South Florida Hurricane, September 16, 1928.
SOUTH FLORIDA HURRICANE,.
South Florida Hurricane, September 16, 1928.
Souvenir Photographic Folder of the South Florida Hurricane of September 16, 1928, the Okeechobee Storm
West Palm Beach:, 1928.
$350.00
In Stock
Item Number: 152238
Rare contemporary souvenir folder documenting the South Florida Hurricane of September 16, 1928, one of the deadliest natural disasters in American history. Oblong duodecimo, original printed wrappers in the form of a postcard, opening to an accordion-folded strip of black-and-white photographic views, priced 25 cents on the cover. The photographs record the devastation across Palm Beach County and the Everglades: wrecked store fronts and the ruined business section of downtown West Palm Beach, a vessel blown ashore, the wrecked F.E.C. railway express depot, the new concrete bridge across Lake Worth destroyed, the Lake Court Hotel with its third-story wall and roof carried away, and scenes of desolation south of the courthouse, alongside images from Belle Glade and the Everglades where the loss of life was greatest. The text recounts the storm striking the coast around six o’clock on the evening of September 16, wrecking Pompano, Delray, Boynton, Lake Worth, the Palm Beaches, Jupiter, Riviera and Kelsey City before crossing the Everglades, where the dikes around Lake Okeechobee gave way and the floodwaters drowned the inhabitants of the farming settlements by the hundreds. In very good condition. A sobering documentary record of the 1928 hurricane.
The Okeechobee Hurricane of September 1928 made landfall near West Palm Beach as a Category 4 storm and remains the second-deadliest hurricane in United States history. While the coastal towns suffered severe property damage, the catastrophe fell hardest on the farming communities of the Lake Okeechobee region: the lake’s earthen dike failed and floodwaters swept across the Everglades, drowning many hundreds, the great majority of them Black migrant farmworkers and their families. The official toll was long given as around 2,000 but is now estimated at 2,500 or more. The dead were buried in segregated fashion, the Black victims interred without markers in a West Palm Beach mass grave that went largely unacknowledged for decades before its designation as a historic site and memorial. The disaster prompted the construction of the Herbert Hoover Dike around the lake and stands as a defining event in the history of South Florida, memorably invoked in the closing chapters of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.
