What’s with Flagler? Nearly everything in West Palm Beach traces back to one man. Henry Flagler — Standard Oil partner, railroad magnate — came down the Florida coast in the 1890s laying his Florida East Coast Railway, and decided the barrier island across the lagoon would make a glittering winter resort for wealthy Northerners. But a resort needs a workforce, a depot, a downtown. So in 1893 Flagler laid out a working town on the mainland to serve the island, paid two settlers $45,000 for the site, ran his rails in, and named it for exactly where it sat: West Palm Beach. The city has been Flagler’s ever since.
The town came together fast. Flagler’s surveyor platted forty-eight blocks between Clear Lake and the Lake Worth Lagoon, the railroad reached the new settlement in the spring of 1894, and on November 5 that year seventy-eight residents crowded into the “Calaboose” — the little wooden jailhouse — and voted 77 to 1 to incorporate. That made West Palm Beach the oldest incorporated municipality in South Florida, on the books two full years before Miami. One early resident remembered it as nothing but white sand, two steel rails, a few acres of pineapples, and scrub on every side. From that, a city.
Why People Visit West Palm Beach
West Palm Beach rewards visitors who want culture with their coastline: a serious arts scene, a lively downtown, historic neighborhoods under the palms, and the Intracoastal at the center of it all. Add the island just across the water and the year-round South Florida sun, and Flagler’s mainland city makes an easy case for itself.
