Pernell Green, 84, recalls living through the 1928 Hurricane which killed 2,500 Floridians.
Pernell Green was 4 years old when the deadly Sept. 16, 1928 hurricane roared ashore between Jupiter and West Palm Beach and south over Lake Okeechobee. But the 84-year-old Stuart resident and retired Air Force veteran recalls the details like it was yesterday.
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The storm was one of the 10 most deadly storms in history to strike the United States. It did the equivalent of $1 billion in today’s dollars in damage. It killed everyone in the tiny town of Chosen.
“My father took my mother, baby brother, Leon, and me to a big two-story warehouse in Belle Glade, where he thought we would be safe,” said Green. “We were on the second floor. There was a white family with us, but I don’t know what happened to them.”
Green said his mother stayed up all night while the storm raged and water rose to the level of the second floor windowsill and started seeping in.
“I was patting it,” he recalled. “Kids that age don’t know to be scared.”
When dawn came, the water subsided and his mother led them out of the warehouse and up the road. He said bodies lay everywhere on the roads, the railroad tracks and in the ditches, from which they had to get drinking water.
“We found a store with no one in it, and everyone got some food to eat,” said Green.
Eventually they were taken to West Palm Beach by the American Red Cross and put up in an emergency center.
His father had gone back to their home in a boat to get his mother’s wedding presents, but the wind drove his boat into a telephone pole and he took shelter in another big building where people were forced to hold onto the rafters to keep from being swept away.
“But they would get tired. They would say ‘I’m going,’ Then they would let go, fall into the water and drown. My father couldn’t save them,” he said.
Later he was told that after the storm, his father came to Stuart and told everyone his family was gone. “They even tolled the bell for us,” he said. “But later he found us in West Palm Beach.”
Skeletons of some of the victims are still found in the mangroves around the lake.
Historical Society founder Willy Jay Thompson said the storm came in from the Bahamas, doing heavy damage to the east coast from Miami to Fort Pierce and drove westward to blow Lake Okeechobee out of its bed. The wind ravaged Stuart, Port Salerno, Hobe Sound and Jupiter. The residents of the area were not forewarned about the storm, as they might have been in our times, Thompson said.
“All most of them knew was that during the night, the winds and rains picked up and then the lake came out of its bed on the northern and southern ends,” he said.
Then as now, the Everglades was a rich agricultural area, Thompson said, attracting workers from all over the country and the Bahamas.
“The storm changed their lives forever,” he said.
Others Recall.....
"I wasn't born when the Storm hit, but my father lived through it. His name was Johnny B. Thomas, and I didn't meet him till I was grown up, but right away, all he could talk about was the Storm of 1928, and how he had to bury all those people in the trench, how he dug these deep graves and threw the dead bodies in there like animals. He died four years ago in a nursing home, and even at the end, he'd tell me he could still smell the flesh." -- Luvenia "Mama Lou" Washington, 70, Riviera Beach community volunteer.
Luvenia "Mama Lu" Washington holds a photo of her late father, Johnny B. Thomas, at age 90.He was a survivor of the 1928 storm
"My parents were survivors of the storm, and my mother was pregnant with me when it hit. The winds came, and the house was rocking back and forth, and the water started pouring in. My mother and father and my father's parents jumped on a chair, then a table to stay above the water. Then, my father was able to unhinge the door and lay it over the rafters, and they climbed up on it. The water moccasins would come up on the door, and they'd have to slap them off, and there were gators in the water, too. My parents sat there for more than a day before somebody came by in a boat and got them." -Vera Farrington, 72, former assistant principal at Boca Raton High School
"A lot of our children don't even know about the 1928 hurricane. We need to make them aware of that, that their ancestors were the ones who helped Mr. Henry Flagler build this area, which was a swamp, infested with rattlesnakes, skeeters and alligators. So in a sense, they gave their lives so they could make South Florida what it is today." -- Mary Alford, Vera's sister, 70,retired nurse.
"I was born in Delray Beach, and my parents would take me to the Everglades during the season when they were gathering crops. In 1928, when I was 6, my dad stayed back in Delray, and my mother took me and my sister to the Glades. And what saved us was my mother had some Seminole Indian friends. This one Indian friend came to her on Friday, two days before the storm, and he said, "Beatrice, I want you to take your children and leave, because the storm is coming here and the lake is going to overflow.' He said, "I checked, and all the birds are gone.' But how he really knew about the storm was by reading the sawgrass. Each little bud stands for a storm. He could tell from the sawgrass that there was one storm left. So my mother listened to him and took us back to Delray, and we survived." -- Solomon Rolle, 83, former Palm Beach County employee.
"A mother sitting on top of a roof in the black night . . . the house floating away . . . holding a baby. The baby was torn out of her arms, slid down a roof, disappeared into the black water. People can't understand the force of the wind at 120, 150 miles an hour. This man was floating in the water, holding on to debris. . . . He made a final lunge to get a better hold and when he did his hand went over a nail in the debris. It went through his hand. He passed out. When he came to, that's how he survived, by being held there in the debris by the nail through his hand." -- Herb Donald, 92, of Dunedin, who lived through the devastating 1928 Okeechobee hurricane, recalling stories told to his mother as she tended to storm survivors in West Palm Beach.
"After they came and got my parents in the boat, my mom made them take her through the water to where she thought her parents' house was. They could see dead bodies all around, and she said, "I'm not going to leave this place till I see someone in my family.' And there was a body floating down this canal, a young black man. My daddy grabbed a stick and flipped the dead body over, and his head came up, and it was her brother, Granvill. And then she went out and didn't remember anything for days. She lost her parents and her four siblings. I feel so badly because she never knew what happened to them. By all accounts we read, some of them are in that mass grave in West Palm." -- Vera Farrington.
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