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Wreckers and Railroads in the Florida Keys

 While we were in Key West, we visited two different museums that provided some history of the island city, which was once the richest city per capita in the United States. The source of this wealth originally was from the wreckers—boats and crews that went out when a ship went down on the reef around the island. They saved a lot of the people on the ships, but they also salvaged the cargo, which created a lucrative economy on the island, as well as creating the basis for salvage law in the U.S.

 
The Shipwreck Museum in Key West

Wrecked Spanish galleons began littering the Florida Keys with gold and silver as early as the 1540s, but the heyday of the wreckers was from the 1830s to the turn of the 20th century—it started when folks in Key West started encroaching on Bahamian wreckers in the area. In the 1820s, the U.S. Congress passed a law requiring any wrecks taken in U.S. waters to be valued solely by a U.S. court. Key West became the primary hub for selling the salvaged cargo, and a Key West judge literally wrote the book on U.S. salvage law.

Lighthouses were eventually built on the reef and the average of one wreck a week in the waters off the island subsided quite a bit. But some salvage boats still operate, and some amazing treasures have been found in the past 50 years. The museum dedicated to the wreckers has a lot of information about one particular ship, the Isaac Allerton. The Allerton was an American merchant ship that was named for a passenger on the Mayflower; it sank in a hurricane in 1856 in a 30-foot deep channel. Because it was in such deep water, the Key West wreckers couldn’t salvage all the cargo, but what they did manage to save still made it one of the richest wrecks in Key West history. What was also interesting was that the captain of the Isaac Allerton was the Roswell Baldwin, a several greats grandfather of Alec Baldwin and his actor brothers. Small world.

An old engraving of the sinking of the Isaac Allerton

In 1985, a salvage group who were diving in the area, looking for a Spanish galleon that had sunk in the area, rediscovered the Isaac Allerton and salvaged quite a lot of the cargo that had been left earlier, including two marble column capitals that had been bound for the U.S. Custom House being built in New Orleans. A lot of the cargo of the Isaac Allerton is on display at the Wreckers Museum we visited.

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Flagler’s Railroad

The Wreckers Museum admission included another nearby museum, the Sails to Rails Museum, which has exhibits on the Age of Sail, a time when tall ships plied the treacherous waters of the Caribbean and the Florida Keys. Then you can step through to another building, once the payroll car of Henry Flagler’s Overseas Railroad, to learn about the man and an amazing engineering feat, building a railroad from Miami to Key West over the islands and water.


Henry Flagler, waiting for a train

The museum’s first exhibit is a large diorama of Fort Jefferson on the Dry Tortugas, 70 miles from Key West. It’s a national park now, but during the Civil War it was a prison, and its most famous prisoner was Samuel Mudd, the doctor who set John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg. These days it’s known more as a place to swim and fish, though.

A large diorama of Ft. Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas,
at the Sails to Rails museum in Key West

A display in the round shows the history of sailing vessels in the Keys, up to the last sailing ship built in Key West, built in 1939, the Western Union (which is docked in the harbor). It was built to lay cable between Florida, Caribbean islands, and South America. 

But the second part of the museum is also fascinating, where we found out more about John D. Rockefeller’s lesser-known partner in Standard Oil, Henry Flagler. He made a lot of money in the oil business, and then he became a proponent of development in Florida, especially the Atlantic Coast, where he built hotels that attracted wealthy northerners, especially in the winter. His plans included the idea of building a railroad all the way down the Keys. He accomplished that feat in 1912, two years before he died—and it remains the largest engineering project ever undertaken by a private citizen. But it only lasted until 1935, when it was destroyed by a Labor Day hurricane. However, a lot of the infrastructure of the railroad remained, and became the basis for the Keys Overseas Highway, A1A, which opened to traffic in 1938.


A1A, the Overseas Highway, in Key West

A lot of history in these two museums, and visiting them was a nice way to spend a day in paradise!

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