There are plenty of stories about how Marathon got its name.
Historian and author Dan Gallagher says the real story is far better than any of the made-up ones.
In his book, “Florida’s Great Ocean Railway,” he gives credit for the name to New York playwright Witter Bynner, who came to Key Vaca at the invitation of J.R. Parrott, who happened to be Florida East Coast Railway president and general manager.
“Parrot invited Brynner on a trip to the Keys ‘to plot stations for the railroad,’” Gallagher writes. “When asked to generate a name for the station at Key Vaca, Bynner proposed the name Marathon, inspired by a passage from Byron:
‘The mountains look on Marathon -- and Marathon looks on the sea.”
In a recent interview, Gallagher reveals another bit of sleuthing he’s turned up about this period in Marathon’s earliest days.
Bynner stayed at the Marathon Hotel, which was the only hostelry in the Middle Keys in 1907. It’s long gone, of course, but it would have been located just beyond where the Marathon Yacht Club now sits.
Indeed, without Henry Flagler’s grand vision, Marathon would not have even existed.
And few remember that for a period in the early 1900s, Marathon was the southernmost passenger and shipping port in the United States, Gallagher said.
Flager’s engineers built a mile-long dock off of Knight’s Key with a steamer and train terminal that handled massive numbers of ships and goods between Marathon and Cuba.
“No one alive remembers seeing Boot Key Harbor filled with nearly 100 construction vessels, or when Hog Key was the site of the biggest machine shop and marine repair center ever seen in the Keys,” Gallagher writes.
From 1908 to 1916, Marathon was headquarters for Flagler’s Key West Exten- sion Construction Division, headed by William J. Krome, who remained as chief engineer for F.E.C. until 1919.
In his book, “Marathon: Heart of the Key West Extension,” Gallagher includes maps and historic photos that capture the impact of Flagler’s railroad on early Marathon, showing the rail yards, machine shops, terminals, the F.E.C. General Office building, a hospital, commissary, storehouse and dwellings for railroad managers and their families.
Construction workers were initially housed in tents built at “Pull-And-Be-Dammed Creek,” now known as Vaca Cut.
“The first store appeared in Marathon in 1909, a commissary for the F.E.C. workers,” Gallagher writes.
“Also, that month, the first post office was established in Marathon.”
In those days, Marathon even had a “Broadway,” Gallagher notes. It was a wooden boardwalk that connected the major buildings built near the wye track, near what is now 33rd Street, gulfside.
On Jan. 22, 1908, passenger trains began running on a regular schedule from Miami to Knight’s Key Dock, Gallager notes, adding: “This was four years before the rail line would reach Key West.”
By the late 1920s, Marathon pioneer William Parrish created a commercial-fishing industry by turning railroad buildings into fish houses and docked fishing boats where steamships once tied up.
“Best of all,” Gallagher said, “there was a train to take fish to market.”
All that changed, of course, by 1935 when the Labor Day Hurricane changed the course of Keys history.
