Whitehall Flagler Museum

A Gilded Age Palace on Lake Worth

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.

The Owner: Henry Morrison Flagler

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.

The Architects: Carrere and Hastings

For Whitehall, Flagler turned to the New York firm of Carrere and Hastings — John Merven Carrere and Thomas Hastings — the same architects who had designed his Hotel Ponce de Leon. Both had trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and apprenticed at the celebrated New York firm of McKim, Mead and White, becoming leading American exponents of the Beaux-Arts style popularized at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Beyond Whitehall, the partnership is remembered for landmarks such as the New York Public Library and the Fifth Avenue mansion of Henry Clay Frick. At Whitehall they controlled the exterior, the interior layout, and above all the marble entrance hall with its grand double staircase. The architects conceived the house and its grounds as an evocation of a classical temple to Apollo — a fitting idea, since temples to Apollo, home to the Muses of literature and the arts, were the ancient world's first "museums". The domed ceiling at the center of the Grand Hall depicts the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi, the Doric columns of the facade echo temple architecture, and the building's east-facing orientation and sun symbolism reinforce the theme.

Inside a 75-Room Mansion

Whitehall's symmetrical Beaux-Arts facade is defined by massive marble columns and a red barrel-tiled roof, and the house is built around a central courtyard, rising two stories over a basement and beneath an attic. The first floor holds the grand public rooms; the upper level contains twelve guest rooms, with servants' quarters on the second floor and in the attic, along with a pantry, kitchen, and private offices for Flagler and his secretary. The interior decoration was designed and executed by the New York firm Pottier and Stymus, who furnished the house as a suite of period rooms in an array of European styles — Louis XIV, Louis XV, Louis XVI, the Italian Renaissance, and Francis I. Rather than a formal garden, Whitehall was set within a coconut palm grove, with an interior atrium garden whose two-tiered fountain copies the Venus fountain in the Boboli Gardens of Florence. The estate occupied Brelsford Point, with Flagler's Hotel Royal Poinciana to the north and The Breakers to the east, and was enclosed by one of the most elaborate wrought-iron fences of its period. Highlights for today's visitor include:

• The marble Grand Hall and its double staircase, the ceremonial heart of the house.


• Restored period rooms interpreting how a Gilded Age household lived and entertained.


• Railcar No. 91, Flagler's private railroad car built in 1886 and restored to its 1912 appearance, displayed in the Beaux-Arts Flagler Kenan Pavilion.

From Winter Home to Hotel to Museum

The Flaglers used Whitehall as a winter retreat from 1902 until Henry's death in 1913, and in doing so helped create the Palm Beach "season" that drew the wealthiest families of the age south each winter. After Flagler died the house stood largely closed; Mary Lily visited only once more before her own death in 1917, after which Whitehall passed to her niece, Louise Clisby Wise Lewis. Lewis sold the property to investors, who added an eleven-story tower of more than 250 bedrooms on the west side and converted the estate into the Whitehall Hotel, in operation from 1926 to 1959. By 1959 the aging building faced demolition. It was rescued by Flagler's granddaughter, Jean Flagler Matthews, who formed a nonprofit corporation — the Flagler Museum — to purchase the property that year. Whitehall reopened to the public with a "Restoration Ball" on February 6, 1960; the hotel tower was later removed and the atrium garden restored. The mansion was added to the National Register of Historic Places on December 5, 1972, and designated a National Historic Landmark on February 16, 2000.
Practical notes for visitors:

• Location: One Whitehall Way, Palm Beach, Florida, on the shore of Lake Worth.


• What to see: the restored mansion and Grand Hall, changing exhibitions, and Railcar No. 91 in the Flagler Kenan Pavilion.


• Good to know: the museum offers tours plus a music series, lectures and seasonal programs; check the official schedule, as hours and programs vary through the year.

Seen from above, Whitehall reads as a bright rectangle of columns and red tile set against the blue of Lake Worth — a surviving monument to the moment when a Standard Oil partner turned a stretch of Florida coastline into the winter capital of Gilded Age America.