Henry B. Plant - Post Civil War

Post Civil War

After the war, the railroads of the South were practically ruined and many railroads went bankrupt in the depression of 1873. In this situation he found his opportunity. Convinced of the eventual economic revival of the South, he bought at foreclosure sales in 1879 and 1880 the Atlantic and Gulf Railroad and the Charleston and Savannah Railroad. With these as a nucleus he began building along the southern Atlantic seaboard a transportation system that twenty years later included fourteen railway companies with 2,100 miles of track, several steamship lines, and a number of important hotels. In 1882 he organized, with the assistance of Northern capitalists (among whom were M.K. Jesup, W.T. Walters, and Henry Morrison Flagler, who himself would be instrumental in the development of Florida's east coast) the Plant Investment Company, a holding company for the joint management of the various properties under his control. He reconstructed and extended several small railroads so as to provide continuous service across the state, and by providing better connections with through lines to the North he gave Florida orange growers quicker and cheaper access to Northern markets. Tampa, then a village of a few hundred inhabitants, was made the terminus of his southern Florida railroad and also the home port for a new line of steamships to Havana.

For the accommodation of winter visitors he built in Tampa, in the style of a Moorish palace, an enormous hotel costing $2,500,000. The hotel was called the Tampa Bay Hotel and was famous for its fanciful Moorish and Victorian architecture. The hotel now serves as the main building for the University of Tampa and houses the Henry B. Plant Museum. Another large, Victorian-style hotel established by Plant during the 1890s was the Belleview Biltmore near Clearwater, Florida.

The subsequent growth in wealth and population of Florida and other states tributary to the Plant System made its founder one of the richest and most powerful men in the South. A good physical inheritance, preserved by temperate habits, made it possible for Henry Plant to keep working until almost eighty years of age.