A Piece on Miami’s History Brought Down to Truth and Facts

By Seth H. Bramson

Dear friends and RSR readers:

I must ask your kind forgiveness in my being absent for so long, but hope and trust you do understand that in addition to my currently working on three books and teaching classes at a local (Miami) fine and fully accredited university, I am involved with numerous local and statewide history projects and initiatives but want to assure you all that I will work diligently to improve my time performance.

Miami’s 125th anniversary is coming up in July and I am pleased to share a piece which I re-wrote for a fellow who is doing a yeoman’s job in preparing for said anniversary. Please enjoy but please remember that while this piece was written by my friend, Cesar Becerra, I did a major restructuring and correction(s) job and so I am not taking credit for anything but that, along with correcting some of the facts, in several cases in which said corrections needed to be made in order to be certain that truth was being conveyed.

My friend’s work begins here: I have played Henry Flagler for longer than I can remember, albeit a shorter version of him of course and a tad darker skinned. But I can rock my inner Flagler and pepper him with historic knowledge that infuses years of learning and understandings.

And that’s just the information and delivery of cadence. I can’t vouch for his accent just right. I don’t know what he sounded like but on occasion I slip into a mix between Yosemite Sam and some Southern judge. Other times I dial him back and give him a smooth introspective edge.

Folks have seen me play Flagler annually for years in several locales, and I have shown up with just the outfit and sometimes with a plethora of props that include wicker furniture, ornate decorative screens, water pitcher and tea set, and yes even orange blossoms and a cutting or two of thatched palm.

Now when I don the outfit it goes to another level. Especially the 1920’s Stetson Boater. Not a reproduction mind you the real thing. But the hat is simply one way I channel the deeper Flagler. The other is through Seth Bramson and his almost encyclopedic knowledge of this “father” of Florida.

I have only ventured to his Miami Shores home on four occasions in my life despite knowing Seth now for nearly two decades. Inside the lovely home he resides in with his beautiful wife Myrna is an archive that is simply non-pareil in size, depth and one of a kind items that completely defy comprehension.

In addition to the fact that much of it is inside his double garage (which as you can imagine is no longer used for its intended purpose), there is a utility room totally filled, a den with barely enough room for him to get to the computer, a back bedroom loaded with stuff and two ten x fifteen foot storage units which he rents. Every one of those is stuffed floor to ceiling and is chocked full with just about every type of memorabilia known as Miami memorabilia or Floridiana. I don’t know if Seth created the phrase but if he didn’t a case could be made that it’s a blue ribbon example of a massively large collection.

As Seth likes to factually say, “this is the largest collection of FEC Railway and Florida transportation memorabilia in the world and, in addition, is the largest private collection (private as opposed to the libraries or museums) of Miami memorabilia and Floridiana in the country.”

But of all the things Seth is …be it professor (he has taught at several universities in South Florida and is currently Adjunct Professor of History and Historian in Residence at a fine local university) or hospitality management guru (he was once the manager of both the famed New York Gaslight Club as well as of the Playboy Club Miami) he does hold one accolade that cannot be matched or even threatened to ever be overtaken; he is the Company Historian of and for the Florida East Coast Railway and is the only person in the country (as he likes to say, “number one in a field of one!”) who bears that official title with an American railroad and in addition is a Henry Flagler historian and expert who travels far and wide lecturing about that great man, and all aspects of Flagler’s life are at his fingertips and in his brain at any one time. He need not look up a document he is quoting in order to enhance such a quote. But, as he likes to say, “while this year—2021—begins my 63rd year of collecting all this junque, with the coming of the internet, I find something new and I learn something new every day.”

Indeed, he knows where almost everything is in a collection of now well over one million individual items while I am overwhelmed with just how he can keep track of a collection that looks like it belongs in a Smithsonian Institution archive back room!

It was on my third trip to his home to retrieve a box of items he was going to donate to my commemorative crate project that I sat down to hold some of Flagler’s most historic and original hand signed documents. And I mean historic!

With one, Mr. Flagler was writing to James Ingraham, his land commissioner and for whom the Ingraham Building in downtown Miami is named, asking about land sales and in other cases writing to other moguls about various issues and problems of mutual interest.

Seth is the long standing president of The Miami Memorabilia Collectors Club of which I was honored with being in that position for one year a long time ago, and so I know how time consuming that position truly is. He has written extensively of and about South Florida local and Florida transportation history and is America’s most prolific writer and single most published author on and about those subjects. As of this writing, Seth has written 33 or 34 books on those topics. When I asked him about the number he replied with a smile and said, “Cesar, us old railroaders never die; we just lose track!”

But his beginnings were humble as far as how he got into history.

“I grew up in Miami Beach and my dad opened up his sign shop on Fifth Street around 1947 or ‘48. He’d take me to work with him on Saturdays and I was maybe four or five and as we’d be coming back on Washington Avenue heading North on the beach I could still see the long-buried trolley tracks and something moved me deep inside. Even as a little boy when we moved down here and I was two years old, I loved trains.”

This is an understatement of the highest caliber. Seth’s home is filled with just about every kind and type of railroad memorabilia imaginable, except, of course the actual trains themselves. So it was a natural trajectory that he would one day slip into the role as the number one Flagler and Florida East Coast expert, both transportation and geographically-related.

“And it just grew from there. When I was twelve I flew to Chicago to see my Aunt Gertrude and after that I started taking the train every summer.

“After I was appointed F E C company historian in 1992 to manage the joint FEC Railway–City of Miami centennial, each FEC president in turn has reappointed me. As noted above, I am ‘number one in a field of one,’ and one of only three people who has ever held the title of company historian with any American railroad.”

As you can sense, Seth may not be overly humble, but his reach and knowledge are unparalled. As we continued to talk about Flagler and Miami’s history I had some curiosities to sort out, particularly about the myth versus the truth and facts of the orange blossom story.

Seth explained;

“The Orange Blossom story was debunked as early as 1913. In a booklet put out by the then-incorporated Village of Coconut Grove in which it is clearly stated that while the story of Mrs. Tuttle sending Mr. Flagler some orange blossoms is very romantic, it is also completely untrue.”

This document is but one of a few in the early years that called a spade a spade. Although Bramson is still searching for it – in his voluminous collection–I will call it for now potentially possibly the earliest moment where an official document was calling for a correction of the myth.

There have been others of course that have written falsely regarding that myth, including, on one occasion, Arva Parks doing so in a caption on page 67 for a photo on page 66 in her pictorial edition of Mayor John Sewell’s memoirs.

“When Flagler received orange blossoms after a northern Florida freeze, it helped convince him that he should look south.”

That part of the caption is par for the course but the next line states;

“Some say Julia Tuttle sent blossoms to Flagler, others that James Ingraham did. Coconut Grove resident Kirk Munroe claimed that the blossoms came from his orange trees.”

What is telling here is that there is confusion in the telling of a story that had already been debunked by Ingraham in his speech that it was he who picked and delivered them.

Bramson separates fact from fiction and conclusively makes clear what actually occurred:

“Number one,” he says, “she never sent orange blossoms or any other type, kind or species of growing or flowering plant. After the great and terrible freezes of December, 1894 and January and February, 1895, Mr. Flagler was invited down to the region around the shores of Biscayne Bay to see that the area was untouched by the freezes. Although he declined the invitation he sent James Ingraham, his land commissioner, and Joseph R. Parrot, his railroad vice president down to see if she was telling the truth with her claim that “the region around the shores of Biscayne Bay was untouched by the freezes.”

Messrs. Ingraham and Parrott did come down, but could only use the railroad to West Palm Beach, the remainder of the trip being by boat and buckboard. On arrival, they were stunned: while almost the entire state had been brutalized by the aforementioned freezes, what would become the Miami area was untouched.

Ingraham and Parrott brought back to Mr Flagler several boxes of truck (produce) as well as two citrus tree limbs. While we don’t know today exactly what kind of citrus, the tree limbs were heavily wrapped in wet cotton. When Mr. Ingraham and Mr. Parrot arrived back in St. Augustine and presented their finds to Mr Flagler, the great man, after examining the boxes and their contents, as well as the two tree limbs said, and I quote, “Gentleman, are you sure, are you certain?” The reply to that question was “yes, sir, we are sure, because we are bringing back what we found there”

Soon thereafter, as Seth recounts, delving into a sheaf of Flagler-signed letters just about careening over the side of his dining room table, “and this is where Mr. Flagler sent Mrs. Tuttle the famous telegram that said “Madam, what is it that you propose?” And it was following her receipt of that message that she responded with the now-famous in Miami history words: “My dear Mr. Flagler, if you will extend your railroad to Biscayne Bay and build one of your great hotels, then in addition to the land already promised to you by Mr. and Mrs. Brickell south of the river, I will give you half of my holdings north of the river plus 50 acres for shops and yards.”

You will notice that Mrs.Tuttle alludes to the fact that Mr. and Mrs Brickell had already been in touch with Mr. Flagler. (They had also tried to get the great Henry Plant to extend his railroad from the west coast of Florida, but Mr. Plant declined the entreaties on several occasions)

But myth story aside Bramson clearly makes the point that it was much more than “orange blossoms and a bit of land” involved, and as he clearly states, extending the railroad from West Palm Beach to Miami, which were both part of Dade County at that time involved the attainment of thousands and thousands of acres of land. Bramson elaborates:

“But what we have been able to absolutely ascertain is that that was only part of the deal. Once the deal was signed and contracted with Mr. and Mrs. Brickell and Mrs. Tuttle, Mr. Flagler delegated a great deal more to Mr. Ingraham, he given the job to go to the state as well as the County officials to advise them that Mr. Flagler is willing to extend the railroad but that the FEC wished to be certain that it would receive the land that the other railroads were getting and which the Jacksonville, St. Augustine, and Indian River Railway (FEC’s predecessor name) had been given as incentive to extend the railroad south to West Palm Beach.”

Seth gets to the meat of an angle to the story few have studied;

“At the time, some of the land needed for the extension to Miami was privately held, and several of those land owners advised Mr. Ingraham or his agents that, indeed, they would sell the land at a modest price of give the land to the railroad provided that—and this became a famous line!—“You can have the land as long as you build a station,” after which Mr. Flagler would say “yes, absolutely, we will build a station there.” While he kept his word in every case by building the station, in no few case, primarily because nobody lived anywhere near said location, no trains would stop there.”

In actuality, the deal to bring Flagler south has a team effort to it by many many landowners. But in the end the history books love to wrap it up romantically and it is to that end that Seth puts the cherry on top yet again:

“Mr. Flagler didn’t extend the railroad to the shores of Biscayne Bay because—he got some orange blossoms—he absolutely did not, but he did it because he got thousands of acres of land.The proof of which is easily found if one looks at the region’s abstract books for most of what is now Palm Beach County, all of Broward County, and almost all of Dade County. Those detailed tomes clearly state that most of the land in question became property of the Jacksonville, St. Augustine, and Indian River Railway, which is the proof that land was given to the railroad.”

By the time I left Bramson’s home with his donation of items for my commemorative quote I ask him his opinion, or at least to expound on something he said for the interview he gave Katie Lepri for the WLRN piece on the debate as to whether Mary Brickell was a mother of Miami, also:

“Let me be clear,” Bramson stated. “The real and true “mothers of Miami” were Mary Brickell and Julia Tuttle. It was never just Julia alone, and, regretfully, one person harped on that non-fact in order to change history, and that, of course, is what a large part of correcting the errors both in print and spouted out by certain individuals giving walking tours. In fact we have, here in The Bramson Archive, the oldest marked Dade County piece known to exist, the 1878 revenue collector’s book for the county and the Brickells as well as the Sturtevants (Julia’s parents) are in there. They were in Miami long before Mrs. Tuttle arrived in 1888.”

And that has got to count for something. How does one define almost two decades of tough “grubbing” in the real last forgotten frontier.

I say it’s worth a hell of a lot more than just an omission or an apology. And if we now know that one particular side of the Brickell union was in charge of a lot more than we thought she was in charge of then we should double our efforts to rally to her cause. But that’s an opinion. As you can see, slowly over time the facts just keep piling up.

Ladies and gentlemen, dear readers: Again, I do thank my friend, Cesar, for this fine submission and I again want to state unequivocally that I did not write it and will not take credit for it as certain local (Miami area as well as Florida residents) have done to the point at which they appear to enjoy plagiarizing the work of others, but I will also state that I do feel some small part of ownership because of the time and effort which I spent—with no remuneration of any kind either requested or given—making numerous corrections in grammar, syntax, punctuation, spelling and historical facts, asking only that you enjoy this as presented. Above all, please stay safe.

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