Florida

St. Augustine is the oldest city in the United States settled by Europeans that has been lived in ever since. The Spanish founded it in 1565, more than 40 years before Jamestown. The massive stone fort they built there, the Castillo de San Marcos, was finished in the late 1600s and still stands over the harbor.

For most of the 1800s, Florida was hard to reach and thinly settled. That changed when a man named Henry Flagler visited St. Augustine in the 1880s. Flagler had made a fortune as a partner of John D. Rockefeller in Standard Oil, and he decided to turn Florida into a winter resort for wealthy Northerners. He built the Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine, which opened in 1888, and then pushed his railroad down the east coast, building hotels as he went at Palm Beach and Miami. In 1912 his Overseas Railroad reached Key West, running across the Keys on bridges over open water. On the west coast, Henry Plant did the same thing with his railroad and his Tampa Bay Hotel.

Florida in the photographs is often a dream being sold. Orange groves, palm-lined drives, alligators, sponge fishermen at Tarpon Springs, and grand hotels with wide verandas. The Detroit Publishing Company sent photographers to Florida around 1900, and their color prints helped fix the image of the state as a tropical paradise.

The 1920s brought a land boom. People bought lots they had never seen, sometimes under water, and prices soared until they collapsed. A powerful hurricane hit Miami in 1926, and the boom was over. The Everglades, the Seminole people who had lived there for generations, and the long empty beaches all appear in the record from before the developers reached them.

In pictures of early Florida resorts, notice the clothing. Visitors came in winter, from the North, and the men often wear suits and hats on the beach. Florida was a winter destination long before it became a summer one.