Ultimately, though, Henry Flagler came back to St. Augustine. When he
died in , his remains were secured within the Flagler mausoleum at
the Memorial Presbyterian Church downtown. Back in Henry’s daugh-
ter had died while en route to St. Augustine. Typically, he persuaded the
pastor and congregation of the First Presbyterian Church to permit him
to build them a new sanctuary, with the mausoleum wing, and to change
the church’s name. Memorial remains a monument to the town’s Flagler
episode, with its great dome, Italian-tiled floors, and elegant leaded-glass
windows. Nearby, the old Ponce de Leon lives on as a private institution,
Flagler College. The Alcazar now houses the city government and the Light-
ner Museum. After decades of neglect, the old Hotel Cordova was restored
to splendor, reopening in with its original name of Casa Monica. Juan
Carlos II, King of Spain, visited in . Hardly less exciting and news-
worthy, in August Ringo Starr reportedly came to town, unannounced,
stayed at Casa Monica, and sat in with a band at a nearby club. Sad to re-
port, ‘‘Ringo’’ turned out to be an imposter.^8
tThe sudden resurgences, glory days, and subsidences of the two old
settlements of West Point and St. Augustine corresponded to a powerful
regional trend also powered by rail construction and traffic. The post–Civil
War political and business tumult across the South included reorganiza-
tions of old, battered rail lines and the founding of many new ones. By
the s, trunk lines were completed and vast construction of local con-
nections was well under way. The South was becoming fully part of a na-
tional system, not only because owners and directors of its railroads were
often Yankees and foreigners, but because rails pulled all regions into the
conforming logic of business. It was railroad companies who imposed the
standardization of national time, in four time zones, in . Two years
later, all major roads agreed to standardize almost , miles of noncon-
forming track gauge, most of it in the South. On a single weekend day—
Sunday, May —workers moved mostly southern rails three inches
closer together, so that practically any train from practically anywhere in
the nation might easily roll anywhere. The two monumental standardiza-
tions hastened the opening, as it were, of the poorest, remotest places to
the world. By , nine-tenths of the southern population lived in a county
with at least one operating rail line. Along these lines old settlements re-
vived and enlarged, and many new towns came into being, all because the
railroad came their way.^9
During these decades and well into the twentieth century, the federal