Incorporated on July 28, 1896, with a population of 343, the City of Miami was born near where you now walk, at the time one of the smallest cities ever incorporated in the United States. The city's improbable birth was the work of Henry Morrison Flagler, who extended his Florida East Coast Railway from Palm Beach to this remote mangrove outpost at the urging of Julia Tuttle, a Cleveland widow who owned land here and dreamed of a city. When a freeze in 1894 devastated citrus crops further north but left South Florida's vegetation untouched, Tuttle sent Flagler a branch of orange blossoms as proof.
He came south, extended the railroad, and helped incorporate the city. His Royal Palm Hotel — a grand wooden resort that stood near this spot — became the social center of new Miami. Nothing of the original hotel survives; it burned in 1930 and was replaced by downtown development.
But the founding story it represents — a city conjured from swampland by a railroad baron's ambition and a widow's vision, on land inhabited by Tequesta people for millennia before them — is the ur-text of Miami. Everything else grew from this improbable beginning on the edge of Biscayne Bay.