Henry M Flagler Museum

Henry Flagler, a founder of Standard Oil and the developer who opened Florida to tourism, bought the Palm Beach site in 1893 for $50,000 and built Whitehall as a winter residence for his third wife, Mary Lily Kenan, presenting it to her as a wedding gift. Designed by Carrère and Hastings — the architects who had earlier worked on Flagler's Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine — the 75-room Beaux Arts mansion was finished in time for the couple to move in on February 6, 1902, and the pair traveled south each year in Flagler's own private railcars, among them No. 91. Flagler died in 1913 at 83 from injuries after a fall on Whitehall's marble stairs; following Mary Lily's death four years later the house passed to her niece, was sold to investors, and gained a ten-story, 300-room hotel addition in 1925. Flagler's granddaughter Jean Flagler Matthews rescued the building from demolition, forming the nonprofit Henry Morrison Flagler Museum corporation that purchased it in 1959 and opened it as a museum in 1960; the hotel tower's upper ten stories came down in 1963, and Whitehall today holds National Historic Landmark status.