Ella Marion Lane Meredith, wife of Joseph Carroll "J.C." Meredith, died on September 24, 1909, five months and 4 days after her husband succumbed to a diabetic condition aggravated by the exhausting work of building a railway over the sea from Homestead, Florida to Key West. She was only 45 at her death and he just 53. Miami newspapers reported that husband and wife were devoted to each other and that Meredith's death fell hard on Ella, one explicitly stating that she died of a broken heart.

Their courtship apparently began after Meredith completed his engineering studies at Iowa State College and Stevens Institute in New Jersey. They likely met while he worked on Missouri River improvements near Nebraska City in the very early 1890's. Certainly, both claimed Nebraska City as their home as late as August 18, 1891, when coy references in a society column of Ella visiting the home of Colonel and Mrs. W.G. Cummings in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, coincided with Meredith's own visit to the same couple. Their charade let slip a budding romance and less than four months later, they wed in St. Louis at the home of Ella's aunt on December 16, 1891. They settled in St. Joseph where Meredith's success brought more Missouri River commissions., engineering assignments for the Mexican Central Railway and its grand docks in Tampico, and leadership of the Key West Extension of the Florida East Coast Railway.

While J.C. was a widely regarded engineer, Ella was formidable in her own right. Much is gleaned about her from notices in newspapers and school records. Daughter of a successful mill owner and banker from Waterloo, Iowa, she was a gifted student and a graduate of the Vassar College School of Music. Well-read, civic-minded, and sociable, she understood her husband's rise in the world in the same way she grasped her father's own rise to affluence and prominence from humble beginnings. Mentions of her in Miami newspapers usually followed gatherings of Miami business and political leaders and their wives. Railroad executives, too, must have found her a well-groomed compliment to her husband's singlemindedness. She obviously was at home in such settings.

Though a private couple, J.C. and Ella had seen more of the world than many of their contemporaries. Her widely travelled and privileged youth and Meredith's professional journeys prepared them for the challenges of settling in new places, making friends out of strangers, and enduring the personal sacrifices that an ambitious railway owner demanded. Despite their living in an age in which photography was no longer a novelty, no photo of her can be found.

J. C. Meredith was hired by one of the great industrialists of the age. Henry Morrison Flagler appointed Meredith Chief Engineer of the Key West Extension. Among the most difficult and ambitious engineering projects of the 20th Century, it was as dangerous as it was challenging. The Extension, as it was called, employed as many as 5,000 workers at a time and, when finished, anchored Key West to the U.S. mainland. Like other great engineering feats, it compressed time and space. Shipping and travel that once took weeks from New York to Havana shrank the journey to mere days.

The railway also claimed Meredith's life. Flagler, a founder of Standard Oil, owner of the Florida East Coast Railway, and developer of the Key West Extension, was stricken by Meredith's death and directed the railway honor him with a bronze inset plaque that once adorned his gravestone and reminded passersby of this supreme engineering marvel. Known then as the Over-Sea Railway, it is known today as the Overseas Highway, the railway bed now bearing SUV's and pickups instead of rolling stock and Pullman cars.

Meredith's career may not have fared so well and so long without the bedrock of a marriage that withstood long separations and the disabling, and finally lethal, fatigue of pounding and laying a railroad out of coral rock, swamp muck and ocean depths. Ella and J.C. rest side-by-side in Miami's old City Cemetery, among so many of Miami's early worthies and appropriately within sight of the railway that eventually took both their lives.

King Funeral Home handled both their funeral arrangements. Meredith's body lay in his home after preparation, a practice common at the time, and a cortege formed there to draw his casket to nearby First Presbyterian Church for his funeral. A large crowd, newspapers noted, gathered at City Cemetery for his interment, Flagler and the senior leadership of the Florida East Coast Railway among the mourners. Barely five months later another sad cortege bore Ella from the same church to the same coral plot where she was reunited with her beloved husband.

The above information was provided by Mark H. Metcalf, [email protected].