Гамильтон Дисстон: Флориданы дамытушы және кәсіпкер

American industrialist and real estate developer

Hamilton Disston (August 23, 1844 – April 30, 1896) was an industrialist and real estate developer who purchased 4 million acres (16,000 km²) of Florida land in 1881, an area larger than the state of Connecticut, and reportedly the most land ever purchased by a single person in world history. Disston was the son of Pennsylvania based industrialist Henry Disston who formed Disston & Sons Saw Works, which Hamilton later ran and which was one of the largest saw manufacturing companies in the world. Hamilton Disston's investment in the infrastructure of Florida spurred growth throughout the state. His related efforts to drain the Everglades triggered the state's first land boom with numerous towns and cities established through the area. Disston's land purchase and investments were directly responsible for creating or fostering the towns of Kissimmee, St. Cloud, Gulfport, Tarpon Springs, and indirectly aided the rapid growth of St. Petersburg, Florida. He furthermore oversaw the successful cultivation of rice and sugarcane near the Kissimmee area. Although Disston's engineered canals aided water transport and steamboat traffic in Florida, he was ultimately unsuccessful in draining the Kissimmee River floodplain or lowering the surface water around Lake Okeechobee and in the Everglades. He was forced to sell much of his investments at a fraction of their original costs. However, his land purchase primed Florida's economy and allowed railroad magnates Henry Flagler and Henry Plant to build rail lines down the east coast of Florida, and another joining the west coast, which directly led to the domination of the tourist and citrus industries in Florida. Disston's immediate impact was in the Philadelphia area, where he was active in Republican politics and a philanthropist, but his legacy is often associated with the draining and development of Florida.

Hamilton Disston was born in Philadelphia, the eldest son of nine children born to Mary Steelman and Henry Disston, an English immigrant and descendant of French nobility. Disston's father was a successful industrialist who rose from being orphaned just days after arriving in the United States to running the Keystone Saw Works when Hamilton was a child. Henry Disston was responsible for multiple machining and saw patents, and in the spirit of Victorian era paternalism, envisioned and engineered a community around his steel factory in Tacony, Pennsylvania. After attending public school, Hamilton left at 15 years old, opting for an apprenticeship at the saw factory which, by that time, was a $500,000 per year international venture. Only one month after Henry's death, Hamilton gave President Rutherford B. Hayes a tour of the factory where an unshaped piece of steel was manufactured into a hand saw in only 42 minutes, and was presented to the president at the end of the tour—etched with his name. came to own approximately of mostly swamp land, granted by the U. S. Congress to states with wetlands for the purpose of reclaiming the land under water by constructing canals and levees. In Florida, consolidated grants for the purpose of building rail infrastructure and reclaiming wetlands were placed in a trust called the Internal Improvement Fund of the State of Florida (IIF). The trust fund was managed by the governor of Florida and four state officials. The fund pledged land to railroad companies and guaranteed bonds issued by the railroad companies on the land. When the high costs associated with the American Civil War and Reconstruction caused railroad companies to default on the bonds, the fund became liable and rapidly sank into debt and eventually into Federal Court receivership. By the time Governor George Franklin Drew took office in 1877, the fund was nearly $1 million in debt. The state constitution forbade issuing bonds to repay it; investors were not interested in Florida, no rail lines were built, and progress in the state stalled. In 1877, diplomat Henry Shelton Sanford invited Disston, an avid sport fisherman, on a fishing trip through Florida. During the trip, Disston realized the possibility that enormous tracts of land could be reclaimed for agriculture by using canals to drain Florida's Lake Okeechobee. Disston and five associates, meanwhile, entered into a land reclamation contract with the Internal Improvement Fund in January 1881. The contract stipulated that Disston and associates would be deeded half of whatever land his Atlantic and Gulf Coast Canal and Okeechobee Land Company reclaimed around Lake Okeechobee, the Kissimmee, Caloosahatchee and Miami Rivers. Congressman and Disston family friend, William D. "Pig Iron" Kelley, described Disston's first contract: "He instituted broad preliminary investigations from which he received satisfactory reports; he surveyed the entire field of the proposed work, and with Napoleonic instinct and foresight saw in the proposition an opportunity to promote his country's welfare by the reclamation of a more than kingly domain. Disston stood to gain up to with his drainage contract, although it would displace numerous squatters. Florida's Armed Occupation Act of 1842 had granted land to squatters in order to force the local Seminole Indians off the land, but Disston's contract would force the squatters off any land that Disston could show was submerged. Court orders related to the debt threatened to derail the contract so Governor William D. Bloxham visited Disston in Philadelphia to persuade him to relieve the debt. During the visit, Disston tentatively agreed to purchase four million acres (16,000 km²) of Internal Improvement Fund land for 25 cents per acre, an agreement which became a formal contract on June 1, 1881. It made him the largest landowner in the United States.

While some in Florida disapproved of the sale for giving away the land too cheaply, it had positive effects. In the four years following Disston's purchase, four times as many rail lines were added than the 20 preceding years. Land sales multiplied six times after the sale and the state's taxable property value doubled. Around 150,000 tourists came to Florida during the winter of 1884 alone. To lure people to Florida, Disston opened real estate offices across America as well as England, Scotland, Germany, Italy, Sweden and Denmark. He promoted himself as owning two thirds of the entire state. These efforts drew people to the Orlando area; and the major cities of Sarasota and Naples, Florida grew out of land sold by Disston. He and three other industrialists in Philadelphia—James McManes, William Leeds, and David Lane— were known as the "Big Four", controlling Republican nominations and appointments to city positions in a machine system until new political bosses replaced them in 1890. His wealth allowed him to associate with tycoons and political celebrities, and he was often sought after to advise politicians though he refused to run for office. In 1883, he arranged for President Chester A. Arthur, a fellow Republican, to take a fishing trip to Kissimmee as part of a large publicity campaign for the city. Disston founded a sugarcane plantation, out of which sprang the city of St. Cloud. Refineries for the plantation were constructed in Kissimmee and near Lake Okeechobee. Disston was advised to begin with a large canal connecting Lake Okeechobee with the St. Lucie but the prohibitive costs forced him to begin with smaller dredging operations to straighten the Kissimmee River and to connect Lake Okeechobee with the Caloosahatchee. Dredging commenced around Lake Okeechobee during the winter of 1881–1882. In June 1883, a report concluded that the Kissimmee valley was indeed drying up as Disston planned, and another report a year later reported further drainage with nearly of reclaimed land credited to Disston.

In addition to dredging, Disston's plans included the creation of a major city in the Tampa Bay area to rival the budding city of Tampa. By 1884, he established the Lake Butler Villa Company, one of four land companies he operated. While it still credited Disston with draining parts of the upper Kissimmee valley, it credited a drought with drying the area north of Lake Okeechobee. Meanwhile, Lake Okeechobee—which typically rises and falls seasonally, and is affected by the frequent flooding and droughts associate with the Florida climate—was inundated despite Disston's canals, and the only canal out of the lake that Disston actually completed resulted in the Caloosahatchee River flooding the surrounding area. Furthermore, Disston's planned canals to the east and south out of Lake Okeechobee had not materialized. The 1887 commission concluded that Disston had received which he had not earned. Regardless of the lack of success in Disston's canals, the money he paid to the Internal Improvement Fund allowed other industrialists to take an interest in the development of Florida. A friendly competition developed between Flagler and another railroad magnate named Henry Bradley Plant. While Flagler oversaw the construction of rail lines and hotels along the east coast, Plant concentrated on extending the railroad from Sanford to Tampa, crossing the state and connecting the coasts. At the terminus of this line he built the exquisite Tampa Bay Hotel, opened in 1891.