For its first decades Key West got rich off disaster. Ships ran aground on the coral reef offshore with such regularity that salvaging the wrecks — "wrecking" — became a licensed, court-supervised industry, and the men who hauled cargo off the reefs made the town, by the 1830s, the wealthiest city per capita in the United States. Salt ponds, sponging, and sea-turtling followed. Those fortunes built the first grand houses of Old Town and gave Key West a worldly, seafaring character it never lost.
For a time the island was the end of a railroad. Henry Flagler pushed his Florida East Coast Railway across open water from key to key, and in 1912 "Flagler's Folly" reached Key West — an engineering marvel that linked the island to the mainland for the first time. The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, a Category 5 storm, destroyed the line and took hundreds of lives, many of them World War I veterans working in the Keys. The roadbed was rebuilt for cars, the Overseas Highway opened in 1938, and U.S. 1 now runs the length of the Keys and ends here, at Mile Marker 0.
Why People Visit Key West
Key West rewards travelers who want history, water, and a freewheeling island culture rather than only a beach — the Southernmost Point, the Conch Republic, the literary and presidential houses, and a compact Old Town you can walk end to end. People come for the sunset at Mallory Square and the bars of Duval, for the Hemingway and Truman landmarks and the wrecking-era treasure, and for an easygoing day at Mile Marker 0 where the Overseas Highway, and the country, finally run out of road.
