Mr. Flagler’s St. Augustine

6. Remaking the Oldest City, 1885

73 6 ∑ Remaking the Oldest City, 1885 The scheme has outgrown my original ideas. —Henry Flagler to Franklin Smith, October 16, 1885 During the summer of 1885, after Flagler had already purchased extensive tracts of landinSt.Augustineandcommencedseriousplanning forhishotel,hiswhole enterprise threatened to come unraveled when Dr. Anderson could not secure a clear title to the site of the hotel. By September Flagler appeared to be on the brink of walking away from the entire venture. ThetroublestemmedfromthewillofAnderson’sfather,who had passed away more than forty years earlier. His will gave lifetime tenure to his widow Clarissa, but after her death, which came in 1881, the estate was to be divided among his four children. Dr. Anderson’s three half-sisters were dead by this time, but their heirs, the Northrop and Crafts families, requested three-quarters of the value of the fifteen-acre Markland estate. Anderson was, of course, reluctant to surrender what he regarded as his inheritance to people who were almost strangers to him. As a result the Northrops and Crafts brought suit against Anderson, and that suit remained unsettled when Flagler arrived on the scene. Since Flagler could not wait for the court’s decision, whenever that might come, Anderson decided to make an agreement hastily with the Northrops and Crafts to sell just the five-acre marsh lot that Flagler wanted and split the proceeds —with Anderson receiving only a one-quarter share. This agreement, of course, compromised Anderson’s claim to the whole of the estate, but he felt that considering the need for immediate action, he should make this compromise. At first Anderson thought his proposition satisfied everyone, but by the end of July negotiations bogged down.1 74 · Mr. Flagler’s St. Augustine In August William Crafts bypassed Anderson and contacted Flagler directly with a proposal to settle with the Crafts and Northrops for $5,500 each as their share of the marsh lot. Flagler took up the role of intermediary, and he and Dr. Anderson met with the Northrops and Crafts to discuss the matter. Evidently no final agreement was reached at this meeting. Soon thereafter Flagler’s lawyer C.M.Cooper traveled to Charleston to meet with the Northrops and Crafts, but he was unable to gather all of the principals together in one place at the same time to sign an agreement. Cooper then called off the negotiations and declared thatthecourtcaseshouldbesettledintwoorthreeweeks,and that would decide things.2 On the first of September Flagler wrote two letters suggesting that he was just about at the end of his rope. To O.D.Seavey, who was spending the summer as manager of the Maplewood Hotel in New Hampshire, he explained that Anderson ’s legal troubles “seem to have come to a termination without putting him in a positiontomakeatitletothehotelsite.Whatmaycomeofthematterhereafteris impossible to say at present.” To William Crafts he wrote that “further delay will be fatal to the plans I have entertained.”3 The next day Flagler wrote to his lawyer Cooper and declared that he had decided to accept the agreement with the Crafts and Northrops rather than wait for the decision on the court case. He repeated his dire assessment of the situation: “Further delay will be fatal to my work.” The next day he sent Cooper another letter in which he praised Anderson for giving up three-quarters of the purchase price in order to see that the hotel project would continue. At the time Anderson still hoped to win his suit against the Crafts and Northrops. In the same envelope with the letter Flagler enclosed a check for $11,000.4 Still Flagler remained uncertain that all the various members of the Northrop and Crafts clans would put their signatures to the agreement so that a proper deed of ownership could be secured. On September 22 he wrote to his builder James McGuire asking him to delay the start of work on construction until Flag­ ler held firm legal title to the land. Finally, on September 25, he could write to tell Anderson that the Northrops and Crafts had each been sent their $5,500 checks after all the necessary signatures had been secured.5 The final major barrier to securing the main site for the hotel had been cleared. Flagler now owned the five-acre hotel site and the adjacent Ball estate—the properties he had deemed essential from the start. The decision in the case of Northrop v. Anderson was handed down by the circuit court on November...