Tourist Empires, Florida

In the late nineteenth century, two Northern industrialists focused their entrepreneurial energy on Florida: Henry M. Flagler, Standard Oil partner of John D. Rockefeller, and Henry B. Plant, president of the Southern Express Company. They spent several decades building expansive railroad, steamship, hotel, resort, and land enterprises throughout the state, Flagler on the east coast and Plant on the west. Working in quiet cooperation while cultivating a public image as business competitors, they developed the modern state of Florida out of frontier swampland. Along the way, they crafted Florida’s version of the New South: a tourist wonderland propped up by