Carolyn, it's not Bingo! Key West is "qualified", and not the way your pop-quiz question was posed. I'll dig up the Key West info later (hopefully tonight), and the major industry there at the time was "ship salvage". I recollect the population in 1860 to be less than 10,000, thus the high "per capita" income.
In the middle 1800's, due to the booms in anthracite coal and in canal and railroad shipping, Mauch Chunk became the wealthiest town in the United States. Over fifty citizens had personal worth in excess of $50 thousand (equal to one million current dollars). The greatest industrialist of all, with an estate valued at $54 million, was Asa Packer.
By the mid-19th century, the majority of the nation’s cotton was raised in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, and nowhere in the antebellum South was the cotton more dominant than in Natchez, Mississippi, which was claimed to be the wealthiest town in the US shortly before the Civil War.
In 1860 Key West was the wealthiest town per capita in the United States, and in 1880 it was Florida's largest city with a population of 9,890.
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After the pirates were eliminated, the only fear the captain of a vessel had was hurricanes and running aground on the reefs. These factors contributed greatly to the salvage business early in Key West's existence. Salvaging survived until the 1850s, at which time reef lighthouses began to spring up bringing the beginning of the end to the profits earned from salvage.
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