On the eastern bank of Lake Worth, in the town of Palm Beach, Florida, stands Whitehall — the winter home built by the industrialist Henry Morrison Flagler and preserved today as the Henry Morrison Flagler Museum. Completed in 1902 as a gift for Flagler's third wife, Mary Lily Kenan Flagler, the mansion holds more than 100,000 square feet and upward of 75 rooms, ranking it among the grandest private houses of America's Gilded Age. When it opened, the New York Herald reported that no private dwelling anywhere was grander or more magnificent — a verdict that still resonates for visitors standing beneath its columns. Whitehall is now a National Historic Landmark, and roughly 100,000 people from around the world tour it each year.
Henry Morrison Flagler was born on January 2, 1830, in Hopewell, New York, and left school after the eighth grade to work in an Ohio grain store for a few dollars a month. His fortune came from oil: on January 10, 1870, the partnership of Rockefeller, Andrews and Flagler was incorporated as Standard Oil, which grew into the most profitable corporation of its era, with Flagler a founding partner. In the 1880s he turned his attention and capital to Florida, then one of the poorest states in the Union. Over the following quarter-century he effectively built the state's east coast: he assembled the railroads that became the Florida East Coast Railway, opened the 540-room Hotel Ponce de Leon in St. Augustine in 1888, built the Hotel Royal Poinciana and The Breakers in Palm Beach, helped incorporate Miami, and completed the audacious Over-Sea Railroad to Key West in 1912 — some 156 miles of track laid across open water, described as the most ambitious engineering feat ever undertaken by a private citizen. Flagler married three times; his third marriage, to Mary Lily Kenan on August 24, 1901, was the occasion for building Whitehall. He died on May 20, 1913, at the age of 83, from injuries suffered in a fall on the mansion's stairs, and was buried in St. Augustine.
