It was 1952 when social historian Cleveland Amory published “The Last Resorts,” his elegiac look back at the fading resorts of American society: Tuxedo, Newport, Bar Harbor, Palm Beach, Saratoga and Palm Springs, among them. By then, Long Key — the fishing camp that is the subject of “Long Key: Flagler’s Island Getaway for the Rich and Famous” (University Press of Florida, $21.95) — was already a distant memory. Author Thomas Neil Knowles’ slender work on this forgotten little resort in the Florida Keys, to be published April 2, is evocative archaeology, a reminder of a time when travel, while onerous in its way, was a gentler pursuit for genteel folk.
Long Key was the last of nine resorts on Florida’s east coast opened by Standard Oil co-founder Henry Flagler in the Gilded Age. Flagler — who is credited with launching Florida’s real estate industry — spent $41 million building the properties and a railroad connecting them to fulfill a childhood dream of running a hotel. In fact, he created a hospitality empire that still lives on at places like The Breakers. Knowles, a fourth-generation Conch — what residents of the Keys are known as — set out to resurrect the story of Flagler’s smallest, least opulent operation. Mostly, it is a factual account, but it gains emotional depth from an interview with the daughter of the camp’s last caretaker, Buck Duane, who experienced both its glory days and its demise.
A by-product of the Florida East Coast Railway, Long Key began as a work camp for the teams who built that line, which ended at Key West’s deep harbor, a vital transfer point for goods from Cuba and Latin America. After completing it in 1906, Flagler saw the island’s potential as a gateway to the Florida Straits, which teemed with fish. In 1909, the work camp became a two-story hotel surrounded by 30 bungalows.
Big-game fishing was Long Key’s raison d’etre. And novelist Zane Grey did more than Flagler (who died in 1913) to popularize the place; Grey ended up there when a yellow fever epidemic foiled a tarpon-fishing trip to Mexico. Thanks to the author, news of the island’s aquatic abundance spread around the world. Offering lodging, meals, boats (including custom-designed cabin cruisers), guides, bait and tackle, as well as provisions for visiting yachts and even a taxidermy shop, Long Key attracted those rich enough to afford its spartan — rooms were equipped only with chamber pots and sponges and bowls for bathing — yet still expensive pleasures. Visitors to Long Key included president Herbert Hoover and banker Andrew Mellon.
But wealth, power and angling ability were no match for the 1935 Category 5 hurricane that leveled the place — a scene described in the book’s most harrowing passages. Today, the railroad has been replaced by a highway and the fishing camp by a motel, some 500 private homes and a state park. But now, at least, Long Key has its own ghost story, a poignant reminder of three decades of glorious simplicity.