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A storm of memories
On the day hell came to Lake Okeechobee, Vernie Boots built himself a windmill. He found a boat propeller, impaled it on a fat nail and pointed the toy at the rising wind. He was 14. "A kid," he says, "don't have a lick of sense. I was having fun." The propeller whirled fast enough to burn a groove in the nail. The big blow was coming. One of the biggest blows of all time was on its way.
Vernie Boots
On Sept. 16, 1928, the only thing between the wood frame Boots home and the massive lake was 300 feet and a 4-foot dike constructed of mud. When dawn broke, and the hurricane had passed, his father and mother and brother were gone, dead by drowning. So were more than 1,800 other people. He and two brothers survived the storm by clinging to debris and floating two miles into the Everglades.
"I can remember everything," the 78-year-old Belle Glade resident says now. "Just ask me."
Belle Glade after 1928 Storm
The 1928 hurricane, and what resulted from that hellish day, changed the way America's greatest wetland wilderness, the Everglades, was managed. It changed the ecology of a beautiful natural system. It changed lives. Ask Vernie Boots, people here say when they hear you're interested in knowing about the 1928 hurricane and Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades: Go ahead and ask him. So I do.
Hurricane warnings
"The Everglades ain't what they used to be ," says Boots, when I call him at the Belle Glade hydraulics firm where he builds machinery though he is long past retirement age. His parents, William Henry and Mattie Mae Boots, moved to Lake Okeechobee in 1916, tried Arizona for a while and returned to the lake for good in 1925. The Boots family grew beans, potatoes and cabbages outside of Belle Glade in a community known as Sebring Farms. Roads, few and crude, were built from mud and sand. Some folks found it easier to get around by boat.
Like many September storms, the '28 hurricane was born in the Atlantic Ocean. Winds were howling more than 100 mph when it slammed Puerto Rico, killed hundreds of people, and took aim at South Florida. Mass communications were unsophisticated, and many Lake Okeechobee residents were unaware of the coming danger. There were no space satellites to pinpoint storm locations, and no hurricane hunter airplanes to actually fly into the black clouds and collect data. Most information was gathered by ships at sea. Information frequently was wrong or obsolete within hours.
On Friday, Sept. 14, word reached Okeechobee about a possible hurricane. Some people made preparations. Some even moved to higher ground. The Boots clan did. They traveled to South Bay, where a big seaworthy barge was moored in a canal. The barge was thought to be the best place to ride out a hurricane even if the dike burst.
When the hurricane failed to arrive as the experts predicted, people headed home. They went home and looked at the lake and whistled. Heavy rains in August had swelled the lake. What if a big storm hit?
"There was a little dike, maybe about 4 feet tall, by our house," Vernie Boots says, sitting in his office. "You could stand on it and look down into the lake. The water was only a few feet from the top."
On Sunday afternoon the hurricane savaged Palm Beach with 140 mph winds. Fifty miles inland, at Lake Okeechobee, breezes grew into gales and gales grew into hurricane winds. At nightfall, gauges at Belle Glade broke apart at 96 knots. Nobody knows for sure the actual strength of the winds, but barometers dropped to 27.43 millibars, making the hurricane the fifth most intense Atlantic storm ever.
Scene near Dixie Court Apartment, West Palm Beach
The Boots family -- mother and father and four sons -- decided to spend the storm in a neighbor's sturdier house next door. Some 60 people in the community had the same idea. They fought through the wind, entered the two-bedroom home and prayed.
"There was a lot of weight in that house," Vernie Boots says now. "We figured all that weight might keep the house from floating off the foundations."
The storm advanced. Its counter-clockwise winds drove the lake at, and over, the 4-foot dike. As historian Lawrence E. Will later wrote: "The wind was howling with that hollow roar only a hurricane can make. The windows of the heavens were wide open like a lot gate, and rain almost horizontal, stinging like sleet, drove down in endless torrents in the pitch-black night. Then came the water. . . . "
The dike had given away. Water 11 feet deep swept over the land.
"As it came into the house, everybody moved to the attic," Vernie Boots says now. He pauses and takes a deep breath. Sixty-four years have passed, and he still fights his grief when he tells the story. He continues only when he has regained his composure.
"I was one of the last into the attic. . . . The house kept shifting, and a window broke, and the glass cut a piece out of my hand. . . . The house became buoyant. . . . Floated off the foundations."
In the attic, terrified people wailed and prayed and wailed more. Outside, hell worked to enter the humble wood house.
"We floated over to where the government had been building a road. The wind smashed the house against the road bed. We rocked badly and smashed into the road bed again. The third time we hit the road the house fell apart."
"The last thing my mother said was "Whatever happens, stay together.' "
Vernie Boots grabbed a piece of ceiling as the house crumbled. It became his life raft. The hurricane, like the whale that swallowed Jonah, wanted to devour him.
"The wind liked to have turned me over. The big thing I tried to do is keep my head pointing at the wind. That and keeping my balance. I kept rotating on that thing, keeping my balance, all night.
"It was dark, real dark, except for lightning. I mean, you couldn't see nothing. The wind was a constant screech."
For hours it continued.
"Finally, about daylight, the wind started to die. I yelled for help. Two of my brothers answered. We'd been real close during the night but we hadn't seen or heard each other. They'd been hanging to other pieces of wood, too."
The Boots boys were about two miles out in the Everglades. They waded toward civilization.
Community swept away
Belle Glade Garage
Devastation was complete. Belle Glade, Pahokee and South Bay were virtually destroyed. Bodies, livestock and lumber floated everywhere. Some survivors used bloated cows as rafts and splintered lumber as paddles.
"Nothing was left of the community where I lived except for four palm trees. . . . Whatever you was wearing is what you had. . . . They found the bodies of my father and brother -- they're buried in a cemetery near the Caloosahatchee River -- but my mother was never found. "I never saw my mother again." Again he has to pause for breath.
Bodies were stacked in makeshift coffins and wagons and carted to cemeteries. As days passed, and other decomposing bodies were discovered, a new strategy was developed to counter the possibility of disease. Bodies were quickly buried in mass, unmarked graves or burned on the spot. Vultures floated above the stench.
The official number of dead was set at 1,838. But many dead probably were never counted. Many storm victims were vegetable pickers from foreign lands who had no loved ones to ask about them or search for them. Most people who have studied the storm believe the official death toll is low.
By JEFF KLINKENBERG, St. Petersburg Times, July 12, 1992
1928 Okeechobee Aftermath (click photo to enlarge)
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They are in their 80s and 90s now, much of their memories fogged by time, but even 75 years later, the details come flooding back.
The sting of the wind whipping their faces. The look of terror in the eyes of their parents. The desperation that held them to broken planks or fallen trees as entire buildings tumbled in the raging floodwaters.
But it is the bodies that haunt the survivors of the worst storm in Florida history. Too many to count, too decomposed to identify, rotting so quickly that none got a decent funeral. The black migrant workers, making up three-quarters of the dead, didn't even get so much as a marker.
In modern-day South Florida, it is the 61 killed and the $26 billion destruction caused by Hurricane Andrew in 1992 that serve as the benchmark for how ferocious weather systems can get.
But the survivors of the Great Okeechobee Hurricane of Sept. 26, 1928, know better. They know that whole towns can be washed away in a matter of hours, wiping out generations of families with no one left to identify the dead. They know a storm that killed half the population of western Palm Beach County and left every corner of the county tattered and broken. They know a hurricane that exacted $16 billion in damage in today's dollars, enough to pitch South Florida into the Great Depression a year before the rest of the country.
But it is the loss of life that separates this storm from almost any other. Between 2,500 and 3,000 county residents died that day, making it the second-deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history, behind the Galveston, Texas, hurricane of 1900.
"I don't know if I ever really completely got over it," said Frank Stallings, 95, who thinks often of the horror of that summer day. "It was a harrowing thing."
Today, though, so few are aware of the devastation inflicted that the 1928 hurricane is known simply as the Forgotten Storm. Forgotten, historians and survivors suggest, because politicians at the time downplayed the storm's severity, fearful of dampening the tourism keeping the region afloat.
Forgotten because officials failed to adequately document the destruction for future generations.
Forgotten because the vast majority of those who died were black migrant workers, segregated in life and abandoned in death. Their graves, unmarked and untended for generations, more than reflect the racial climate of the times. They expose a shameful chapter in Palm Beach County history, one public officials are only now working to repair.
To survivors, white or black, history's indifference to so seismic an event is offensive, whatever the reason. "We didn't have great, big buildings like they have now," said Alice Forbes Mutchler. "All we had was dead people, and people don't count."
Mutchler, 98, can't forget. To her, the howl of the wind, the screams of the drowning, the sight of sheer devastation live with her still. Such detail is the legacy left by survivors, historical accountings and area natives who grew up on the lore of the storm, resurrecting with each retelling a lesson South Florida will never outgrow.
To them, the Storm of '28 will forever be remembered as Black Sunday, the night when death blew down Palm Beach County's back door.
Landfall
Even before the unnamed storm, packing 150 mph winds, slammed ashore in West Palm Beach, it had killed 1,500 in the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and the Bahamas. Within moments of making landfall on a Palm Beach County shoreline, its fierce winds left a trail of destruction from Pompano Beach to Jupiter.
Sailboats were thrown from their moors, buildings in downtown West Palm Beach splintered and popped, choking Clematis Street with debris.
The Episcopal Church on Swinton Avenue in Delray Beach was flattened, and in Boca Raton, railcars were blown off their tracks and a third of the buildings were demolished. The first hit by the violent weather, the coastal communities paid dearly. Four people died in Jupiter.
In seaside Lake Park, then called Kelsey City, Fred and Ana Nelms were escaping their falling home when the vicious winds swept the couple's infant from the new father's arms, killing the baby instantly.
But as the Category 4 monster raged westward, it saved its most crippling blow for the small farming communities that lined Lake Okeechobee's southern shore. Between Clewiston and Canal Point, 6,000 people lived and worked, and nearly half would perish before the light of day.
It was not the wind, said Roy Rood, 9 at the time and hunkered down in relative safety under an upright piano in his family's Jupiter home. It was the water that devastated the people of the Glades.
A 5-foot muck dike, built to hold back Lake Okeechobee's waves during summer rains, crumbled in the frenzied waters, unleashing a storm surge with the fury of a tidal wave.
"Nobody seemed to be too much alarmed," said Stallings, 20 then and boarded up with his family in their Belle Glade grocery store, "until the water started coming in."
One family strapped the children to a fallen tree. Some in Belle Glade rushed up the water tower, kicking at anyone who got in their way. In the farming communities surrounding South Bay and Pahokee, thousands of field workers hunkered down in flimsy homes, many doomed to drown.
In South Bay, Ed Forbes, a boat captain, got a call on the town's only telephone, saying a deadly storm was headed his way. He and his sons alerted as many of the community's 400 residents as they could, knocking on doors and corralling 200 to the safest spot Forbes could fathom: a construction barge moored in a nearby canal.
"Nearly all the people who didn't get on the barge, some part of their family was lost," said Mutchler, Forbes' daughter. "One woman floated as far as Belle Glade, five miles away. She was alive but the waters beat her up so badly, it beat all her clothes off and beat her black and blue."
On the barge, Mutchler, five months pregnant, held her 7-month-old daughter above the knee-deep water, as her father and brothers feverishly bailed out a waterlogged bilge system with pots. Miles away, Mutchler's cousin, Vernie Boots, was hanging to a broken plank. His family had taken shelter in a two-story home in Sebring Farms, west of South Bay. The house flooded within minutes, reaching the group's perch in the rafters and forcing them to cut a hole in the roof with an ax. Boots, 14 at the time, was thrown to the surface of the water just as the house broke into pieces. Clinging to a piece of the roof during a tormented, hours-long ride, Boots and his brother survived. His mother, who couldn't swim, his ailing father and a younger brother didn't.
The Hurricane Hits
Local pioneer Bessie DuBois, who lived through it, called the hurricane that hit on Sept. 16, 1928, "the hurricane of the century."
Young Carlin White was getting off the train, coming back from a visit to his father’s Oregon ranch, and saw "everyone in town (few as they were) ... busy gathering nails, boards and other necessary materials for the shoring up of their homes."
"I always had plenty of food on hand, so they all congregated at my house," DuBois said of her 11 family members.
As strong gusts of wind began, her father, two brothers and a sister arrived at the house built by DuBois’ husband, John. Her father wanted the family to ride out the hurricane in a reinforced concrete building on the government reservation, but John said his house would hold.
An ice chest was filled (there was no refrigerator), and food was cooked — bread, potatoes and a ham. Concerned about the reports of high water, DuBois took a basket of supplies up to the old vacant house on a nearby hill, where John was born — today’s DuBois Museum — just in case the family had to move to safer ground.
Nearby at about 4 p.m., White — accompanied by his uncle — took his movie camera to the beach in the area of today’s Jupiter Inlet Park. Waves reached almost to the road as the hurricane churned the sea.
"The wind was so strong, we had difficulty standing," White later remembered. "In spite of this, I was able to get some motion pictures of the surf doing its utmost to destroy the beach dune line. I do not think I have ever observed such natural fury before. Little did I know this was quite mild in comparison to what was in store for Jupiter."
"By dark, the storm was upon us with what I thought was its full strength," White remembered of the evening he spent in the dining room of his family’s Carlin House Hotel, just west of the DuBois home. "I could not imagine it getting worse. But it did. Much, much worse."
"We spent most of the time with our eyes glued to our three barometers. Our light came from two kerosene lanterns. We watched the barometers pulsate with every gust. Their needles dropped lower and lower."
At the weather station in West Palm Beach, the barometer was plunging. From a reading of 29.17 at 5 p.m., when the wind was 40 mph, it dropped to 28.54, with 60 mph winds, at 7:48 p.m. Eventually, it reached 27.45 — the lowest ever recorded in the United States until then.
And the wind rose.
"That roar, that continual roar while it’s going on is like having an express train going at 100 mph in your ear," Minear said. "It’s just awful."
"It has a very high-pitched kind of a whine to it," DuBois recalled.
"The sound effects are what’s scary," Roy Rood agreed.
In their various shelters, residents endured and waited. People lay on the floor for protection at the elementary school.
The late James Bassett, who was 5, remembered being protected when "dad rolled a younger brother and me in a mattress."
"Our house came off the blocks," DuBois said. "The water came in under it, the waves were breaking in the yard." A chimney and cement block porch "was all that was holding our house together." Foam from the waves blew against the window and "cabbage palms went down like grass," she later wrote.
As a joke, her father and brother-in-law shaved and got dressed, so they’d be "handsome corpses."
"This house shook," Roy Rood said. Sand was blowing and debris was flying. When tarpaper came off the roof and water came inside, Harlow drilled holes in the floor, so the water would drain out.
At the Carlin House, "The howl of the winds plus the noise of the rain hitting the east side of the hotel made conversation impossible," White said. "We had to shout at each other. Needless to say, no one slept."
"I have never seen so much rain in my life," Mittie Bieger Bassett later remembered. "The wind blew our house right off the foundation. Then it set the house back down after rotating it 45 degrees. It was very strange, but not a dish or a window was broken." Her family went to another nearby home, at Indiantown Road and Pennock Lane. Just after they arrived, a large pine tree blew down across the path they had taken.
The experience of James Bassett’s grandmother was even worse. Her back was broken when her home collapsed, and her husband carried her on his back as he crawled through the storm to Jupiter Elementary. "They almost couldn’t hear him outside when he got there, but they let him in," Bassett said.
Lottie May Hay and her family huddled in her father’s Model T Ford. During the storm, they heard something banging over and over against the car. Her father left the vehicle to check, she recalled, and "the first thing he saw was a bright light. It seemed to spring up out of the ground. Then it started bouncing up and down like a ball. It scared him half to death." It’s believed to have been St. Elmo’s fire, a discharge of electricity that occurs during storms.
On Center Street, at Evelyn Dressell’s house, the water came so high that the living room furniture was floating. In other places, boat houses were lifted off cement blocks and scattered. Shirley Floyd wrote that her house "rocked so badly I got seasick."
At Pennock Plantation, English’s husband didn’t take refuge in the silo after all — which was fortunate for him. "The silo was the first structure to be blown over," she said. Where she was, at the store, men went up to the second floor to brace the window frames.
How high the wind reached may never be known. At 8:15 p.m., the anemometer cups at the West Palm Beach weather station blew away when the wind reached 75 mph. By 9 p.m., with the barometer at 27.87, officials estimated the velocity had doubled. Shortly after 10 p.m., the bureau estimated a wind speed of 160 mph. Other estimates were even higher. "That was a bad one — almost 200 mph winds," Minear said.
The lighthouse keeper, Capt. Charles Seabrook, had a big problem. The beacon recently had been modernized from a mineral oil light to an electric lamp, and the rotation mechanism also had been connected to power lines — and now the electricity was out. Seabrook tried to start the emergency diesel generator, but it wouldn’t respond. The 68-year-old lighthouse was dark in this vicious storm.
Seabrook found the old mineral lamps, but the light would have to be turned by hand —and Seabrook’s hand had blood poisoning, with red streaks running up his arm.
Franklin, 17, his oldest son, volunteered to make the perilous climb up the lighthouse, which was swaying as much as 17 inches. The boy started up and was blown back four times as he tried to climb the steep winding stairway. But finally, he reached the top. And for four hours in the height of the hurricane, as glass was shattered and wind threatened to tear the mechanism away, he rotated the light’s mantle by hand.
Farther south, a home on a sand hill west of today’s U.S. 1, north of Juno Beach, blew away. Its occupants, a couple named Marcinski, "went through nearly the entire storm crawling on their hands and knees along the old Celestial Railroad right of way," White later wrote.
From about 7 p.m., when the hurricane was reaching its peak, until 5 a.m. the next day, the couple slowly made its way — traveling 3 miles to a gas station near the Carlin House.
"Both were badly bruised from being tossed around by the wind," White wrote. "Many times they became separated and had to grope around to find one another."
Aftermath
Devastation south of the Palm Beach Courthouse
The ship’s bell on the DuBois’ back porch was ringing, and that was good news. It meant the wind had changed and the storm was passing. Sunrise revealed a new world to the residents of Jupiter.
"There wasn’t a home ... that escaped damage," Mrs. Bassett later remembered.
"Mother found only one dry room in our whole house," George Mae Walker recalled. "The house was tilted to one side, but we managed."
"Britt Lanier’s brand new stucco house was blown down flat and all of the new furniture ruined," English wrote.
DuBois wrote that her father, brothers and sisters went home to find their house "had done a merry-go-round about the central chimney. The stairs were at odd angles, dishes broken and the house off the blocks."
Her own home "hung from the chimney and porch in a sad posture," she wrote. "All the underpinnings had been washed about like chessmen scattered with a careless hand."
The windows on the second and third floors of Minear’s house had broken, letting in the wind and sending the dormer into the middle of the river.
Although their home stood, the Rood property was a mess, with all the fern sheds down. After getting the water out of their house, Roy Rood’s mother found one dry spot in the building, put a mattress there and went to sleep.
Boathouses had been ripped off cement blocks, and the weather station was severely damaged — later to be completely removed. At the naval radio station, two 300-foot towers had been uprooted and the concrete footers torn out. A pavilion located where Beach Road now meets the ocean was washed away.
Telephone poles were knocked down, cars turned over and 17 windmills destroyed at the Pennock Plantation.
Flooding was extensive, waist deep in places. Center Street was under water and after the storm, people used rowboats to get around. One motorist put a blanket in front of his car to push a wave ahead of the vehicle. East of the railroad bridge, a boat was floated out of a boathouse by the high water, and the river rose 8 feet to the railroad trestle.
In West Jupiter, six people who had taken refuge in the school building were killed. Only those who stayed under the oak and metal desks survived. And a girl less than 1 year old had been killed when she and her father, who was holding her, were blown into some debris.
People "were just stunned," DuBois said.
Residents checked on one another. And many people who had not taken refuge in the school on Loxahatchee Drive now gathered there — "almost the entire population," White remembered — bringing the total to around 300.
"Just about everybody in town was there, both blacks and whites," Hay recalled.
Recovering bodies
Click photo to enlarge
Just as the killer storm had caught the people of the Glades unprepared, so too did the sheer volume of the dead it left behind. Armies of volunteers built pine boxes to bury the bodies. Large trucks were commissioned to carry the dead to gravesites on higher, drier ground.
And Frank Stallings and his father, whose grocery store was flattened but whose family lived, joined others in recovering the dead. "We were hauling bodies out of the water two and three at a time," said Stallings, recalling the faces he recognized in the lifeless piles. Sickened by the sight and, even more so, the stench, he couldn't eat for days. The task proved more than anyone could handle. By the fifth day, the bodies were rotting in the heat, causing a health hazard.
Preparing to burn coffins - click to enlarge photo
"The Health Department instructed my father to build a fire and destroy the bodies because they were getting too far along," Stallings said. The experience haunted his father until his death, he added, especially the memory of a birthday bracelet he recognized on a toddler girl. "She had proudly shown it to him two months before," Stallings recalled. "He said the hardest thing he ever had to do was throw that little girl's body on that fire."
The burned remains, along with those of many others -- 1,600 in all -- were trucked to Port Mayaca on the lake's eastern shore. Makeshift graveyards in roadside ditches from Pahokee to Sebring contain the remains of scores of others. Sixty-nine white people were buried in pine boxes at Woodlawn Cemetery in West Palm Beach. Another 674black people were dumped, unceremoniously and without a sign to mark the spot, in a 20-foot hole in the city's pauper cemetery, forgotten for more than 70 years.
The number of known graves approaches 2,500, but more bodies were never found, swallowed whole by the Everglades muck or left to the elements after the government called off the search for lack of money.
click photo to enlarge
Recognition
It was a hurricane that scared the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers into its first major flood-control effort in South Florida, one that pushed the Hoover administration to build a towering, 40-foot-high dike where the modest, earthen barrier lost its battle. But only now, 75 years later, are authorities recognizing the enormous toll the hurricane took on the people of the Glades.
This summer, the National Hurricane Center increased the death toll from 1,836 to 2,500, with an asterisks suggesting the total could be 3,000. The long-neglected West Palm Beach pauper cemetery is finally getting its memorial monuments. And after so many years passed without notice, the storm's 75th anniversary will be honored with remembrance ceremonies, photo exhibits, even a re-enactment of the burial procession, throughout this month.
For Vera Farrington of Delray Beach, whose mother died in 1993 -- long before authorities took notice of a storm that wiped out most of her family -- the recognitions are bittersweet. "I'm so sorry that they weren't doing this when my mother was around to see it," said Farrington, who was born a few months after the storm. "That [experience] weighed heavily on her. I think this would have been some closure for her."
A marker at Woodlawn Cemetery in West Palm Beach memorializes victims of the 1928 hurricane. White victims were buried in the cemetery while black victims were buried in a mass grave at the corner of Tamarind Avenue and 25th Street.
By Nicole Sterghos Brochu http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/nationworld/search/sfl-ahurricane14sep14,0,5316941,full.story
Because of its horrible consequences on this date, the September 1928 hurricane is often referred to as "San Felipe." The greatness of the tragedy in Puerto Rico slowly made the news in the United States, just about the time Florida residents were receiving their first warnings of the powerful storm offshore.
On September 15, it swept through the Bahama Islands, dashing away anemometer cups before they could record the highest winds. Residents along the Florida coast did what they could to prepare; some secured their homes, and others fled.
In the early hours of the sixteenth, San Felipe was poised 200 miles south east of Miami, and already this large and powerful storm was being felt along the coast, which was battered by gale-force winds and rolling surf.
By nightfall the hurricane made its lunge over the Florida coast near West Palm Beach. Experiencing the awesome power one would expect from a category 4 storm, Palm Beach County was rocked by a large tidal surge and winds estimated at over 150 mph.
A minimum barometer reading of 27.43 inches was taken at 7:00 p.m., which fell just short of establishing a new record low for the United States (a reading of 27.37 inches had been measured in 1919).
West Palm Beach recorded a total of 18.42 inches of rain during the week of the storm, over 10 inches of which fell as the hurricane passed through. Witnesses reported that the "lull" lasted about forty minutes, and the storm was moving at a forward speed of about 14 mph.
Up the coast at Jupiter, many residents, both black and white, took refuge in the schoolhouse, which weathered the storm much better than did their homes. One cement-block house collapsed during the storm, crushing several members of a family--the only reported deaths in Jupiter.
The Jupiter Lighthouse, the red brick sentinel that had witnessed many storms, was said to have swayed a remarkable seventeen inches "as mortar squeezed from between bricks like toothpaste."
Prior to the hurricane, the light had been converted from oil burners to electricity. As the storm reached the coast, all power lines were downed, and the lighthouse auxiliary generator failed to work.
Captain Seabrook, the keeper, refused to let the light go out and scrambled to reinstall the old oil burners. Without electricity, the light's mantle had to be turned by hand, and Seabrook, who was suffering from blood poisoning at the time, was prepared to push the apparatus around all night. His son Franklin, noticing the bright red streaks on his father's arm, stepped in to work the mantle, continuing to near exhaustion. As a result, the light shone through one of the century's most dreadful storms, and later the younger Seabrook was officially commended for his heroism.
Captain Seabrook
All along the coast, piers, docks, and waterfront structures were lifted by the tide and carried for hundreds of yards. In some instances, houses were raised from their foundations and spun ninety degrees, their porches and stairs twisted into tangled arrangements. Trees were knocked down on virtually every street, wrapped in webs of electric cables.
Flagler Avenue
On Tuesday morning, September 18, thirty-six hours after the hurricane's arrival, headlines around the nation summarized the calamity: "Florida Destroyed! Florida Destroyed!" The initial news of the disaster at West Palm Beach was just beginning to emerge when a far more ominous catastrophe was discovered--the mind-boggling massacre on the edges of Lake Okeechobee.
By noon on the day of the storm, many of the people around the lake had heard of the approaching cyclone. In South Bay several men took the initiative to drive the maze of roads around the lake to spread the news and to urge people to seek shelter. Many women and children gathered on a large barge anchored in the lake.
But as the afternoon progressed and the great storm grew nearer, hundreds of families, landowners, and laborers went about their work on the broad, flat terrain with no idea of what was about to occur. Normally, the water level in the lake was maintained slightly above the level of the land so that water could be drained off as needed. In the weeks before the storm, heavy rains had kept the lake level high and filled the ditches and canals around the glades.
By September 10, the lake level had risen three feet in thirty days, and the ten or more inches of rain that fell during the storm added to the burden. But it was the intense hurricane winds, estimated at over 150 mph at Canal Point, that lifted the waters of Lake Okeechobee and tossed them southward, completely washing away entire communities and the dikes that were supposed to protect them.
According to some reports, the waters rose from four to six feet in the first hour of the storm, and still-water marks in some buildings were almost eight feet above the ground. Few were able to survive this incredible wall of water.
In the darkness of the next few hours, Florida experienced its greatest recorded tragedy. A detailed and vivid account of these events is chronicled in Lawrence E. Will's book, Okeechobee Hurricane and the Hoover Dike. In it, Will relives the storm and writes of the great irony of the disaster: "This calamity occurred within a few miles of a large city and of a world famous resort, yet so isolated was the location that not until three days later did the state's own governor learn of its enormity. So extended and so difficult was the terrain that after six weeks the search for bodies was discontinued with many still unrecovered."
Dead bodies were scattered everywhere, decomposing in the Florida sun with each passing day. Many of those who had managed to survive had been swept for miles into the saw grass and were forced to walk or wade back to whatever recognizable roadway they could find. Some, too weak or injured to stand or walk, sat for days in hopes of being spotted by passersby. Some who survived the storm are believed to have perished later as they wandered the vast Everglades.
And the countryside stank with death.
Out in the Glades, workers fearful of disease had tried to bury some victims, but the saturated ground spit them up. Some went into a mass grave in Port Mayaca, along the lake's northeast shore in western Martin County. It is said to hold as many as 1,600. Some were piled into hills of humanity and set afire. Some were loaded onto barges and taken out of the interior.
Mass graves in West Palm
Whites and blacks were separated, and about 70 whites went into a common grave at West Palm Beach's Woodlawn Cemetery, home to the white pioneers who had settled the city only a few decades earlier.
But about 674 were placed in an unmarked mass grave at Tamarind Avenue and 25th Street. The grave was eventually forgotten by all but the residents of the neighborhood. Buildings and a street were eventually built over it. It would be seven decades before people started thinking about it again. A group now wants to build a $6 million park and monument to honor the dead.
Several unusual events were reported in the aftermath of the storm. Arthur Stokes, a black worker arrested for murder before the hurricane, had to be released at his trial because the only witnesses had drowned in the storm. Similarly, the storm clarified the whereabouts of Deputy State Hotel Commissioner Pat Houston, who was believed to have absconded with a considerable sum of the state's money because of his long absence. It was reported that Houston's good name was returned when his body was found near Pahokee. Governor Martin said that the body of one of the storm victims, C. L. Reddick, was found five days after the flood, still guarded by the man's trusted dog. One local man, emotionally numbed by the calamity, worked long hours in search of bodies, even though he himself had twice been bitten by a water moccasin. Perhaps most amazing of all, an eighty-three-year-old woman from Belle Glade was found alive in a steel washtub on September 20, four days after the storm.
Unfortunately, because of the bad publicity Florida had received after the 1926 storm and the economic bust that followed, some officials at first downplayed the disaster at Okeechobee. But word of the tragedy soon spread, and more relief poured in. The Red Cross was well prepared for the storm's aftermath, having gained valuable experience during the Miami hurricane and the flood at Moore Haven. Local volunteer chapters went to work as soon as news of the storm's impact in Puerto Rico was known. Well before the hurricane struck Florida, the Red Cross had dispatched six experienced relief workers to the state. After the storm hit, while the American Legion was busy with rescue efforts and the search for bodies, the Red Cross set up twenty-two emergency feeding centers. Soon thousands of refugees had access to food, clothing, and shelter. The people of the glades were in particular need of clothing, as the swirling floodwaters had left many of the survivors nearly naked.
Excerpt from the book Florida's Hurricane History, by Jay Barnes.
Life in South Florida changed forever. A giant dike was built around the lake. Eventually a government entity was born and a network of canals carved for flood control; the agency's mission later grew to include water supply and quality, and it became the South Florida Water Management District.
Port Mayaca Hurricane marker, site of the Hurricane victims' mass grave
The memory of the rugged pioneers of the swampy Florida Everglades lives on in a remote cemetery two miles east of Lake Okeechobee. Those whose bodies were found and identified were stacked like cordwood on docks, then loaded into wagons and hauled miles away to dry Port Mayaca. Today, towering cedars and a flapping American flag stand watch over a granite headstone that remembers the hurricane victims.
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