Minor Cooper Keith

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Minor C. Keith

Minor Cooper Keith (1848 – 1929) was a U.S. railroad, fruit, and shipping magnate whose business activities had a profound impact in Central America and in Colombia.

Keith was born in Brooklyn, New York. He was the nephew of U.S. railroad entrepreneur Henry Meiggs who was asked to continue to build a railroad in Costa Rica from San José, the Capital, to the Caribbean by Próspero Fernández Oreamuno (President of Costa Rica from 1882-1885). A former President, Tomás Guardia Gutiérrez (1870-1976) had started the construction of the railway in 1871. Keith was involved from the start of the project but took full control after Meiggs's death.

In this era when the transmittal of disease was not understood, and given the mountainous terrain the railroad had to go through, it is not surprising that the death toll was high, running to four thousand people.[1]. Keith was rather the last resort for the Costa Ricans; the route was mountainous, the bank accounts empty, the securities of the railroad unsellable. Keith began this business with his two brothers, who both died in the endeavor. He imported labor from all over the world.

When the Costa Rican government defaulted on its payments as early as 1882, Keith had to borrow £1.2 million from London banks and from private investors and he had begun planting bananas in order to continue the difficult engineering project. He had already done that, planting them along the rail line, from roots he obtained from the French in order to have something to transport on the railroad--and to sell.

In 1884, the government of President Próspero Fernández Oreamuno agreed to give Keith 800,000 acres (3,200 km²) of tax-free land along the railroad, plus a 99-year lease on the operation of the train route, and on the port of Limón. The railroad was completed in 1890, but the flow of passengers proved insufficient to finance Keith's debt. On the other hand, the sale of bananas grown in his lands and transported first by train to Limón and then by ship to the United States, proved very lucrative. Keith soon came to dominate the banana trade in Central America and in the Caribbean coast of Colombia.

To market the bananas, Keith soon ran a steamship line from Limón to the United States. He bought up other Central American banana companies. In 1899, Keith combined his venture with Andrew W. Preston's Boston Fruit Company in the West Indies to form the United Fruit Company.

Keith purchased 40,000 hectares of land in the Tilarán mountains in the Abangares district of the province of Guanacaste in Costa Rica with funds raised from profitable banana company investments. There he established one of the earliest major commercial gold mining operations in the area of the country's oldest mining traditions.. His company, the Abangares Mining Company, employed foreign laborers from Honduras, Nicaragua and Jamaica.. Through government tax breaks, a vertical monopoly business structure as well as being the only seller of goods and services to the isolated mining towns he established, Keith's companies received almost all of the income produced by his mining interests and a relatively small percentage of his profits was injected into the economy of Costa Rica by his investments and operations in the Abangares area.

He returned to railroad building, organized (1912) the International Railways of Central America, and completed an 800-mi (1,287-km) railway system, but died before realizing his dream of a line from Guatemala to the Panama Canal. His goal, which was not realized, was to be able to move anything back and forth by rail from the United States to anywhere in Central America. His work profoundly altered the economic life of Central American countries.[2]

Keith married Cristina Castro Fernández, daughter of former President of Costa Rica José María Castro Madriz. He founded a chain of general stores. He left his collection of ancient Indian gold to the American Museum of Natural History in New York.[3]