Best Miami Guide
MIAMI HISTORY
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JULIA TUTTLE
(1840-1898)
Founder of Miami
Birthplace: Cleveland, Ohio
Miami is the only major U.S. city to have been founded by a woman. Julia Tuttle, who was from Cleveland, first saw southern Florida in 1875 when she visited her father, who had moved there as a homesteader. After Tuttle's husband died in 1886, she decided to move to South Florida as well. Arriving in 1891, she bought several hundred acres on the bank of the Miami River. To a friend she announced that it is the dream of my life to see this wilderness turned into a prosperous country. She knew that her beloved area, then called Bay Biscayne, would never be anything but a sleepy backwater unless it was accessible by railroad. She eventually convinced railroad executive Henry M. Flagler of the area's vast potential and persuaded him to extend his Florida East Coast Railroad to Miami in 1896. She sent Flagler a fresh orange blossom in the winter time to prod him into extending his railroad south. In exchange, Flagler received hundreds of acres of land from Tuttle and the other major property holders in the region, the Brickells. That same year the city of Miami was incorporated.
HENRY FLAGLER
(1830-1913)
Flagler was a self-made millionaire and industrialist who co-founded the Standard Oil Company. He was the master mind of the plan that transformed Standard Oil into the most successful monopoly of the nineteenth century. During the second half of his life, he steadily developed land and built railroads in Florida, establishing agriculture and tourism as the state's leading industries. In 1896, Henry Flagler's Florida East Coast Railroad reached Miami. The United States government announced in 1905 it's plan to build the Panama Canal. Flagler realized that since Key West was the closest deep water port in the USA to the new canal, it would become a much more important city. It meant building bridges out into the water to cross 128 miles of open ocean. Five hurricane's during it's construction didn't make the daunting engineering task any easier. In 1912 Flagler rode the final link into Key West. He was called the man who invented Florida. No other person ever had such a central and key role in the growth and development of an entire state. He was a true pioneer.
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