Cuban poet and patriot José Martí, had been planning and organizing their efforts against Spain in Cuban communities in Tampa and Key West.
In January 1898, rioting erupted in Havana. On January 24, the United States dispatched the powerful battleship USS Maine from Key West to Havana, hoping that a show of force would cool passions.
On the evening of February 15, about half an hour after a US Marine bugler had blown the mournful notes of “Taps” aboard the Maine, there was a muted explosion in or near the battleship. Then came a second explosion, powerful enough to lift the ship’s bow out of the water and toss the massive turret of one of its ten-inch guns off the deck.
More than 260 American sailors were killed. Historians are still arguing about whether the explosion was caused by a bomb planted by Spanish loyalists hoping to provoke a war with the United States or by volatile gases that ignited in the battleship’s coal bunker. But after an investigation, American officials decided the deadly blast had been caused by a bomb planted by Spanish saboteurs.
Goaded on by sensationalistic newspaper stories about the explosion of the Maine and Spanish atrocities in Cuba, the United States declared war on Spain in April 1898.
The US Navy immediately took the war to the Pacific Ocean. On May 1, an American fleet under Commodore George Dewey destroyed a Spanish fleet of warships in Manila Bay in the Philippines.
But the US Army was much slower to gear up for war. The United States had not had a major mobilization of troops since the end of the Civil War. When war on Spain was declared, the US Army had only about twenty-eight thousand men under arms. It would take time to field a force against Spain. And because of Florida’s proximity to Cuba, it was a logical place for the army to prepare 125,000 new soldiers for battle.
It made sense to train troops in Jacksonville and Tampa, two cities with excellent harbors where troops and war matériel could easily be moved in and out. It made less sense to station troops in Miami, which, even with Flagler’s railroad, was still little more than a settlement and did not have a harbor comparable to Tampa, Jacksonville, and Key West.
An army inspector filed two reports saying that Miami was not a good place to put soldiers, but Miami residents believed their frontier town would be a target for Spanish ships, and Flagler thought it would be good for his railroad to have an army base there.
So troops were sent to Miami.
The city was still a frontier village with a few hundred residents in April 1898. The town started changing, however, when the troops came. Money and people poured in. Many soldiers weren’t impressed with South Florida in the summer, however; a Louisiana soldier described Miami as “a waste wilderness as can be conceived only in rare nightmares.”
American military leaders thought Tampa would be a good place to assemble and train troops for an invasion of Cuba. The declaration of war on Spain and the call for 125,000 recruits had stirred patriotic passions in young American men, who flocked to recruiting stations. Soon they were pouring into Tampa, at the time a city of about twelve thousand.
Commanding General of the Army Nelson Miles was dismayed by the conditions when he arrived in Tampa in June 1898. All was chaos. Miles pronounced the confusion “inextricable.” But eventually, American troops were ready to invade Cuba.
William Jennings Bryan volunteered his services to the US Army, and in July, he arrived in Jacksonville as a colonel commanding a regiment of troops from Nebraska. The war moved quickly once American troops invaded Cuba in mid-June, so the conflict ended with Bryan still in the army camp in Jacksonville.
Still, Bryan would not forget his first trip to Florida.
Julia Tuttle died the same month the war ended, and about half the land in Miami went to her heirs. The executor of her will, Harry Tuttle, wasn’t as fussy about booze as his mother had been. In 1900, he sold a lot inside the city limits without the “no alcohol” clause.
The new owner promptly opened a saloon.
The railroads continued to bring wealthy visitors to Florida who liked what they saw and bought property. Louis Comfort Tiffany and William Luden, the cough drop millionaire, were among the super-rich who built huge houses in Miami.
When Flagler sat down to talk with journalist James Barrow in 1907, he was only a few days past his seventy-seventh birthday, and had recently started his most ambitious—some would say craziest—project. In those long-ago days before labor unions, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency, he was extending his railroad from Miami, 128 miles down the remote, ecologically fragile Florida Keys to Key West, the nation’s southernmost city.
It was a Herculean undertaking that would require unheard-of feats of engineering.
But Flagler didn’t intend to stop at Key West. The bustling maritime city of about twenty thousand—accessible only by boat, and about as much Caribbean as American—was only ninety miles from Havana, Cuba. Flagler intended to extend rail passenger and freight service to Cuba. Tourists could board a train in New York and ride to Key West, where the passenger cars would be loaded on a special ferry for the crossing to Havana. When the ferry arrived in the Cuban capital, departing passengers would board the passenger cars for the return trip to Key West and points north.
The frugal minister’s son who had set off on his own as a teenager with a handful of coins in his pocket was worth somewhere around $60 million—about $1.5 billion in twenty-first-century dollars. Flagler recalled the early days when he was broke and in debt and trying to recover and learn from his mistakes.
“I carried a lunch in my pocket until I was a rich man,” he told Barrow. “I trained myself in the school of self-control and self-denial.”
Flagler acknowledged that the self-imposed frugality hadn’t been easy, but it was better than working for someone else.
“It was hard on [me], but I would rather be my own tyrant than have someone else tyrannize over me,” he said.
His nineteenth-century upbringing as the son of a poor-but-honest preacher had had a dramatic influence on his attitude toward great wealth.
“If money is spent for personal uses, to promote idleness, luxury, and selfishness, it is a curse to the possessor and to society,” Flagler told Barrow. “Wealth brings obligation, moral and governmental. It has but one legitimate function, and that is its employment for the welfare of the nation. The man who builds a factory or digs a mine serves his country.”
It was a properly moral Victorian attitude of noblesse oblige. And he expressed another old-fashioned opinion about acquiring great wealth: It took an awful lot of hard work and self-sacrifice, and required a single-minded, almost fanatical devotion.
“To succeed may cost one’s health, or it may mean separation from one’s family and friends and banishment to the desert, the mine, or the forest,” he said. “But no matter the way and no matter the price, success always demands unremitting toil, self-denial, and enthusiasm.”
Henry Flagler would live just long enough to see his railroad to Key West—called the Overseas Extension—completed in 1912. He died after taking a bad fall a year later at his magnificent home in Palm Beach.
Flagler’s construction crews employed hundreds of men to clear the right-of-way and lay the tracks for the railroad down Florida’s east coast. Among the men who hired on was Joe Ashley, a backwoodsman who was a highly skilled trapper and marksman.
Joe Ashley brought his fami
ly from the state’s Gulf Coast and joined Flagler’s construction crew in 1904, the year Flagler made the decision to extend his railroad to Key West. Among Joe Ashley’s sons was eleven-year-old John, who had inherited his father’s remarkable skill as a marksman with a rifle and a pistol. John preferred to spend his time in the wilds, trapping otters. The skills the youngster was developing would serve him well in another, more lucrative occupation in a few years.
In 1905, Flagler’s work crews began clearing the right-of-way to lay rails to the tip of the Florida peninsula, where they would start building bridges and laying tracks across the Florida Keys. Florida’s mild winters and rail connections to populous northeastern cities were getting more attention across the country. The January 1906 edition of National Geographic magazine noted that southern Florida was “the only truly tropical land” that was connected by rail to the eastern United States. “It is indeed a wonder that when cold weather comes, this region is not completely overrun with people,” writer John Gifford said.
As the first decade of the new century ended, Florida was not running over with people, but it was starting to get noticed. The 1910 US Census showed that the state’s population had increased from just over 528,000 in 1900 to about 753,000 in 1910.
The population increase for Dade County—which included Miami—was especially impressive. In 1900, when Dade County extended one hundred miles up the coast from Miami, its population was about 4,600. Ten years later, Dade’s boundaries had been shrunk to create Palm Beach and St. Lucie Counties to its north. But even within the diminished boundaries, Dade’s 1910 population had more than doubled in a decade, to just under 12,000. And the combined population of the new counties that occupied Dade’s old boundaries was approaching an additional 9,700 newcomers.
Americans were beginning to realize that an earthly version of Paradise lay at their doorstep. Florida was a long way from being tamed, but the tangled, unearthly wilderness that had terrified Jonathan Dickinson and alternately disgusted and enthralled Jacob Motte did not seem quite so wild and impenetrable anymore. As the first decade of the new century ended, more newcomers were coming to Florida, bringing their dreams, ideas, and money. As they worked to carve an idyllic paradise out of the wilderness, a homegrown gang of opportunistic thieves—daring, ruthless, clever, and intimately familiar with the wilds of southern Florida—were determined to grab as much of the new wealth as they could carry away to their hideout, deep in the Everglades.