Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
In 10 years, from 1881 to 1891, Florida's railroad miles quintupled, from 550 to 2566.
Most of this track crisscrossed northern and central Florida, where the people were, but
one rail line went south to nowhere. In 1886, railroad magnate Henry Flagler started build-
ing a railroad down the coast on the spectacular gamble that once he built it, people would
come.
In 1896 Flagler's line stopped at the squalid village of Fort Dallas, which incorporated
as the city of Miami that same year. Then, people came, and kept coming, and Flagler is
largely credited with founding every town from West Palm Beach to Miami.
It's hard to do justice to what happened next, but it was madness, pure and simple - far
crazier than Ponce's dream of eternal waters. Why, all South Florida needed was to get rid
of that pesky swamp, and then it really would be paradise: a land of eternal sunshine and
profit.
In 1900 Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, envisioning an 'Empire of the Ever-
glades,' set in motion a frenzy of canal building. Over the next 70 years, some 1800 miles
of canals and levees were etched across Florida's porous limestone. These earthworks
drained about half the Everglades (about 1.5 million acres) below Lake Okeechobee, re-
placing it with farms, cattle ranches, orange groves, sugarcane and suburbs.
From 1920 to 1925 the South Florida land boom swept the nation. In 1915 Miami Beach
was a sand bar; by 1925 it had 56 hotels, 178 apartment buildings and three golf courses.
In 1920 Miami had one skyscraper; by 1925, 30 were under construction. In 1925 alone,
2.5 million people moved to Florida. Real-estate speculators sold undeveloped land, un-
dredged land, and then just the airy paper promises of land. Everything went like hotcakes.
Then, two hurricanes struck, in 1926 and 1928, and the party ended. The coup de grĂ¢ce
was the October 1929 stock-market crash, which took everyone's money. Like the nation,
Florida plunged into the Depression, though the state rode it out better than most due to
New Deal public works, tourism, and a highly profitable foray into rumrunning.
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