The St. Augustine Visitors' Bureau #2: Florida East Coast (Railway)

The Standard Oil Company was founded in Cleveland, which is about as far spiritually and climatically as it is possible to get from St. Augustine anywhere in the United States. The failed salt miner Henry Flagler, who had made friends with John D. Rockefeller when both were selling grain, was one of the partners. It is hard to imagine a person in this country who has not heard of John D. Rockefeller, and harder still to imagine a regular person who is aware that John D. Rockefeller gave all the credit for Standard Oil’s monopolization practices and success to Henry Flagler.

Henry Flagler’s wife was dying when he first arrived in Florida, and the climate of Jacksonville, though no good for the consumption that Mary eventually died of, sparked an idea in Henry's business mind. He gazed down the east coast to the Keys, and then directed his eyes back up. Wasn’t there something in St. Augustine?

He headed down there, a day’s journey through swamp on bad roads still, and found on the outskirts of town a large mansion, which he tried to rent. He was rebuffed, though he offered nearly ten thousand dollars, an absurd sum for the time, to rent for just a week. Instead, the owner of the mansion, on a plantation, suggested that he move to town.

His new wife needed little convincing, and they built a large home for themselves in St. Augustine. Suddenly, around them, on the day they arrived to occupy the home, possibility began to form. A whole town, it seemed, had come into existence around them, with a lighthouse, and some picturesque old Spanish ruins being maintained with a surprising amount of love by a group of folks calling themselves Minorcans, not that Henry Flagler had ever heard of Minorca before, and some clapboard shacks.

He decided, almost at the spur of the moment, that people would want to visit, many people, who would need to be accommodated in great luxury. He built a hotel, over 500 rooms that almost bankrupted him, one of the grandest in all the land at the moment its doors first swung open. A belltower and a Spanish tile roof and a beautiful orange stucco exterior that could be seen for miles and miles and miles around, and then it was decided that what was missing was a grand railroad station to go along with a grander railroad.

It was an ambitious name, Florida East Coast, for a road that went from Jacksonville to Daytona via St. Augustine, the puffing iron horses burning coal from Pennsylvania that came down on the Seaboard Air Line and boiling water for steam from the same only-slightly-brackish springs that people were drinking out of.

There would be more, though, he believed, and it started to come true a little bit, his branch to Palatka connecting with the Atlantic Coast Line and the Central of Georgia carrying passengers through from Gainesville, where the University just now was, out to see the sights in St. Augustine.

–

Usually railroaders are the men who move the trains around and railroad men are the barons who move the money around, and usually the ties that bind the money to the wheels get forgotten, but sometimes memory demands and receives intention. We remember the Chinese section hands of the Transcontinental now because we’ve made a concerted effort to thanks to the demands of their descendants, and we remember the Irish and Italian and Black trackmen and sandhogs of the New York Subway because the city’s put effort into commemorating their memory, and we remember the prisoners of the Tsar and the Soviets who built the Trans-Siberian because they wrote hauntingly of their experiences and we chose to read. The folks who laid Henry Flagler’s rails, though, have faded like so many others.

This is probably because Henry Flagler was leasing these men from the state of Florida. Sure, the Civil War had ended, and slavery ostensibly with it, but being poor and Black in Florida was a very good way to get arrested and convicted and find yourself in a group of folks exempted from the protections afforded by the thirteenth amendment, leased out to the Florida East Coast. These men swung machetes and burned brush and slept in jail camps each night. They poured fill into muck, braving quicksand and disease and slept under the armed guard of deputy wardens. They cut wood for ties and hauled long rails over and placed spikes in and whacked spikes down and did it all again to the called cadence until the light got low and they tucked into cots that were property of the State of Florida.

But in their hastily-assembled jail camps some of the men sketched out tales of the future. They talked, they gambled, they planned. There was a peninsula out there, on the opposite side of the Tolomato river from the tracks they were putting down. There was a section, south of the King’s Road, that was wet a lot, but looked solid enough to bring up crops. Over there, nobody had anything built or staked. One of the men swore the land belonged to someone who’d gotten it off the Freedmen’s Bureau and still had it in his family, just he used it to pull shrimp from the river and nothing else, sold those for enough to pay the tax and feed himself.

If they got out from under the yoke of the state, three then five then twenty of the section hands said, they could fill the land like they’d been filling around the track ballast. They could work for the Railroad for money instead of time and fish the rivers to supplement their income and bring their families around, too, and build a little community, but a real one.

And morning after morning, laying the interchanges and shoveling the small-stone ballast and hewing ties with axes and tossing up telegraph poles alongside, more and more of them started to see what it might look like, just on the other side of the river. They stayed, asked to be in the group of leased folks who built the station and then the hotel and as they got released they kept staying there, right where they’d imagined they would.

Their comrades of the nine pound hammer who wanted to get gone barely noticed as the folks who had thought the plan through slipped off into what looked like nothing to start building for themselves. And so some moved along further south with the Railroad, pushing towards Daytona, but some others began to form part of the place with their hands and tools and in their own eyes too.

–

And then, one winter, it froze. For the first time in a long time, a genuine cold settled upon St. Augustine and also on the rest of Florida known and used at the time, cracking timber and killing trees and wiping out in one violent breath millions of dollars of investment until, from the southernmost point, from a ranch straddling the Miami River and covering six hundred and forty acres of dry land, came a bouquet of fresh orange blossoms.

These blossoms, courtesy of a Julia Tuttle – who said that she had founded and divided up a townsite on the river and would sell the lots as absolutely frostproof, as proven in this hardest of hard frosts, if only the railroad would come through – were delivered to Henry Flagler in his mansion in St. Augustine. He had them made into a bouquet and presented them to his mistress, and construction began in earnest again. Julia Tuttle sold property and built a city and caused, from very little, a second boom in citrus.

That was, of course, accompanied by a boom in tourism, and not just to the new Miami. Those people seeking the warmth and delights of Florida no longer thought to stop in its north, where there might be a freeze they had already come so far to escape. They could go instead to Miami, or to Key West, even, on the Overseas Railway, and so they did that too.

This would seem to concern us very little, sure, Miami is a different world entirely. But it came to pass that it was too profitable to cary freight (in the form of citrus and orange juice) up and down the coast, and Henry Flagler was a jealous man, and so the Champion Service of the Atlantic Coast Line went down the west coast of Florida most of the way, and the Silver Meteor of the Seaboard Coast Line went down as far as Jacksonville and then turned inland until Palm Beach. 

And so it was that our little St. Augustine, bypassed except by oranges, remained served by a little branch out towards Gainesville, whose residents (and their neighbors in the more far-flung parts of Alachua County) took advantage and made the tourism their own, a little sea and sand and sun the privilege of the working man. Why more working people, from elsewhere, didn’t come to their little outpost was for them a question that didn’t need an answer. 

The St. Augustine Visitors' Bureau #1: Geographical Imagination

On my first visit to St. Augustine, walking down a stone-paved alleyway in the Old Town, I was interrupted outside a small theater with a Spanish Tile roof and invited inside to watch a magic show. As the magician’s assistant outside did a quick illusion to draw the crowd, I decided that I thought it was magic enough to be physically present in an imaginary place. 

Sure, yes, the big lighthouse painted like a barber pole in a black-and-white photograph exists, a giant pulsing light behind its fresnel lens warding mariners through the treacherous waters around the entrance to the harbor to its north and up and down the Intracoastal Waterway and the Tolomato River and the Matanzas River where they come together. Anyone can see that. 

Certainly there’s an airport there, and you can even buy tickets to it, and take off or land on the outskirts of town. There are hotels, and there are museums, and there are beaches. You’ve heard about all of this, maybe, or maybe not. I had, before I got to visit. It was a bit of a myth to me, though, as it probably is to you.

Florida is Miami and Orlando, Tampa and Key West, Pensacola and Daytona Beach, Jacksonville and the Everglades. Florida certainly isn’t a tiny Spanish settlement built primarily from seashells in not-insignificant part by the first documented Black conquistador, Juan Garrido. Florida was built by the citrus industry and its railroads, and then by the tourist industry and especially Disney and then by suburban developers targeting the ancient. It certainly, over here in reality, wasn’t founded well before Jamestown or the Mayflower or even New Amsterdam.

My uncle started his time in Florida as an alligator wrangler on one of the ranches left over from the time when the beef industry was king of big chunks of Florida. By the time I was old enough to notice, though, my grandparents lived on a small island off the coast of Georgia and my uncle lived with his family in a suburb of Jacksonville. The Florida suburbs are interchangeable to an outsider like me, but their subtleties do not escape the heron-eyed Floridian. My aunt and uncle moved south to a small subdivision carved out of the swamp near a medium-sized castle on a strip between the Atlantic and the Intracoastal, and then my grandfather passed and my grandmother consolidated to a lovely apartment across from a fancy beach club ten minutes up Florida A1A from them.

This is what let me set foot in the place itself, I think. It’s easier these days than ever, I’m told, what with there being more than half a million people in the four-county stripe and family from far afield being allowed since time immemorial. 

And so I went, and I touched St. Augustine, and walked its streets, and went to its beaches – Vilano Beach specifically, near the delightfully old-style Italian restaurant (just over the new high bridge carrying A1A) and the Publix serving the beaches near the Preserve – and ended up outside the magic theater. I had just watched a significantly more convincing theatrical performance when a bunch of old folks dressed like they were officers of the Spanish Main fired off a cannon inside the big coquina star fort that somehow became a National Park, and I could smell paella steaming up from the patio of a nearby Spanish restaurant and I felt so lucky to be able to be there for all those moments that I turned to my cousin and suggested a relaxing long lunch instead, and off we went.

–

There is a time before history, and there is a time before humanity, and there is a time before the land that would eventually become Florida and in all three of those the Alligator was around. He isn’t the oldest crocodilian, some of his brethren can trace their families back to a time when their ancestors dined on pachycephalosaurus. He’s only been with the earth for 37 million years.

He looks every one of those years as he crawls along. The alligator looks every moment of those lives as he suns himself just on the edge of the water. He looks like he has learned and forgotten again the meaning of age as he gapes his mouth open for a stretch, a little bird landing on his back to chirp memories of prehistory into his ear.

And then you see him in the water, cutting through it with the deftness of the finest soccer player and the obvious strength of an offensive lineman and the terrifying inevitability of a slugger on a hot streak and you know why the alligator has ruled this land answering few questions about his reign. He is the king of these marshlands and swamps. You know, seeing him, that you are a passing tourist in the alligator's domain with the good fortune to meet with his ambivalence.

It would be too strong to say that the alligator is as important or as competent or even as intentional an engineer of his domain as the beaver is of hers, no animal can touch her large-scale changes to the landscape without a front-end loader. But the alligator hollows out hollows for his cooling in the hottest times in which water-dependent life survives the dry seasons, and he does more to shape the earth than just build nests for the young. I would be remiss in arguing that he is a true engineer, but he certainly dabbles.

I would be remiss in arguing that he has built the landscape of Florida to his specifications, but it would be fair to say that the alligator has found a place that fits his needs perfectly. The land the alligator found and settled and spread throughout was varied. It has swamps of freshwater and high reeds and tidal islands. It has lowlands covered in thick stands of medium trees. It has brush, endless tangling matting brush of every plausible kind, running together into thick walls over the landscape for acres and acres and acres. In this land, he makes his home.

Our intervention hasn’t done much to change his perspective on the land. The alligator likes our yards and pools and the spaces we’ve cleared and flattened and especially our golf courses, where we’ve engineered the land almost perfectly to his specifications.

But it was those varied lands that still, kind of, in some small patches, exist across the peninsula of Florida that first welcomed the alligator on his migration. The alligator adapted to the land and made it his home long before any of us ever imagined anything there.

It’s still his home now, of course. It’s been his home for 30-odd million years, and I wager it’ll be the alligator’s home even after it’s unsuitable for being ours. But we’ve done a little something to improve a small part of it for the alligator and his crocodilian brethren, and not just on the front nine.

All 23 other extant species of crocodilian have joined their alligator friend at a little place called the Alligator Farm in St. Augustine. It is widely recognized as the very first tourist attraction in Florida, serving soldiers at a local fort and then growing and changing and (while continuing to serve nearby soldiers and their families as bases grew and as we fought more and then permanently reshaped the warm parts of our country with young people who realized as they learned to fight that they didn’t need to spend all winter frozen) working harder to pretend to be an actual zoo dedicated to colossal alligators and other crocodilians. They’re not home, there, the other ones, it gets a bit cold for them in the winter, but they’re certainly not leaving.

It’s not well known that the alligator is a gregarious creature, I think the common imagination makes him seem more solitary than he is. I wonder if the alligators inside the farm can hear their free brethren when they bellow, whether they hear or feel the infrasound of their mating calls and signals to each other in their bodies, whether that makes the captive gators pine for the open range of St. John’s County.

–

Juan Ponce de Leon couldn’t find the Fountain of Youth when he landed at St. Augustine with his fellow conquistadores. This is a fact we learn early in histories of the conquest, and often we learn it as a joke at the expense of the merciless conquistadores, who might have been able to conquer and enslave and murder tens of thousands of indigenous people and destroy dozens of thriving cultures, but who were foolish enough to imagine that they would find water granting them eternal life and even eternal youth to go alongside.

Ponce de Leon’s arrival in Florida was auspicious, though. He found the land covered in flowers and bestowed its name in honor of the season. And then he started to look. “It’s hot in Florida, and humid too” is the obvious drilled into the mind, but even though he was from Spain, Ponce de Leon could hardly have imagined the sheer power of the chewable air oppressing his men-at-arms. 

And surely the air chewed them back. His landing was right around biting gnat season, and the great clouds of noseums (who are not possessed of the pain-relieving compounds in the mouthparts of mosquitoes) were most certainly pleased to be provided a buffet of individuals unfamiliar with their ways. The only way to avoid the dozens of pinpricks is to move, to slog forward through the swamp and reeds and alligators and mangroves of the coast underfoot and through the air itself wet enough to mildew a fancy Spanish blouse and pantaloons almost overnight. 

Compelled forward, Ponce de Leon and his men killed and raped and enslaved and tasted every brackish spring, hoping to stave off the death they must have known awaited them in this new land. And one by one they dropped, falling to their surroundings and making graves around the place and seeing only swamp and death and failure, killed by the land they failed to tame. Ponce de Leon himself was slain as he attempted a theft near Tampa, long having left St. Augustine behind.

About a half-century later, though, Pedro Menendez came again to the same inlet, but with the intent to make a life there. He found the place surprisingly amenable, he massacred only Frenchmen meandering through the area unable to see what was in front of their faces. He put down roots, and in those roots he inscribed the name of an old North African saint, Augustine.

Menendez knew a good thing when he had it and he wasn’t going to let it go for nothing, so he twisted into those roots a promise that the keepers of the place would enjoy its benefits to themselves. That promise grew to an aura as the settlement multiplied and fortified (mostly out of old sea shells turned into cement turned into a star fort at one of the three most favorable points along the harbor, though not the one actually commanding the highest ground), joined only by a favored few, those hearty enough to negotiate the swamps and creeks and permanent backcountry extending inland a ways. 

There, in the furthest inland reaches of this part of New Spain, Juan Garrido took refuge and extended the roots laid by his captain Menendez and briefly ranched a large patch before he failed into a job as a watchman. He sold the ranch back to the Spanish treasury for a pension, but the prairie his cattle grazed remained, and the remains of his cattle, felled by fever, helped to keep the roots he laid growing strong into the land until it held a part of Menendez’s original promise.

Today, along the beat Juan Garrido walked until he died, painted onto a large plank of wood outside a tall clapboard fence, a sign proclaims that the Fountain of Youth exists in St. Augustine. It’s there in plain sight for those who can find the way to see, and known to anyone with a few dollars to cough up for a quick taste.