Miami. Jan Nijman
of all the characters involved in Miami’s beginning. He was the one who built the railway, first to Miami and later all the way down to Key West. It was vital because it allowed agricultural produce to be transported north. It provided a powerful injection into South Florida’s agricultural sector, which in turn attracted growing numbers of farmers and laborers. According to popular legend, Julia Tuttle persuaded Flagler by sending him a box of fresh oranges from her grove in 1894, the year that the entire Florida harvest some sixty miles north of Miami had been destroyed by frost. At the time, Flagler’s railway was not supposed to go south of West Palm Beach. Tuttle added to her plea by offering him parts of her land.
The first train pulled into the Miami station on April 13, 1896. Flagler was a seasoned businessman whose partnership with John D. Rockefeller in Standard Oil had already made him a multimillionaire. Most likely, he had estimated the profitability of a southern extension well beyond the citrus industry that was promoted by Tuttle. In addition to constructing the railway, he acquired large tracts of land and drew up the grid for Miami’s street pattern. Present-day Flagler Street is the center of Miami’s grid pattern, dividing the city into northern and southern halves. He was instrumental in creating the town’s basic infrastructure with roads and water and electricity systems, and he designated a separate residential area for black workers. He also financed the first newspaper, which carried the somewhat grandiose title Miami Metropolis.
Perhaps most of all, Flagler had his eye on South Florida’s potential as a magnet for tourists. In 1897, he opened the exclusive Royal Palm Hotel on the north bank of the river. It was a grand five-story building fully equipped with four hundred rooms, electricity, elevators, and a swimming pool. The Royal Palm soon became a place to be seen for the nation’s elite. Among the guests were John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and the Vanderbilts. When the city was incorporated in 1896, some of Flagler’s supporters proposed to name it after him, but he is said to have declined the honor. Instead, it was decided to stick with “Miami,” the name used half a century earlier by William English and first recorded by the Spanish after their encounter with the Tequesta.
Henry Flagler became known as the Father of Miami but he was a distant father at best. Born in New York in 1830, he was in his sixties when he came down to work in South Florida. He was already independently wealthy. Between 1895 and 1900 he spent part of his time in Dade County, some of it in the Keys, New York, and elsewhere, and most of it in Palm Beach, where he had his primary residence. From 1901 to his death in 1913 he lived in his Whitehall estate in Palm Beach and he was buried in St. Augustine. Flagler never called Miami home.
It is estimated that in the last five years of the nineteenth century the population of Dade County tripled to 4,995 persons. The rapid increase was due to the railway. A town was arising on both sides of the Miami River, stimulated with the construction of the first bridge. At the center of the town was a retail district along today’s Miami Avenue and the Royal Palm Hotel, both north of the river. The town was supported by agriculture, construction, and incipient tourism. It attracted an unusual mix of people from various walks of life. The material and social inequalities were enormous.
Figure 3. The Royal Palm Hotel on the north bank of the river, 1917. State Archives of Florida.
Figure 4. Teeing off at the Royal Palm, 1899. State Archives of Florida.
Figure 5. Workers digging the foundation of the Royal Palm Hotel, 1896. State Archives of Florida.
For some, like James Deering, South Florida offered an opportunity to live a fantasy. Born in 1859, he was the son of William Deering, a well-known industrialist and the inventor of the harvester machine. Based in Chicago, the Deerings were one of the wealthiest families in the United States. James Deering set himself the task of building “the finest private house ever built in America” right on Biscayne Bay about a mile south of the river. The Villa Vizcaya, as it was named, was inspired by Renaissance-style Italian mansions from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Construction started in 1912 and the house itself was finished in 1916—work on the gardens continued. Many of the materials were shipped from the Mediterranean. No less than one thousand workers were involved, including craftsmen from Europe and the Caribbean, this at a time when the city of Miami counted about ten thousand people. Set on 180 acres, the estate had meticulously kept gardens and was designed to be self-sufficient with livestock, horticulture fields, and wells.
Vizcaya represented the apex of the American renaissance movement. Deering traveled most summers to Europe with his general art supervisor and close friend, Paul Chalfin, to buy materials, furniture, antiques, and art for decoration. The villa had lavishly designed renaissance, baroque, rococo, and neoclassical rooms. Deering spent the winters here from 1916 to his death in 1926. Presently, Vizcaya is a museum of sixteenth- through nineteenth-century European decorative arts and most of the interior is in its original state.
Why James Deering embarked on the Vizcaya project remains a mystery. One might say he was in Miami not to work but to play and he did not associate much with local business circles. His unmarried status, frequent travels with Chalfin, apparent affection for the male nude statues displayed on the estate, and the rococo decorative overkill made it all seem rather queer—but this was half a century before such things were even talked about in public in South Florida. Deering died on board a steamship en route to the United States and was buried in the family grave in Chicago. The beneficiaries of his philanthropic legacy were mainly up north and included several Chicago hospitals and the Art Institute of Chicago. Vizcaya came into the hands of family members up north as well, but they donated it to Dade County in 1952, to turn it into a museum.
To the large majority of the population at the time, Deering’s life must have seemed a fairy tale. Most were poor laborers living in harsh conditions. The clearing of most of southeast Florida’s dense mangrove vegetation was done manually with machetes; it took tremendous efforts and caused a fair number of casualties. The building of the railway and the expansion of farms required hard labor as well. Many workers were recruited from the southern states and from the Bahamas. By 1910, more than 40 percent of the city’s residents were black, most of them laborers. About half of them came from the Bahamas.4 Little is known about the personal histories of these working people and even of black business leaders like Dana A. Dorsey,5 in sharp contrast to that of white pioneers.
Figure 6. Colored Town, 1906 (later renamed Overtown). © Florida Photograph Collection, Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries.
The Sewell brothers “worked Negroes as their specialty. With hundreds of them, they accomplished wonders in clearing land so that buildings could be erected.”6 John Sewell arrived from West Palm Beach to work for Flagler in 1896. To make sure his personal history would not be lost to humanity, the immodest Sewell published his own memoirs in 1933.7 He was a shrewd entrepreneur and political operator for Flagler. People would speak of Sewell’s “black artillery” in reference to the groups of black workers he commandeered around town, carrying shovels on their shoulders like rifles. He was known for his manipulation of these workers’ votes whenever needed in local elections. In 1905 Sewell himself was elected the mayor of Miami. His self-aggrandizing memoirs place him at the center of Miami’s growth: “I have decided to have the history published as my point of view is different from the others. My data are from the inside of the ring and absolute facts.” In an appendix on the assassination attempt on the president-elect, Franklin Roosevelt, in Miami in February 19338 he wrote: “Myself and my wife were within 25 feet of Governor Roosevelt and 40 feet from the assassin, which shows after 37 years I am still on the inside of the ring.”
There is a pertinacious quality to stories about Miami’s early pioneers. Although they were portrayed as adventurous and persevering heroes who beat the odds and became self-made men on Miami’s frontier,