Camps for workmen were laid out along the Upper Keys, from Key Largo to Long Key (proximate to today’s MM 68), a distance of about forty miles, but while supplies could be trundled by rail to the work site at Lake Surprise, everything necessary for the preponderance of the workforce quartered farther along—water, food, medicine, equipment, and building materials—had to be carried around the break in the line by barge or the shallow-draft paddle steamers. “All there was ready for us was the air to breathe,” grumbled one workman, “and that was too thick with mosquitoes to be much good.” Added one of the paddleboat captains after his craft had run aground on one of the many shallow reefs abutting Long Key: “[There’s] not quite enough water for swimming and too damned much for farming.” Overseeing it all was the quiet but indefatigable Meredith, the Midwesterner and “concrete expert” whom Flagler had snatched away from one years-long project in Mexico and dropped into the midst of an even greater undertaking in the Florida Keys.
What do You think about Last Train To Paradise (2003)?
