Long before Disney World and Miami Beach, Florida was a very different place than it is today. There wasn't much to speak of between the old Spanish city of St. Augustine and the thriving metropolis of Key West: a lighthouse here and there, a small settlement of a few families every 20 miles or so. A big reason for this was lack of easy access: one needed a boat to get just about anywhere.
That all changed when Henry Morrison Flagler, one of the founding partners in Standard Oil, set his sights on Florida real estate development. Flagler established the Florida East Coast Railway, and a collection of luxury hotels along the way. The railway not only made it easier for people to get to Florida, but also easier for a wide variety of fruits and vegetables to get to northern markets as well. When he reached Palm Beach in 1902, he built a modest(!), three-story, 55-room wedding gift for his wife, and named it Whitehall.
Today, Whitehall is the Henry Morrison Flagler Museum, a beautiful, if gaudy, example of the excessive wealth of many during the Gilded Age. Like many similarly-classed people of the day, Flagler used his Palm Beach house only during a very brief winter season (his other house was in Mamaroneck, New York).
The first room of the house, Marble Hall, is a HUGE room, said to be the largest of any private home of the day. The room was meant for entertaining, as was the ballroom. The highlight of the Palm Beach Social Calendar was a costume party, held in Whitehall's ballroom, honoring George Washington's birthday. Men and women all wore powdered wigs, and received tiny hatchets and cherries as party favors. The Flagler's also entertained in the mansion's central courtyard, which offered the additional advantage of catching cool ocean breezes.
The house is full of wonderful architectural details like wood beams with leather insets, plaster ornamentation covered with aluminum leaf (a very expensive process 100 years ago), and domed ceilings with indirect recessed lighting from around the edges. Paintings, statuary and other decorative art objects abound.
Upstairs are the 15 guest bedrooms, 13 servant's rooms, 17 bathrooms and Mrs. Flagler's sitting room. Many of the rooms have been turned into exhibits on Flagler's life and accomplishments, as well as changing exhibits on Florida history and the turn of the 20th century. The third floor, now used for museum storage, housed the servants of the houseguests who came to visit.
In the 1940s, after the Flagler family sold the house, a multi-storied hotel was constructed adjoining the mansion. When it hit the financial skids by the late 50s, Flagler's granddaughter purchased the property and established the museum as a tribute to her grandfather. The upper floors of the hotel were removed, and so the building's facade, at least from the front, is unchanged from Flagler's time. Today the museum is still undergoing restoration, but is still well worth a visit. A gift shop offers a wealth of books on Flagler's life and times, as well as jewelry and many decorative objects.
Outside, Flagler's personal railcar is open for visitors, and it is quite interesting to see, especially all the luxury additions like the surround-spray shower and the servant call buttons in every room. With this exception, though, I found the grounds to be rather disappointing. For a house this large, the property is surprisingly small. Had it not been for the hotel addition, the ballroom would have opened out onto a plaza overlooking Lake Worth (actually the Intracoastal Waterway). Across the water are homes and shops and businesses...not at all what I would want to look at were I wealthy enough to live in this place.
But then I got to thinking: this really was Flagler's dream, to open Florida to development. No matter what one thinks about whether or not that should have been done, Flagler's success in realizing his dream can't be denied. And he didn't stop in Palm Beach. The Florida East Coast Railway continued south through Fort Lauderdale, Miami, and on to Key West. The completion of the Overseas Railway in 1912 was truly an engineering marvel.
Today, tourism and agriculture are the foundations of Florida's economy. Both are a direct legacy of Henry Morrison Flagler.
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The Henry Morrison Flagler Museum is located in Palm Beach, Florida. From Interstate 95, head east on Okeechobee Boulevard (exit 52). Go about 3 miles to the first traffic light past the Intracoastal Waterway, and turn left onto Cocoanut Way. The museum is on the left, just past the third traffic light. The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday; call 561-655-2833 for hours and prices.