We usually think of entrepreneurs creating companies. Sometimes they create much more.
One of the fastest growing US states is Florida. There are several reasons: climate, Boomers moving south, people avoiding high tax regions etc.
But the current Florida is really just “Florida 2.0”. The real story behind the birth of Florida, call it Florida 1.0, as a “destination state” began almost one hundred and fifty years ago when a partner of John D. Rockefeller and a post-Civil War railroad baron, both named Henry, saw opportunity in a state that had been largely ignored.
One of the “Henrys” thought moving there would improve his ailing wife’s health; the other saw a way to create traffic for his struggling railroad as it attempted to recover from the ravages of the Civil War. An investment banker of the time said of the latter Henry: “But that any man could have the genius to see of what this wilderness of waterless sand and underbrush was capable and then have the nerve to build a railroad here, is more marvelous than similar development anywhere else in the world.’
Both men found opportunities neither was looking for, and the Florida we know today is the result..
Read the story of “Two Entrepreneurs Who Helped Create Florida. “
