"Tough old guy," Billy said. "And pretty ballsy too."

There was reverence in his voice when he told how Flagler then took his rail line to Miami when it was just a fishing town, and then took on the superhuman task of building the overseas rail line from island to island all the way to Key West.

Some of this history I knew. Billy had been my lending library, passing on books about Florida's past, Audubon guides when I stared dumbly at a species I didn't know and maps to give me a larger idea of where I was. He rarely gave tutorials. But this felt different. My friend was a lawyer, he was building a case.

"Flagler employed thousands of southern blacks, free men who left their birth homes in Georgia and Alabama to hack his trail down the coast. They were the ones who piled the sand and gravel for a roadbed and then laid the ties and rails to carry Flagler's class to the sunshine."

"But better work than trying to scratch out the sand where they had been," I offered.

"Agreed," said Billy. "They weren't forced and they weren't stupid. But Flagler was also a businessman. He knew that deadheading empty trains back north wasn't profitable. So he encouraged and often subsidized farmers to grow citrus and winter vegetables on the land west of his tracks."

"So he could fill the empty trains going back north, and make a buck selling oranges in the winter," I said.

"Exactly. And once the rails were down, many of the black workers stayed and went to the fields to harvest that fruit and those winter vegetables."

For generations those families would be the muscled backbone for a thriving agricultural industry. It was not, we both knew, unlike the working core of North Philadelphia's factories and machine shops that once built thriving neighborhoods there.

"By the 1940s, stable communities were set west of Flagler's tracks," Billy went on. "And entrepreneurial women started small businesses, stores and restaurants that created an internal economy."