Most are familiar with the story of business mogul, Henry Flagler, but behind the railroad tycoon is a man with an eye for innovation. Without him, the Ponce de Leon Hotel wouldn’t have come into being quite the same way.
In 1883, a Boston hardware merchant and amateur architect named Franklin Webster Smith constructed his home on King Street and called it Villa Zorayda. The house stood out and caught the attention of many people, including Henry Flagler.
Smith drew inspiration for the design from the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain. Inspiration for the method of construction, however, came from Vevey, Switzerland. There Smith witnessed (and later wrote about) the construction of a chateau where “concrete partition walls four inches thick were being cast…very rapidly, with unskilled and cheap labor.”
Smith, however, tried something new in his concrete mix – he used a relatively new binding agent called Portland Cement (developed in England by Joseph Aspdin in 1824) with sand and crushed coquina stone as an aggregate (calcites in the coquina gave the mixture extra strength).
This new concrete held together the Zorayda, and also served to solidify a business relationship between Smith and Flagler, who saw the material as ideal for his new hotels due to its affordability and suitability to the climate. So when construction began on the Hotel Ponce de Leon in 1885, Smith’s poured concrete method was used. Smith himself even helped ensure that concrete was being poured and tamped properly and even reported intoxication amongst the laborers.
Things were going well until Smith decided to build the Casa Monica Hotel, but Flagler was concerned that Smith’s business acumen was less than astute. Flagler cut business ties with Smith in January of 1886, but told him in a letter, “Don’t let this matter worry you, it will come out all right in the end.”
Unfortunately for Smith, it did not. Plagued by financial difficulties, he sold the Casa Monica to Flagler about three months after its grand opening in 1888.
Business between Flagler and Smith ended in 1888, but 61 years later Flagler would come to Smith’s rescue one last time. In 1949, the St. Augustine Illustrated Sun reported that Smith had commissioned Stanford White to build Villa Zorayda. Harry Harkness Flagler (Henry Flagler’s son) wrote a letter on behalf of Franklin Smith’s daughter, Nina Larrey Duryea, confirming that Smith had, in fact, designed the Zorayda himself, and that Flagler had drawn inspiration for the design and construction of the Ponce directly from Smith.
Photo via Florida Memory: State Library and Archives of Florida
