By the beginning of the twentieth century, Henry Morrison Flagler had extended the Florida East Coast Railway down Florida’s Atlantic coast to Miami. In 1905, he began the more difficult project of carrying the line through the Florida Keys to Key West.
The problem was not simply distance. The route crossed a chain of low islands separated by shallow flats, tidal channels, and stretches of open water. Bridges were required across the deeper passages, while raised fills carried the track across islands and shoals. Materials, equipment, and labor had to be moved into places with little existing transportation infrastructure.
Thousands of men worked along the route during the seven years of construction. Laborers lived in temporary camps and aboard floating quarters positioned near the advancing work. They excavated coral, placed fill, poured concrete, erected bridges, laid track, and maintained the temporary works required to move equipment and materials farther through the island chain.
The engineering challenge was substantial. William J. Krome, Flagler’s chief surveyor, helped determine how the line would pass through the Keys. The route had to balance the need for bridges across deeper channels with the use of fill across islands and shallow flats. The railroad grade had to remain suitable for the locomotives of the period, while the structures had to accommodate tidal movement and withstand continuous exposure to salt water.
The larger bridges became the most visible symbols of the project. Long Key Viaduct carried the line across open water on a succession of concrete arches. Bahia Honda required a steel truss crossing over one of the deeper channels along the route. The long crossing west of Marathon extended the railroad across several miles of water toward the Lower Keys.
Between those structures, the tracks crossed islands and shallow flats on compacted fill.
The achievement was not the construction of one extraordinary bridge. It was the creation of a continuous transportation corridor through an environment in which land repeatedly gave way to water.
The railroad reached Key West on January 22, 1912.
Flagler was eighty-two years old when he rode into the terminal aboard the inaugural train. The completed extension connected Key West directly to the mainland rail system and gave residents, businesses, travelers, and government agencies a scheduled transportation link that did not depend entirely upon coastal shipping.
Passengers could travel through the Keys by rail. Freight, mail, construction materials, and supplies could move in both directions. Communities that had previously depended more heavily on boats were now connected by a continuous transportation system.
The railroad did not change the geography of the Keys. It created a reliable route through it.
During the next two decades, the railroad remained the principal continuous transportation corridor through the island chain. Maintaining it was expensive. Salt water accelerated corrosion, exposed structures required regular repair, and the line crossed more than one hundred miles of islands and open water. Even so, the railroad remained central to the movement of people and materials between the mainland and Key West.
Automobile travel gradually began to change that arrangement.
Roads were constructed across portions of the Keys, while ferries carried vehicles across gaps where no highway connection existed. State and federal projects continued extending the roadway during the 1920s and 1930s, with the objective of creating a continuous highway connection between the mainland and Key West.
By 1935, the transition was incomplete.
The railroad and the developing highway occupied the same narrow island chain but represented different generations of transportation. Rail provided the established connection through the Keys. Road construction was gradually creating an alternative for automobiles, trucks, and buses.
The unfinished highway also provided work.
During the Great Depression, several hundred First World War veterans were assigned to federal work projects in the Upper Keys. They lived in camps established on the islands while working on improvements associated with the developing road system.
Many of the men had struggled to find stable employment after military service. Some had participated in the Bonus Army movement that brought thousands of veterans to Washington to demand early payment of the compensation Congress had authorized for their wartime service. Federal relief and rehabilitation programs subsequently placed veterans on work projects in different parts of the country.
The Florida Keys became one of those locations.
By the summer of 1935, the veterans’ camps had become temporary communities along the developing highway corridor. The men lived, ate, slept, and worked there under a federal administrative system responsible for housing, supplies, medical care, transportation, and supervision.
The railroad remained part of their connection to the mainland. Trains continued moving through the same chain of islands where road crews were extending the next generation of transportation infrastructure toward Key West.
Three decades earlier, construction crews had occupied the Keys while building the railroad.
Now another workforce occupied them while building the road.
The technology had changed. The geography had not.
By late August 1935, rail and road together defined transportation through the Keys.
The railroad remained the established continuous route through the island chain. The highway had extended automobile access considerably farther than had been possible a generation earlier, but portions of the system remained unfinished or dependent upon less direct connections.
Along that corridor were established communities, railroad employees, fishermen, businesses, travelers, highway crews, and several hundred veterans living in federal work camps.
The Archivist recorded the arrangement because it established the human and logistical conditions already present in the Upper Keys before the storm became significant.
The veterans had been sent there to work on the next transportation system through the islands.
By the final days of August, they were still there.