CHAPTER IX.
Mr. Plant’s Industry and Power to Endure Continuous Strain—Labor of Examining and Answering his Enormous Mail—Letter from Japan—Mail Delivered Regularly to him at Home and Abroad—His Private Car, its Style, Structure, Hospitality, and Cheering Presence—Numerous Calls—The Secret of his Endurance—The Esteem and Love of the Southern Express Company for its President—Mr. Plant Enjoys Social Life—He is a Great Lover of almost all Kinds of Music—Mr. Plant a Medical Benefactor—Some of the Progress Made in the Healing Art—Bishop of Winchester’s High Estimate of the Value of Health—Dr. Long’s Opinion of the Gulf Coast as a Health Restorer—Unrecognized Medicines in Restoring Lost Health—Nervousness among the American People—The Soothing and Strengthening Effect of Florida Climate—Mr. Plant’s Part in Facilitating Travel and Providing Comfortable Accommodations for the Invalid.
MR. PLANT’S industry and power of endurance are a marvel to those around him in office work. Over five hundred letters a week received is no unusual thing. These are read to him by his private secretary, and answered under his direction or dictation. They come from the three different departments of the Plant System, which extends over many thousands of miles, by land and by sea, and in its Express department forwards goods over a mileage greater than the circumference of the globe.
Some of these letters require deliberation, skill, care, and sound judgment in replying to the many complex questions of such a large and important business as the Plant System covers. Others are less complicated and more easily disposed of, while many are of a social character, from Mr. Plant’s numerous friends scattered, I might say, over the world. One day while sitting in his office at Tampa Bay Hotel, he said: “I had a very pleasant letter this morning from Japan. Some lady missionaries there write me of an excursion I once gave them in Florida, which afforded them much enjoyment and of which they write in enthusiastic appreciation though it occurred many years ago, and I had forgotten all about it.”
This large mail is a matter of daily occurrence. No day in the whole week is free from its arrival. If he travels, as he often does in his own elegant private car, his mail is delivered at important stations all along the road. Being in constant communication with all departments of the System by telegraph, telephone, or messenger, his mail is forwarded to him promptly at all railroad stations named for its delivery, is examined and replied to as readily as if in his main office in New York City, for he has an office, desk, and all needed facilities in his car for sending out telegrams, letters, or messages from the different stations by the way. His car is a model of convenience, comfort, and elegance in all its appointments. It is finished in richly carved mahogany, upholstered and curtained in rich blue velvet, with numerous windows and mirrors of heavy French plate glass. It is numbered “100,” and known all over the South. Its entrance at any station causes sunshine to break on every face, and the old colored men who come, bucket in hand, to wash and polish it where it happens to remain over a night or a day at the station, are fairly beaming when they greet “Massa Plant” and are always paid back in their own coin with United States currency added. Every old “uncle” at the railroad stations in the Cotton States knows “Car 100,” and asks no better holiday than to “shine her.”
To return to the enormous office work of the President of this great system of transfer and traffic, it is a marvel how he has stood it all these years. It is no unusual thing for him at Tampa to spend two hours in hard work in examining his mail before breakfast, then till luncheon, with perhaps an hour’s intermission, and then work until late in the afternoon. His numerous calls from all sorts and classes of people, are a constant strain upon brain and nerve, not to say heart at times. The secret of this endurance of long and fatiguing work, is found in the fact that to a sound constitution, inherited from a hardy, thrifty ancestry, Mr. Plant has added a temperate life and great moderation in the use of stimulants. While a man of quick intuition and keen sensibility, he has shown the most wonderful self-control in the most trying circumstances. When others would be agitated and wholly thrown off their balance Mr. Plant would remain calm, quiet, cool, and clear-headed to a degree that stilled the tempest all around, and effected an amicable adjustment of matters most important as they were most complicated and difficult of settlement. This self-control is joined with great fertility of resources, great charity for the peculiarities of men, and withal a kindliness of nature, a disposition not to hurt any one, that have enabled him to render services to his associates and to his country that may not now be told, and perhaps will never be known until the great day when the “cup of cold water” shall be rewarded. Mr. Plant is never in a hurry, much less is he ever flurried, chafed, or worried about anything. All he does is done deliberately, systematically, easily, and once done it seldom or never has to be gone over again. “Make the best of everything,” is his motto.
A gentleman occupying a prominent position in the express department of the Plant System writes:
“It affords me great pleasure to acknowledge the esteem and love of the Southern Express Company’s employees, known to me, for Mr. Plant, who has favored us so often with his kindness, liberality, and mercy even when we were at fault. My knowledge extends back about thirty years, having commenced with the Southern Express Company in North Carolina in 1866, and having worked in Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Kentucky, and Mississippi since that time, mingling very freely and socially with my fellow-employees. I have never heard one word of condemnation of Mr. Plant during all that time but, on the contrary, a hearty, free expression of respect and affection for the man who, by divine aid, had done so much for the whole South as well as the great number of employees in the Southern Express.
“Faithfully
“I. S. S. A.”
In long years of intimate association with Mr. Plant I have never heard him utter a profane word or a bitter expression against any one.
“Greater is he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city,” said the wise man. Mr. Plant has told me himself that if he learned of any one made unhappy by anything he had ever done or said, or if any misunderstanding should arise, he could not rest until all was settled to mutual satisfaction, and that, too, just as speedily as possible. “Charity for all, malice toward none,” briefly expresses the spirit, tone, and temper of this great and good man. Hence he has been saved the consuming force of friction and hatred which grind and wear out so many before their time. The young men now entering public life will find most valuable suggestion even in this brief record of a life so large, useful, and honored, through a period of our country’s history the most intense as it has been the most important since the days of the Revolution and the formation of a free and independent republic.
His busy life has made him neither a recluse, a pessimist, nor a slave of the world. He has been a good deal in society—both as guest and host he has mingled freely with his fellow-men and enjoyed to the full the pleasures of friendly reciprocity.
Mr. Plant’s love of music, in a man of his years and busy life, is remarkable. He says: “Music rests me, and helps me to sleep when I retire for the night, while I find it a great enjoyment in my waking hours. It is medicine to me.” Hence he is often seen spending the last hours of the day in the music room of the Tampa Bay Hotel, enjoying with the guests the delightful music rendered with such exquisite taste by the skilled orchestra. Mr. Plant is familiar with the best of the modern operas as well as with the finest classical music of the past. Among his favorites are Haydn, Handel, and Mozart. He is also fond of popular ballads and songs, such as Moore’s melodies and national patriotic songs. He says he enjoys even the hurdy-gurdy.
Mr. Plant might be termed a medical benefactor,—a health restorer,—because of the results of his work for the South and the North as well. In no department of scientific advancement during the last half-century has progress been more marked than in the department of medicine. The healing art, in its lessening of pain and in the prevention and cure of disease, has made, and is daily making, the most wonderful discoveries. What a boon to suffering humanity was the discovery of ether by Dr. Charles T. Jackson, of Boston, in 1846, who found that by the inhaling of this anæsthetic the patient is rendered unconscious of pain. Vaccine inoculation, introduced by Dr. Jenner in 1799, has prevented the spread of that much dreaded disease, small-pox. The name of Dr. Koch will long be held in grateful remembrance for his earnest efforts to cure consumption, as will those of Pasteur to cure hydrophobia. The Southern States to-day have thousands of people in ordinary good health, many of them in excellent health, who, ten, twenty, or thirty years ago, were given up by their physicians as past recovery and soon to die. But thirty years ago the modes of travel to the South and the lack of adequate provision there for invalids were such as only a person in fair health could bear. Through Mr. Plant’s efforts in large measure, both of these requisites for a sick man, or a delicate woman, have reached a state of perfection difficult to improve.
At the banquet given to Mr. Plant at Leesburg, Florida, in the winter of 1896, one of the speakers referring to what Mr. Plant had done for the North as well as for the South, said: “In the ‘Dixie’ land he has made the desert to bloom like the rose, changed waste places into fertile fields, the swamps into a sanitarium, the sand heap into a Champs Élysées, the Hillsborough into a Seine, and reproduced the palace of Versailles on the banks of Tampa Bay, and away up in freezing, shivering New England and Canada, when the doctor had written his last recipe and the druggist had emptied his last bottle and the undertaker was at the front door, our friend has placed the patient in a wheeled palace, and signalled, ‘On to Richmond,’ not to die, but to live; and old Virginia has smiled on the dying man, North Carolina has fairly laughed aloud, South Carolina has taken him into her warm embrace, and Florida has thrown flowers not on his coffin but on the resurrected Lazarus, and the family have invited their friends, not to a funeral, but to a feast. The Plant System ships have ploughed the Gulf of Mexico and spanned the Caribbean Sea, and have brought health and happiness to many homes over which bereavement and sorrow were hovering like the black angel of death.”
The Bishop of Winchester once said: “The first thing is good health, and the second is to keep it, and the third to protect it. Then arises the question, where shall we go?” It is not known that the noted physician had ever seen the Bishop’s question when he wrote: “Were I sent abroad to search for a haven of rest for tired man, where new life would come with every sun, and slumber full of sleep with every night, I would select the Gulf Coast of Florida. It is the kindest spot, the most perfect paradise; more beautiful it could not be made, still, calm and eloquent in every feature.” This was said by Dr. Long, an army physician in charge at Fort Brook, Tampa. The power of the fine arts over the mind, and of the mind over the body, are demonstrated facts. The most frequent and depressing of ailments among Americans is nervousness in various forms, and in different stages of progress, from morbid sensitiveness to utter prostration. In many cases medicine merely aggravates it. Its chief symptoms are irritability and wretchedness, often ending in suicide. Healing must come largely through the mind in rest, peace, comfort, and pleasant occupation.
While the mind in this condition cannot bear strain, neither can it be idle. Idleness induces morbidness and misery. Physical comfort must not be neglected, but there must be wholesome, nourishing food, pure air, and proper exercise. Hence, the value of the well-equipped and elegantly finished Pullman palace car, and the well-built steamer designed for comfort and safety, furnished and finished in a style that delights the eye and ministers to the enjoyment of every faculty. Hence the luxuriant hotel, with all its home comforts, its artistic adornments, and its princely entertainment, beauty for the eye, music for the ear, feasting the æsthetic while feeding the materialistic nature of man. All this enjoyment, while a soft, balmy air is breathed beneath a clear, blue sky, and while the invalid is bathed in the bright, warm sunshine of a southern clime, induces repose, peace, content, happiness, and health. The spirit loses its irritability, the mind regains its elasticity, sleep refreshes the tired brain, food nourishes the exhausted body, the whole man is renewed, and life that was not worth living has become an inspiration, a joy, an heroic and manly achievement.
It should be said here that up to the time that Mr. Plant established the steamship line between Tampa and Havana, there had been no regular communication between those two ports during the quarantine season. There were some irregular opportunities of transfer when passengers were detained for days to be investigated, fumigated, and harassed by quarantine regulations. Mr. Plant held that ships could be built and managed that would make communication as safe in summer as in winter, and he has proved the correctness of his theory. In ten years of regular service, the steamer Mascotte has never had a case of yellow fever. Through Mr. Plant’s suggestions, the Tampa Board of Health has established rules and regulations for travel to the West Indian ports which make it perfectly safe at all seasons of the year, so far as contagion from disease is concerned.
How much Mr. Plant has done to bring this blessed change to thousands, many beautiful tributes testify in the public press of our times. The expressions of enjoyment in the following letters could be extended almost indefinitely. In the Saint Augustine News of March, 1895, an enthusiastic correspondent writes: “It was early in the present century that this man of brains and bounty appeared on the great stage, and began a career scarce equalled by any in the annals of American financiers, and it is to him that Florida owes a debt of gratitude, deeper than to any other man—and this man is H. B. Plant. Favored indeed is Florida, not only in climate, scenery, and fruit, but with the munificence of these mighty-hearted millionaires, who have Alladin-like metamorphosed the sunny peninsula into a veritable fairyland. I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. H. B. Plant, who has transmogrified Tampa, and ribboned Florida with his railroad system. As usual with men of great minds and means, he is wholly unpretentious, as much so as his humblest employee. He is anything but fastidious; yet he is a clean-cut man of the world, of vast business capacity, a keen, penetrating financier, and altogether lovable in his domestic life. His shipping interests extend from Halifax to Boston, his express and rail lines from New York to Tampa and New Orleans, and his connecting vessels run from Cuba and all Gulf of Mexico ports. Mr. Plant’s homes are the family place in Branford, Connecticut, a palace on Fifth Avenue, New York, and the Tampa Bay Hotel in winter. Mr. Plant’s family consists of a son who will succeed to his great responsibility and estate.”
Writing from Cuba in January 1888, “J. C. B.” says in his “Notes”:
“In the language of an intelligent observer, writing from Havana early in the present month, it would be difficult to find any other interesting foreign land, when its accessibility is considered, so worthy the attention of American travellers as Cuba. To the average thought of one who has not visited it, it seems far and repellent. It is neither of these.
“The improved special fast facilities furnished by the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Atlantic Coast line, the Plant system of railways, and its new, swift, and superb steamships, carry you from the American to the Cuban metropolis in three days.
“While the north shore of the island has three important harbors—Havana, Mantanzas, and Cardenas—the former is incomparably the finest and most spacious; the city, to the west of the gleaming bay, is a rare study in Moorish, Saxon, and Doric architecture. The scene has been thus pen-pictured:
“‘On the east side, where the close jaws of the harbor open, and clambering up the mountain side where frown the landward outworks of Moro Castle, is Casa Bianca, with its queer villas and structures, each one standing out in this wonderful daylight of the tropics in such distinctness, and with such a strange seeming of approaching and growing proportions, that, in your fancy, the houses individually become great pillared temples. In and over and through this dreamful spot, away up the side of the mountain, thread and run such indescribable wealth of vegetation that, as you look again and again, the clustered, shining houses seem like great white grapes bursting through a glorious wealth of vines and leaves.
“‘Beyond Casa Bianca the bay debouches to the east. Here is a veritable valley of rest. Every half a mile is a little cluster of homes set in a marvellous wealth of rose and bloom. Beyond this valley are seen pretty villages, each with its half-ruined church, whose only suggestion of use or occupation is had in the din of never-ceasing chimes; and still beyond these are uplands which almost reach the dignity of mountains, upon whose far and receding serrated heights an occasional cocoa tree or royal palm looms lonely as a ghostly sentinel upon some mediæval tower.
“‘Farther to the south lie the great Santa Catalina warehouses, where the saccharine source of Cuba’s wealth is stored in huge hogsheads, or rests dark as lakes of pitch in tremendous vats. Behind these is Regia, the lesser Havana, across the harbor, with its churches, its quaint old markets, its cockpits, its ceaseless fandangoes and its bull pen. Over beyond this, set like a gleaming nest in the crest of the mountains, a glimpse is caught of Guanabacoa, full of beautiful villas, beautiful gardens and fountains, and in the olden times the then oldest Indian village of which Cuban legends tell. Beyond Regia to the south, and upon the shores of the bay, is the ferry and railroad station, whence thousands reach the outlying villas, or leave the capital for the various seaports of the northern coast; and right here, night and day, is as busy and interesting a spot for the study of manner and character as may be found in all Cuba. At this station is seen a famous statue to Edouard Fesser, founder of the Havana warehouse system. The entire southern portion of the bay, where some day the barren shore line will be lined with great warehouses and docks, is filled with old hulls of sunken steamers and ships, conveying the keenest sense of desolation, and the shore here rises to uplands bare as Sahara, until, skirting to the right, the bold mountain, Jesu del Monte, is seen; and then come the great outlying forts extending far around to the sea. Between you and these, if still aboard-ship, you see Havana’s domes and minarets, and, to all intents, you are anchored in a sceneful harbor of old Spain.’
“This schedule of the quick mail service performed by the elegant steamers, Mascotte and Olivette, of the Plant line, in connection with the railway system heretofore mentioned between Tampa and Key West, in the east, affords but a few brief hours of rest in the harbor at Havana. Upon the first appearance of the Olivette, fresh from her conspicuous performances in distancing the fleet of steamers which accompanied the racing yachts of the international regatta, the writer had the good fortune to be among the invited guests who paid a visit to this magnificent vessel, which is justly the pride of her distinguished owner, Mr. H. B. Plant, the President and Managing Director of the Plant System of railways and steamships.”
