Mary Lily Kenan – Henry Morrison Flagler’s Last Wife

In the 1880’s, the landscape of St Augustine changed forever with the arrival of an enterprising millionaire Yankee – Henry Morrison Flagler. A partner in Standard Oil with John D. Rockefeller, his life was a wonderland of building railroads, creating hotels and turning the eastern seaboard of Florida into the tourist mecca of the south, including his beloved St. Augustine. After his first wife Mary Harkness died at an early age, followed by a divorce from his second wife Ida Alice, he married Mary Lily Kenan from Kenansville, North Carolina in 1901.

Theirs was a marriage that would last until Flagler’s death in 1913. Their 12 years together were abundantly lavish, beginning with their move from St. Augustine to Palm Beach, where he built the magnificent Whitehall, now the Flagler Museum, as a wedding gift for Mary Lily. For a decade, they spent the winters at Whitehall, entertaining with the sumptuous style befitting one of America’s elite industrialists.

During this period, he undertook his most controversial accomplishment – building the Overseas Extension of the Florida East Coast Railway to Key West. And upon his death, Mary Lily inherited most of his large estate. Added to her family’s wealth and involvement as university benefactors and noted entrepreneurs of their day, she spent her years building a legacy of leadership in America.

The Kenan Charitable Trust was the result of Mary’s brother William Rand Kenan Jr. coming into her substantial fortune upon her death in 1917 (he discovered acetylene gas which led to the creation of Union Carbide).

The grand Ponce de Leon Hotel that Flagler built in 1888 became Flagler College nearly a century later in 1968. The Kenan Foundation came full circle to donate sizable contributions that the family invested in the development and restoration of its unique campus…including the famous Tiffany stained-glass windows and the first electric hotel clock in the nation that is still in operation in the elegant parlor where he and Mary Lily once entertained.

We dedicate this ‘suite’ to Mary Lily Kenan’s good fortunes.