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.