Nice work in finding the cold irony in Flagler's death, and spot-on in painting him as the prototypical Florida Man. Florida's always hooked my interest for the same reason Flagler's story hooked you: it's been a place of insane industrial and agricultural speculation - Manifest Destiny written in fire and blood - since the early republic. There's much to satirize in the failed hopes of men like Flagler, as Papa saw, but a failure grand enough still creates downstream successes: Key West as a commercial center is unimaginable without Flagler's beyond-all-reason pursuit of a finished railroad.
Nice inclusion of the sunset scene with Flagler and his interviewer, too. It's a tidy reminder of why people lose their heads in ways big, small, and literal: for the sake of a dream of heaven on earth.
This is tremendous, thank you. The Wikipedia wormhole of engineers and “men of progress” constructing railways against the forces of nature’ is already quite deep (see also: the rusting hulks lying in the sun in Salar De Uyuni) but this is a story I hadn’t heard of until you dredged it up. Hat tip.
Nice work in finding the cold irony in Flagler's death, and spot-on in painting him as the prototypical Florida Man. Florida's always hooked my interest for the same reason Flagler's story hooked you: it's been a place of insane industrial and agricultural speculation - Manifest Destiny written in fire and blood - since the early republic. There's much to satirize in the failed hopes of men like Flagler, as Papa saw, but a failure grand enough still creates downstream successes: Key West as a commercial center is unimaginable without Flagler's beyond-all-reason pursuit of a finished railroad.
Nice inclusion of the sunset scene with Flagler and his interviewer, too. It's a tidy reminder of why people lose their heads in ways big, small, and literal: for the sake of a dream of heaven on earth.
This is tremendous, thank you. The Wikipedia wormhole of engineers and “men of progress” constructing railways against the forces of nature’ is already quite deep (see also: the rusting hulks lying in the sun in Salar De Uyuni) but this is a story I hadn’t heard of until you dredged it up. Hat tip.