“Then, instead of rushing to a railroad eating-house in order to refresh the inner man, having to put up with ‘railroad coffee,’ and experiencing a nervous shock every time a whistle blows, your meals are taken at dainty little tables, in your own compartments, where polite and efficient waiters do your bidding.
“Instead of the tiresome, old-fashioned trip of two days and a night, the trip now is twenty hours. Verily the twin powers of steam and electricity have wrought wonders in the conditions of life.
“The Plant System, to which the Atlantic Coast Line is ‘a feeder,’ has emphatically gridironed the South. To-day Mr. Henry B. Plant is the president of a railroad system that embraces twelve different corporations, and whose mileage extends to 1941, with a list of employees numbering 5506. He is also president of the Plant steamship and steamboat lines, covering the coasts of the Gulf, Cuba, and Jamaica, and skirting the coasts of the North, running from Boston along Nova Scotia to Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island. In addition to these interests, Mr. Plant is president of the Southern and Texas Express companies, which do a business as express forwarders over 24,412 miles of railway, and have lines in fifteen States, employing 6808 men and using 1463 horses and 886 wagons. Mr. Plant is seventy-six years of age. He needs no eulogy; his works speak for him. Although of Northern birth, he is as much beloved and respected at the South as if native-born.
“Thirty-six years ago, President Jefferson Davis, of the Southern Confederacy, demonstrated his confidence in, and admiration of Henry Bradley Plant by giving him a pass entitling him to move hither and thither at will through army headquarters, or wherever he pleased, in the interest of the Adams Express Company, which he then represented, although Mr. Plant declared that he did not sympathize with the political movement which sought to rend the States.
“The Tampa Bay Hotel, Port Tampa Inn, and the Seminole, Winter Park, Florida, are monuments of Mr. Plant’s enterprise and a portion of the System. From one of these palatial hotels one can catch a fish on the back porch and pluck a lemon to dress it with from the front porch. In Charleston the name of Henry B. Plant is a synonym for success, and a name which many a young man mentions with veneration, as one to which he owes a lasting debt of gratitude.”
The May number of the Express Gazette, Cincinnati, Ohio, has this appreciative paragraph:
“The editor of the Advertiser, Key West, Florida, pays the following eloquent tribute of praise to Mr. H. B. Plant, President of the Plant System of Railroads and the Southern Express Company:
“‘Mr. H. B. Plant, the president, the founder, and the controlling spirit of the great Plant System, is held in high estimate by the citizens of this island. He found it, years ago, isolated and remote from the great centres of commerce, and his partiality to us soon changed a semi-occasional connection with the mainland, by vessels of inferior character, into a tri-weekly communication by the finest coastwise steamers in the Southern waters. Brought in ready touch with the marts of trade, factories sprang into existence, commerce grew, and a city with millions of revenue supplanted a fishing hamlet. Through his enterprise we are enabled to write our history in a line—a village, a city, a metropolis—and all this in a decade.
“‘The debt of gratitude which Key West owes to Mr. Plant is beyond estimate. Indeed, so accustomed are we to the conveniences at hand, that we are prone to fail in appreciation of what we have, in our greed for more. That Mr. Plant has been and is still our best friend cannot be questioned in the light of past experience; and while we cordially welcome and hail with delight the coming of other transportation, our city should never be forgetful of the man who was our friend when we had no other.’”
