The city of St. Augustine is the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the continental United States and, at the end of the nineteenth century, it was the birthplace of modern tourism in Florida. At the end of the nineteenth century Henry Flagler, who was an industrialist, and co-founder of Standard Oil, launched his robust hotel and railroad empire from St. Augustine. His businesses fundamentally altered the demographics of the former Spanish colonial city, attracting the wealthy elite of the Northeast. Scholarly contributions about the Gilded Age in St. Augustine focus heavily on the creation of the Hotel Ponce de Leon and the Florida East Coast (FEC) Railroad and the influx of wealthy visitors. However, there is a notable silence in the scholarship. In recent years there has been a growing interest in the people whose blood, sweat, and tears went into making Flagler’s vision come to fruition. What was the daily experience of the individuals who built their lives around Flagler’s vision?

Our digital mapping project Beyond the Line: Mapping Early Twentieth Century St. Augustine through Letters of an FEC Trainman’s Wife makes a significant contribution to the historical narrative of St. Augustine’s residents who witnessed and contributed to the rise of the FEC Hotel and Railway empire. We significantly reconfigure early twentieth-century conceptions of St. Augustine by layering insights from working-class residents alongside the more familiar narratives of tourism and industrialization.

Beyond the Line will provide a better understanding of the connections and tensions of gender and class in the early twentieth-century boom in St. Augustine. A collection of correspondence recently uncovered in the Flagler College Archives gives insight into what life was like for a family living in St. Augustine and working for the Florida East Coast Railway during this boom. Most of the letters are written by a young newlywed schoolgirl named Susan Pollock, who goes by the nickname “Chubby.” Her husband, George Pollock, was a trainman whose career kept him away from home.

Chubby’s letters not only allow a re-mapping of St. Augustine’s early twentieth-century tourist boom but also conjure other locations connected by Flagler’s rail empire. Her letters followed George throughout the eastern seaboard. Through her intimate contact, our digital map collapses geographies to demonstrate the lived realities of this trainman’s work—including the danger. Some of the details in this collection include a first-hand account of the anxiety of having a loved one who lived the unpredictable and sometimes dangerous life of a trainman. This trade included long hours in a hazardous environment. Several of the letters go into detail about an employee who was killed in an accident, and it brings to light the significance of such perils. In 1909, Chubby writes to her husband in multiple locations around the country and is sometimes unsure of his location or well-being, which causes her much anxiety.

Our map highlights the gendered experience of Chubby’s life in St. Augustine and George’s life on the railway. Her 1909 letters provide granular details about what life was like for this family: daily activities such as cleaning and sewing; the social network of other women in working-class families; the shortage of money to make ends meet, and how women relied on their husbands to provide income. Chubby’s letters provide insight into the social spaces of St. Augustine for women of working-class families and the domestic tensions of Chubby’s intergenerational household. Our map draws from these letters to detail a tight-knit community of neighbors and other employees of the FEC railway and community social events such as the 1909 Ponce de Leon Celebration and baseball games featuring teams of FEC trainmen.

Once the data has been collected from these letters, and more information is gathered from other local heritage collections, the data will be analyzed and digitally mapped to visualize this family's daily experience living and working in St. Augustine and for the FEC Railway during the progressive era. This collection is the jumping-off point to continue to tell a more complete story from the perspective of the working class of the early twentieth century boom in St. Augustine.

Using archival materials from the breadth of Chubby and George’s life, Beyond the Line effectively captures important social and demographic changes in St. Augustine. In our digital map, we will combine Chubby’s personal letters with other materials from the collection such as a series of receipts that show George Pollock membership of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen from 1918 until 1947. Though in its infancy, our project provides the starting point to tell more diverse histories of twentieth century St. Augustine that weave class, race, and gender together beginning from the perspective of an ordinary girl.