Henry Bradley Plant was a businessman, Florida entrepreneur, and one of the most important early developers of railroad transportation projects in the southeastern United States. His interests in both rail and steamboat haulage of goods and passenger growth made Plant one of the wealthiest and powerful men in the South.
Henry Plant
Born in Branford, Connecticut in 1819, he became a cabin boy on a ferry from New Haven to New York and worked his way up on the steamboat. Paying attention to shipping express parcels, often neglected at that time, he took a job with Adams Express Company, which primarily shipped packages using railroads. It gave him experience he would certainly use in the future.
In 1853, his wife Ellen became sickly and her doctors ordered her south for her health. They moved to Jacksonville, and there he recognized the opportunity for furthering the development of Florida through railroads and shipping.
Plant organized the Southern Express Company in nearby Georgia and it became very efficient in shipping parcels around the south. During the civil war his company was appointed the agent for collecting tariff for the Confederacy.
After the Civil War, southern railroads were either physically in ruins. Many which still existed were in foreclosure, Plant was able to acquire many of them and reorganize and rebuild them. He was able to acquire 2100 miles of track for his new companies, The Gulf Coast Rail Road and the Charleston and Savannah Rail Road. Plant saw the opportunity to lay track into Florida’s West Coast and the port city of Tampa, and eventually he started laying track all the way to Sarasota.
Freight, not passenger traffic, was Plant’s main concern and he realized that creating the Port of Tampa opened new shipping routes to Cuba and other areas of the Caribbean. However, as the later 19th century progressed, tourism was also becoming a major opportunity with the growth and development of rail lines around and across the country. Plant took advantage of this and started building hotels on the West Coast of Florida.
In 1887, he built the PICO Hotel in Sanford as a stopping point for people traveling to central and western Florida. He then went on to build a series of seven more hotels on Florida’s West Coast.
The Pico Hotel, Sanford, FL
The largest was the Tampa Bay Hotel, which is now the University of South Florida. The hotel had over 500 hundred rooms, built in the Moorish Style, and is very near the port of Tampa. The cost of this hotel alone was $3,000,000 which was an extortionary amount for the time. It was said he was trying to compete with Henry Flagler who was building hotels on the east coast of Florida. In Clearwater, Florida Plant built the Belleview Biltmore which is still a hotel today.
Plant lived to age 79, and he kept working till he died in 1899 of heart disease. After his death, under the direction of his son Morton F. Plant, the railroad was reorganized and consolidated into the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, and the current Florida operations are known as CSX Transportation.
Map of Plant System, ca. 1901
The Florida Map Collection. State Library of Florida
Courtesy of the Florida Memory Project.
