University Press Of Florida Flagler: rockefeller partner and florida baron, paperback/edward n. akin

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From reviews of the first edition: A succinct and informed account of Flagler's] leadership in transforming Florida's economy.

--American Historical ReviewAn important contribution to the understanding of Standard Oil's extended partnership and how the personal desire of Flagler led to the early development of Florida's Atlantic Coast.

--The Historian Henry M.

Flagler (1830-1913), the ambitious Gilded Age tycoon who designed and built much of Florida's fashionable east coast, rode to success on the rails.

As John D.

Rockefeller's closest adviser in the 1870s, Flagler helped assemble the Standard Oil empire.

In this thoroughly researched biography, Akin shows that Flagler understood early in his career that cheap freight rates determined industrial profits.

Portraying Flagler as an aggressive entrepreneur, Akin documents his shrewd negotiations to obtain reduced rates, rebates, and drawbacks from the railroads, thus assuring Standard Oil's national domination over oil transportation costs.

Flagler drove himself as hard as he drove a bargain, obsessed with the desire to create a monument to himself that he called my domain.

His legacy was no less than modern Florida.

In 1885, at the age of fifty-five, he turned his attention away from Standard Oil and began construction of the Ponce de Le n luxury hotel in St.

Augustine, the city where he had honeymooned with his second wife.

Realizing he could never fill its rooms unless better transportation with the North was available, he embarked on the second railroad venture of his lifetime, creation of the Florida East Coast Railway.

Flagler's resort empire eventually included The Breakers in Palm Beach and the Royal Palm in Miami; his Atlantic coast railroad extended all the way to Key West, an engineering achievement that was called the eighth wonder of the world.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Flagler dominated not just the resort and railroad industries in Florida but steamship and agricultural operations,.