The hotel is one of the first buildings in the country wired for electricity from the onset, with the power being supplied by DC generators installed by Flagler's friend, Thomas Edison.

Smith couldn't come up with the funds,[7] so Flagler began construction of the 540-room Ponce de León Hotel by himself, spending several times his original estimate.

[8] Two years later, Smith would build the Casa Monica Hotel opposite the Ponce de Leon, on land sold to him by Flagler.

The Hotel Ponce de Leon is built on land that was part of a former orange grove and salt marsh belonging to Dr. Andrew Anderson, owner of the nearby Markland house.

Writing of a visit to St Augustine, Ring Lardner has one of his characters say: In the evenin' we strolled acrost the street to the Ponce—that's supposed to be even sweller yet than where we were stoppin' at.

I finally warned the Missus that if we didn't duck back to our room I'd probably have a heart attack from excitement; but she'd read in her Florida guide that the decorations and pitchers was worth goin' miles to see, so we had to stand in front o' them for a couple hours and try to keep awake.

But, anyway, he'd heard that this here kind o' water could be found in St. Augustine, and when he couldn't find it he went into the hotel business and got even with the United States by chargin' five dollars a day and up for a room.

In 1882, Henry Plant, Flagler and nine other northern businessmen established the corporation to develop the Southernmost Frontier of the US – the Florida peninsula from Orlando south.

With the success of the Ponce de Leon, Flagler realized the need for a sound transportation system to support his resorts, and he purchased short-line railroads to form what would later become known as the Florida East Coast Railway.

The headwaiter of the Ponce in the 1880s and 1890s was Frank Thompson, who was a pioneer civil rights advocate and an organizer of the professional black baseball team that became the Cuban Giants.

A major cause of this was the continuous extension of Flagler's railway, which allowed tourists to vacation in the warmer, tropical climates further south, giving rise to cities like West Palm Beach and Miami.

The colony attracted many up-and-coming American artists of the time, including Martin Johnson Heade, who painted, among other works, "Giant Magnolias on a Blue Cloth" in Studio No.

[12][13] During the Great Depression, the federal government had organized several of its direct aid programs in the city with the goal of revitalizing the area's tourism economy.

Authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, Robert Frost, John Dos Passos, and, most particularly, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, visited or lived in St. Augustine during this time, and there was an active community of artists.

From 1942 until the end of the war in 1945, thousands of young recruits received their basic and advanced training at the hotel, with up to 2,500 trainees living in the building at any one time.

After his basic training at Curtis Bay, Maryland he was assigned to the Ponce de Leon Hotel (commandeered by the Coast Guard) in St. Augustine.

Beginning in 1976, with the nation's bicentennial anniversary, Flagler College embarked on an ambitious campaign to restore the hotel and other Flagler-era campus buildings to their original grandeur.