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Henry Morrison Flagler (1830-1913) became enormously wealthy as one of the founders of Standard Oil, which he joined in 1867. He was credited by John D. Rockefeller with developing the legal form that allowed Standard to consolidate branches of the company that had been incorporated in a multitude of states, and run all of them from a central office. This is the “trust”, which those “anti-trust” laws of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries aimed to destroy.

But meanwhile: In the late 1870s, Flagler visited Florida with his sick wife. Perhaps not surprisingly, given that he grew up near Rochester, New York, Flagler fell in love with Florida’s warmth and sunshine. He became the state’s most tireless promoter. In 1882, he gave up his day-to-day involvement with Standard Oil and began construction of a 450-room hotel in St. Augustine.

But even in St. Augustine, temperatures sometimes fell below freezing. Flagler decided to build hotels further south on the Atlantic coast. Of course, to make the hotels accessible, transportation was required. From the 1890s to 1912, Flagler built the Florida East Coast Railway. It ran from Jacksonville to Miami, then across the Florida Keys (128 miles of mostly open water) to Key West. The railroad brought Florida a thriving tourist business and allowed farmers to sell their produce far to the north. Flagler is credited as the founder of Palm Beach and Miami, and is often called the inventor of modern Florida.

In Palm Beach, Flagler constructed a mansion for his third wife, whom he had married in 1901. Whitehall, with 75 rooms, was designed by Carrere and Hastings, who also designed New York Public Library at 42nd Street. It was completed in 1902.

The Flagler Museum has a terrific app for iPhone and Android that describes the rooms in the mansion, and gives some background on the building and on the life of the Flaglers. My only complaint about the app is that it has one photo per room. Consider these three posts on the Flagler a supplement to the app. I won’t be repeating information in the app, just adding some notes from the Flagler’s brochure for a self-guided tour. I hope this will tease you to visit the Flagler yourself.

Exterior

One of the fascinating bits in the Flagler Museum’s app is the discussion of the imagery outside and indoors, whose theme is moving from chaos to civilization. The classical figures on the huge urns flanking the entrance (below) are part of that theme, as are the paintings on the ceiling of the Grand Hall.

Grand Hall

The Grand Hall is about 5,000 square feet, appropriate for entertaining on a huge scale. When constructed, it was the largest interior space in a private home in America.

Some people will find it unbearable that one couple should have all this living space. Me, I look at Whitehall and think how wonderful that one couple could afford to add so much beauty to the world. Incidentally, the workers who were paid to create it surely benefited more (in craftsmanship learned and exercised, and in self-esteem) than they would have had the government confiscated Flagler’s entire fortune and divvied it up among them.

Library

The bust on the library table is of Augustus Caesar. Gilded Age magnates saw parallels between the United States and ancient Rome, in terms of practical competence and culture.

Below: I like the way this sculpture is silhouetted against the window! Makes it very difficult to take a photo, of course, but it makes me want to go examine it. (Not allowed. Photos of a different copy are here.)

The Library is decorated in the style of the Italian Renaissance. In a building of the fifteenth century, the ceiling would have been carved wood with leather insets. Here it’s cast plaster with fabric insets, which (as the Flagler’s brochure points out) was much faster to create. This sort of substitution helped make it possible for the huge mansion to be completed in a mere eighteen months.

That’s Caracalla (d. 217) to the left of the Library’s entrance. It’s a mystery to me why anyone would want a bust of Caracalla – he’s definitely one of the Very Bad Roman Emperors.

Whitehall was wired for electricity when it was built, but to people who grew up with candles or gas lighting, electric bulbs seemed to cast very harsh light. In chandeliers such as this one, the light is toned down by a bevy of Baccarat crystals.

Music Room

The Music Room also served as a painting and sculpture gallery. Below: a late-nineteenth-century Italian sculptor shows off his command of marble.

Next week: more on the Flagler Museum.

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