Florida Guide Florida regions, islands, and historic-city planning

Rails and the boom

The railroad, Miami, and the boom

Modern Florida was built on rails. In the late nineteenth century Henry Flagler pushed a railroad down the Atlantic coast and Henry Plant built another across the Gulf side, stitching hotels to track and turning frontier beaches into resorts. Flagler's line reached a tiny settlement on Biscayne Bay in 1896 and made Miami - setting off the boom-and-bust cycle that still shapes the state.

Last checked July 12, 2026

Flagler's east coast and Plant's Gulf coast

Henry Flagler, a co-founder of Standard Oil, began building luxury hotels in St. Augustine in the 1880s and extended his Florida East Coast Railway steadily south - to Palm Beach, where he built Whitehall and the Breakers, and onward. On the Gulf side, Henry Plant's railroad and his lavish Tampa Bay Hotel opened up Tampa and the west coast at the same time.

These were not just transport lines; they were resort systems. Each magnate paired track with grand hotels, deliberately manufacturing winter destinations for wealthy northerners and inventing the template of the Florida vacation.

Miami and the reach to Key West

In 1896 Flagler's railway reached the small community on Biscayne Bay that incorporated that year as Miami, effectively creating the city. He then undertook his most audacious project, the Overseas Railroad extension across the island chain to Key West, completed in 1912 and hailed as an engineering marvel until the 1935 Labor Day hurricane destroyed it.

The rail bed of that lost railroad became the route of the Overseas Highway, U.S. 1, so that today's drive to Key West still follows Flagler's path across the sea.

The 1920s boom and bust

The railroads and relentless promotion set off the Florida land boom of the 1920s, when speculators traded lots sight unseen and cities like Miami and Coral Gables rose almost overnight. The bubble collapsed by 1926, worsened by a devastating hurricane that year, foreshadowing the Great Depression.

That cycle of boom, hype, storm, and reinvention has repeated across Florida ever since, but the basic geography the railroads drew - resort cities strung down both coasts - is still the map visitors use today.

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