Sunshine Paradise: A History of Florida Tourism

Tracy J. Revels “Sunshine Paradise: A History of Florida Tourism” Univ, Press of Florida, 2011, 151 pp.

This book, analyzing 300 years of Florida tourism in just over 151 pages, is another installment in the Florida History and Culture Series. Author Tracy Revels (professor of history at Wofford College) explores how Florida tourism has grown and changed from the 1820s, when early visitors sought a cure for tuberculosis, then the two Henry’s (Flagler and Plant) and their construction of railroad lines and hotels.  Later the first automobile tourists then WWII military training, followed by the great theme parks such as Disney World.  By 2006, 83.9 million people annually visited Florida; 80 percent of Florida employment consists of service-related jobs, many directly related to tourism.

My Notes:

Pg. 3:  Over 80 percent of Florida jobs are in the service industry.  Lacking an income tax, the state draws most of its revenues from sales and hotel taxes.  Walt Disney World alone provides more sales-tax dollars than any other business in the state. 

Pg. 8:  Spain ceded Florida to the US in 1819 for approximately $5 million.  Florida became a state in 1845.

Pg. 50:  Work on Flagler’s $20 million overseas railroad to Key West began in 1905 and continued for seven years.  The first train crossed to Key Wes in January, 1912.  The overseas railroad never turned a profit and was wiped out in the 1935 hurricane.  (Flagler had died in 1913).

Pg. 53:  Just as Florida’s east coast owed much to Flagler, the southwest corner of Florida saw Henry Plant as a driving force, an integrator of transportation and travel industries. 

Pg. 68:  In 1911 the first highway connecting Jacksonville and Miami opened.  Many of Florida’s most famous roads were built in the early decades of the twentieth century, including vast stretches of US 1, 4, 90, and 27.  The Tamiami Trail linking Ft. Myers and Miami, was completed in 1928.  By 1925, some 2.5 million tourists were arriving in Florida yearly, primarily by automobile. 

Pg. 76:  In 1926 the most ferocious hurricane in Weather Bureau history roared across Miami with winds between 123 and 132 miles per hour and a storm surge of up to fifteen feet.  Then two years later, 1928, another hurricane crashed into the state at West Palm Beach, a Category 4 storm packing 150 mile per hour winds, bringing nearly twenty inches of rain,

Pg. 104:  A 1959 survey found that 11.3 million tourist visited the state each year, spending $1.77 billion.  Eighty percent of them came by automobile. 

Pg. 123:  In 1965 Disney started secretively buying up property around Orlando.  By June, Disney had purchased or optioned 27,258 acres in Orange and Osceola counties (forty-two square miles).  The state allowed Disney World to become an autonomous political district, empowered to issue tax-exempt bonds.  In return, Disney pledged to pay for its own fire protection, sewage system, and internal roadways, and to establish a wildlife conservation program.  Florida lawmakers essentially allowed Disney World to become a “Vatican with mouse ears,” an independent entity in the heart of the Sunshine State.  Disney World opened in 1971 at a final cost of $400 million.  At the end of the first year, Disney claimed a total of 10,712,991 visitors.  (By the mid-1990s, Universal Studios hosted seven million guest per year, and Disney World welcomed approximately thirty million.)

Pg. 144:  By 2000, Florida tourism crowds totaled almost forty-seven million visitors.  Tourist-related employment rose by 4.8 percent, with the creation of 820,900 jobs.  Tickets, hotel rooms, and souvenir sales pumped $41 billion into the state, accounting for $2 billion in tax monies.  Tourism sales-tax collections accounted for 20 percent of Florida’s total 1997 sales-tax collections. 

Pg. 146:  An unprecedented four major hurricanes smacked Florida in six weeks in 2004: Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne.