Mr. Flagler's St. Augustine

Book excerpt: Arguably no man did more to make over a city--or a state--than Henry Morrison Flagler. Almost single-handedly, he transformed the east coast of Florida from a remote frontier into the winter playground of America's elite. Mr. Flagler's St. Augustine tells the story of how one of the wealthiest men in America spared no expense in transforming the country's "Oldest City" into the "Newport of the South." He built railroads into remote areas where men feared to tread and erected palatial hotels on swampland. He funded hospitals and churches and improved streets and parks. The rich and famous flocked to his invented paradise. In tracing Flagler's life and second career, Thomas Graham reveals much about the inner life of the former oil magnate and the demons that drove him to expand a coastal empire southward to Palm Beach, Miami, Key West, and finally Nassau. Graham also gives voice to the individuals history has forgotten: the women who wrote tourist books, the artists who decorated the hotels, the black servants who waited tables, and the journalists who filed society columns in the newspapers. Filled with fascinating details that bring the Gilded Age to life, this book will stand as the definitive history of Henry Flagler and his time in Florida.