Disaster at Moore Haven: How the 1926 Great Miami Hurricane destroyed a Small Town on the Shores of Lake Okeechobee

Abstract

On September 18, 1926, a powerful hurricane made landfall in South Florida. It struck the booming new city of Miami, then moved inland to devastate the small agricultural town of Moore Haven, on the shores of Lake Okeechobee. When the poorly-designed earthen dike intended to protect Moore Haven failed, wave surges 15 feet high flooded the town, demolishing houses, farms and other structures, and drowning many townspeople. The high force winds crushed and obliterated the shacks of agricultural workers, which were constructed of scrap materials. The smaller canals scattered over the area carried the drowning victims to Lake Okeechobee's main canals. Relief teams from nearby Sebring were the first to arrive in Moore Haven, but post-hurricane conditions hampered their progress and made recovery and identification of victims difficult. At least 26, and perhaps as many as 50, unidentified victims of the hurricane are buried in a mass grave in Sebring's Pinecrest Cemetery, almost unmarked and difficult to find.

Headnote

Abstract

On September 18, 1926, a powerful hurricane made landfall in South Florida. It struck the booming new city of Miami, then moved inland to devastate the small agricultural town of Moore Haven, on the shores of Lake Okeechobee. When the poorly-designed earthen dike intended to protect Moore Haven failed, wave surges 15 feet high flooded the town, demolishing houses, farms and other structures, and drowning many townspeople. The high force winds crushed and obliterated the shacks of agricultural workers, which were constructed of scrap materials. The smaller canals scattered over the area carried the drowning victims to Lake Okeechobee's main canals. Relief teams from nearby Sebring were the first to arrive in Moore Haven, but post-hurricane conditions hampered their progress and made recovery and identification of victims difficult. At least 26, and perhaps as many as 50, unidentified victims of the hurricane are buried in a mass grave in Sebring's Pinecrest Cemetery, almost unmarked and difficult to find.

Keywords: Florida, 1926 hurricane, mass graves, Moore Haven, Sebring, Lake Okeechobee, forensics

Introduction

On September 18, 1926, a powerful hurricane, estimated to be a Category 4 with peak winds of 138 mph, made landfall in South Florida (Barnes, 2007, p. 9). It devastated the booming new city of Miami, then moved inland to wreak further destruction on the western shores of Lake Okeechobee. The great Miami Hurricane brought strong winds and severe flooding that devastated the small agricultural town of Moore Haven, killing hundreds of people and destroying multiple buildings, railroads, and other structures. Relief teams came down to Moore Haven from the nearest city Sebring, due to the significant damages, the scattering of victims, and the immense area that was flooded. These teams, however, were slow to arrive and found it difficult to recover bodies. Records are sparse, but it is said that Sebring's Pinecrest Cemetery has at least 26, but possibly as many as 50, unidentified victims of the hurricane buried in a mass grave.

In the summer of 2019, Jim Pollard - then the president of the Sebring Historical Society, and Elaine Levey, director emerita of the Avon Park Depot Museum, visited Pinecrest Cemetery, but because the mass grave was poorly marked, they were unable to locate its site. Discussion followed about the need for a better marker and a possible application to have the mass grave listed on the National Register of Historic Places, with an appropriate marker. Levey and Pollard then suggested that the Honors students in Dr. Charlotte Pressler's fall 2019 Freshman English I class research the 1926 hurricane's effects on Moore Haven as an undergraduate research project, using the results in an application for National Register status (Levey, personal communication).

The Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 produced inland winds over 100 miles per hour and wave surges up to 15 feet tall. These extreme forces of the hurricane demolished Moore Haven's houses, farms, and buildings. As the wave surges rushed through the homes of the citizens of Moore Haven, an eyewitness, Lawrence W. Will (1978) saw a wall of black water carrying mud, grass, hyacinths, and debris. The powerful waves ripped people out of their homes, carrying them for miles and often eventually taking their lives. Will (1978) gives an anecdote about a family who suffered the immense trauma of the hurricane. When the black wall of water reached their home, it dragged out a woman and her four children separating the family and carrying them about two miles down the canal. While being hauled down the canal, the two youngest children drowned; the mother tied her children to a clothing line to prevent them from being dragged any further by the intense currents of the flooding town.

Many of the victims experienced ordeals like those of the poor woman and her family Will described. In fact, the forceful waters during the hurricane ended up transporting many of them and depositing them in piles as high as houses in the Willow Swamps on the border of Lake Hicpochee (Will, 1978). The hurricane carried many of the victims in countless directions and distances, making search team efforts less effective than they might have been. As a result, many of the bodies were unrecognizable by the time they were found, or never discovered at all.

Despite the drastic damages caused by the hurricane, the people of a town not far away, Sebring, were among the first to deploy relief teams to the Moore Haven area. George E. Sebring, the town's founder, and his family owned agricultural land in the Moore Haven area, and had built a railroad to bring the produce to market.4 When news of the destruction at Moore Haven arrived in Sebring "just after dark" on the day it struck, George Sebring "immediately took charge of the situation," using the railroad he had built to transport volunteers to Moore Haven (Pond, 2012, p. 33). Among the relief teams were search parties, food, water, and other necessary resources, and surprisingly the only two expert embalmers-funeral home directors in Sebring (C. Nelson, personal communication, October 30, 2019).

These two expert embalmers were Jack Stephenson and Ross Blythe; who experienced the catastrophe for themselves at first hand. The histories of the town of Sebring, the website of the Stephenson-Nelson Funeral Home, and the personal recollections of Craig Nelson, vicepresident of the funeral home and descendent of one of its founders, preserve their story. Stephenson and Blythe had to travel via train, railroad sidecar, and boat to reach their final destination (Stephenson & Nelson, n.d.). Travel to Moore Haven became increasingly difficult the further they went, as a result of "tree-clogged, washed out roads" that extended a great distance across the Okeechobee region (Pond, 2012, p. 33), while the forceful winds of the hurricane had torn apart and flipped over the rails and ties of the railroad (Stephenson & Nelson, n.d.).

Once they finally reached Moore Haven, Stephenson and Blythe helped set up a temporary morgue within a post office, where they spent all day and night embalming the bodies that were found first, all the while standing in snake infested water that came up past their knees (Stephenson & Nelson, n.d.). Under these circumstances, the recovery process was slow and involved the continual removal of debris (Pond, 2012). When the second relief team arrived, both Jack and Ross returned to Sebring, bringing with them twenty-six bodies to give them a proper burial as well as many of the hurricane survivors (Stephenson-Nelson Funeral Home, n.d.). Soon after arriving in Sebring, the townspeople of Sebring buried the bodies in a mass grave in Pinecrest Cemetery marked only with a solitary stone that said "Moore Haven Storm Victims 1926" (Stephenson-Nelson Funeral Home, n.d.).

The unreliable forensics and identification techniques of the time resulted in the mass burial of these unfortunate individuals. During the 1920s, forensics and body identification were extremely basic; investigators asked simple questions of survivors to identify bodies, such as, "Does this look like your son, husband, daughter, mother, etc..?" (Stephenson & Nelson, n.d., para. 12). This was the only reliable form of identification. The family had to do all of the work, not the funeral home, if they wished for their deceased relative to have a proper casket burial in their family plot. Further, embalming was an uncommon, difficult practice in the 1920s that was done by hand (Stephenson & Nelson, n.d.). Without such preservation, the bodies would begin to decompose rather quickly and would soon be unrecognizable to family. On account of these burial and identification techniques, many of the dead went unclaimed; survivors buried them as quickly as possible in mass graves.

To summarize, the hurricane of 1926 had flooded Moore Haven, destroying its buildings, and dragging drowned victims for miles. The substantial hurricane damage, combined with the severe flooding, and the widespread dispersal of victims, contributed to the ineffective and haphazard collection and identification of bodies. The debris and flooding made it extremely troublesome to travel and search for both the survivors and victims. Since it was so challenging for the relief teams to search for the victims, bodies decomposed and became unrecognizable resulting in the need for a place to put the unidentifiable bodies. This place in Sebring is the mass grave for "Moore Haven Storm Victims 1926" in Pinecrest Cemetery, the town's effort to give the victims a respectful and honorable place to rest.

What had caused the ruin of the town of Moore Haven? The worst damages resulted, not from the 100 mph winds, but from the flood that followed them. This flood resulted from combined impact of the hurricane's powerful winds and surges on the inadequate earthen dike that was supposed to protect the town from the floodwaters of Lake Okeechobee. The poor building materials used to create the town's structures, assisted the flood in causing an abundance of damage to buildings. In short, due to its weak infrastructure and susceptibility to hurricane induced effects, the earthen dike on Lake Okeechobee failed to shield Moore Haven from its waters during the 1926 hurricane, destroying lives and property.

The year before the Great Miami Hurricane struck, in 1925, the Florida State Legislature made a decision to build a 57-mile earthen dike from Pelican Lake to Moore Haven, due to increased concern from frequent flooding (Mykle, 2002). The intent was simply to hold back some water from the summer rains as well as the western wind tides, but not to fully protect the surrounding land. This became obvious as the building method for the earthen dike consisted of lifting buckets of nearby materials -such as silt, muck, sand, and rocks- and placing them on top of the existing dike (Mykle, 2002). The builders imported no materials for this project (Mykle, 2002). The hunter gather-gatherer Calusa Indians, who had once dominated southern Florida, created the first level of the dike on a foundation of muck covered with oolite limestone. In addition, in 1916, the Everglades Drainage District had built concrete locks at the end of each canal as a method to retain and control water (Mykle, 2002). These concrete locks and new canals caused the whole lake to contract by six feet and modified the natural flow of water.

The 1925 dike ended up being a structure about 5-9 feet tall that cut through the dead rivers of Lake Okeechobee. These dead rivers began at the lake's edge as wide outlets and became narrower as they proceeded downstream until they vanished. These seemingly harmless, small dead rivers could develop dangerous currents after heavy overflows (Mykle, 2002). In Moore Haven specifically, citizens had to rebuild the dike five times since the dead river underneath the dike did not provide a strong base foundation (Mykle, 2002). This was the dike that the people of Moore Haven relied on for protection during storms, including the 1926 hurricane.

An equally important aspect of the dike's infrastructure is the natural flow of Lake Okeechobee' waters. The lake's main outlet for flooding was the Caloosahatchee River, which arises at Lake Hicpochee near Moore Haven, and empties its waters into the Gulf of Mexico (Mykle, 2002). Although the Caloosahatchee River is Lake Okeechobee's principal outlet, numerous dead rivers also contributed to the water discharge of Lake Okeechobee when it overflowed. The dead rivers proved to be an additional factor that contributed to the flooding of Moore Haven, since this part of the earthen dike fortuitously sat over a dead river, which during the storm began to wash away. Dozens of breaks then widened, sending black lake water down the streets of Moore Haven (Mykle, 2002).

The historical structure of the earthen dike and the natural flow of water from Lake Okeechobee provides insight as to how the dike responded to hurricane-induced rains and winds. The surge, an overall result from the wind, and its prompted currents imposed too much force on the earth levee at Moore Haven, which resulted in about 392 fatalities. The poor base structure was no match for the hurricane's powerful winds and rains. Although Yuepeng Li et al. (2016) and his research group focused on the modern Herbert Hoover Dike on Lake Okeechobee, they suggest that the erosion effects they describe will occur with any dike that has to withstand a strong hurricane. One of their insights is that the storm-induced winds impelled strong water currents, which are a dominant factor on dike erosion damage, these areas being consistent with the high wind zones.

Unfortunately, Lake Okeechobee's characteristic shallow depth worsened the effects of the 1926 hurricane. The hurricane's high wind speeds can be associated with normal water fluctuations in the bowl-shaped shallow lake, which has an average depth of 2.7m (Li et al., 2016). Lake Okeechobee's deepest point in its prime was never more than about 20 feet (Mykle, 2002). Eyewitness George Walker described the lake's condition during the 1926 hurricane: "The surface of the lake had actually shifted and was tilted at an angle- the lake was blown dry for a three miles" (Mykle, 2002, p. 88). On a shallow and yet expansive body of water, the hurricane-induced wind and surge created a significant impact on the lake and surrounding land of Moore Haven.

In consequence of the dike's inadequate protection during the 1926 hurricane, Moore Haven became a city underwater. Moore Haven had already had a history of flooding during the area's rainy season. After the first few storms of the rainy season, Lake Okeechobee typically regained the 100-200 yards that it had lost during the dry season (Mykle, 2002). Lake Okeechobee in those days did not have defined boundaries because its shores were constantly changing according to the season, rainy or dry (Mykle, 2002). Adding to this typical flooding was the issue that Moore Haven had fortuitously built its portion of the earthen dike over a dead river. During the hurricane, the muck dike began to wash away and dozens of breaks widened, sending black lake water down the streets of Moore Haven (Mykle, 2002).

The section of the dike near Moore Haven mainly consisted of the muck side, which created a natural dike that held back some water (Mykle, 2002). The dike had to be continually be reinforced by the town's citizens owing to the moderate flooding that occurred after heavy rains (Barnes, 2007). When the dike failed in 1926, some Moore Haven houses simply disappeared, while others slowly floated out of sight; there was no dry land visible in any direction (Mykle, 2002). Lake Okeechobee was characteristically prone to heavy wind and water currents, which, when combined with the failed dike, resulted in the disastrous flooding of Moore Haven.

The flood had various impacts on residential architecture dependent on the building materials utilized. Stephen Olausen (1993), in Sebring: City on the Circle, states that residential building construction in Central Florida in the 1920s used wood almost exclusively, in Bungalow or Frame Vernacular designs. In fact, the better built residential buildings in Moore Haven sat on stilts that reached down about twelve feet, anchored to the top of marl bedrock (Mykle, 2002). These were the common housing types among the wealthy class in Moore Haven. Most agricultural workers, who could not afford these better built residential structures, lived in shacks, which they built in the uncultivated sections of the farms in which they worked or near canal banks, both undesirable areas due to occasional flooding (Mykle, 2002). They constructed their makeshift shacks from leftover scrap wood and tin (Mykle, 2002). Since building structures differed between the different social classes the effects of the flooding differed, as witnessed by the disparities in damage to structures occupied by poorer and wealthier residents, as noted in the aftermath of the hurricane in Miami.5

However, it could be said of all the structures in which Central Florida social classes lived, that the building styles that emerged reflected the diverse nature of the population and the adaptation to materials available locally (Olausen, 1993). Thus, while building materials differed between social classes, all structures made heavy use of wood, as the people of Moore Haven had easy access to lumber. Surrounding the lake were forests of pine trees, cypress, and some live oaks (Mykle, 2002). Analyzing the flooding impacts on lumber is important when considering the few building structures that were able to maintain their ground during the 1926 hurricane. Wood is badly impacted with long-duration inundation, with an outcome of "rot and decay resulting from the saturation of the wood fibers; this alone can affect the structural components and lead to a loss of structural integrity" ("Effects," FEMA). Long-term flooding on wood will boost the growth of mold and fungi if not removed, or dried immediately, or both, at most 24 to 48 hours after first occurrence of flooding ("Effects," FEMA). Long-term loss of structural integrity, however, was not the main concern of the agricultural workers; the floodwaters entirely and immediately crushed their shacks and the damage was total.

It is difficult for any building structure to survive the winds of a strong Category 4 hurricane. However, in Moore Haven in 1926, the structures included many shacks made of scraps that did not follow any type of building code, and dikes made of muck, which the townspeople had to continuously fix and repair. There is only a slight chance that under these conditions any building structure would survive; but adding a 15-foot wall of water on top of that resulted in the catastrophic flooding and near-destruction of the entire town. These were the chances the victims of Moore Havens had to face on September 18-21 of 1926. Acknowledging the range of collateral damages Moore Haven experienced during the hurricane such as the faulty dike, the destruction of poorly-made building structures, and the weather-imposed effects is critical in understanding why the victims died.

Acknowledgements

The primary authors would like to recognize the following individuals for their contributions to the research: Craig Nelson, Jim Pollard, Elaine Levey, Jenna Murphy, Shayla Cox, and Taylor Derr. Permission to use these individuals' contributions are on file with Dr. Charlotte Pressler, Honors Director, South Florida State College (SFSC), and Research Project Director. A poster of this research was presented at the 2020 Florida Undergraduate Research Conference (FURC) and the 2020 Florida Collegiate Honors Conference (FCHC), as well as at two research forums at South Florida State College. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which has partially funded undergraduate research in humanities at SFSC through their Community College Initiatives grant, "A Sense of Home."

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About the Authors

Camila Rimoldi Ibanez ([email protected]) is a student in the Honors Program at South Florida State College. Currently she is working toward attaining an A.A. degree, and she aspires to go to a post-secondary university and attain a Master's degree in marine biology. Through the Honors Program, Ms. Rimoldi has been able to participate in both humanities and science research. She also has conducted individual research investigations for the past six years that focus on smartphone radiation and coral communication.

Kyria Wickham ([email protected]) is a student in the Honors Program at South Florida State College. Currently she is working towards attaining an A.A. degree and aspires to go to a post-secondary university to study biochemistry. Ms. Wickham has presented her humanities research at multiple conferences. Recently, she joined a science-focused research investigation at SFSC on protein receptor influence on neurite outgrowth.

Discussion Questions

1. Why did the earthen dike intended to protect Moore Haven fail?

2. What was the association between the towns of Sebring and Moore Haven?

3. How did the undeveloped forensic methods of the 1920s affect body identification?

4. Why was there a difference in damage between the different house structures of the different social classes?

5. Why is there uncertainty about the total number of storm victims buried in the mass grave at Pinecrest Cemetery, Sebring?

To Cite this Article

Wickham, K., & Rimoldi Ibanez, C. (2020, Fall). Disaster at Moore Haven: How the 1926 Great Miami Hurricane destroyed a small town on the shores of Lake Okeechobee. Journal of Multidisciplinary Research, 12(2), 145-152.

Footnote

4 Jenna Murphy, a student, carried out the research on this topic.

5 Shayla Cox and Taylor Deer, students, carried out the research on these topics.

References

References

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Effects of long- and short-duration flooding on buildings. (2013). FEMA. https://www.fema.gov/media-library-data/20130726-1712-250452312/effects_of_long_ and_short_durati on_flooding_on_building_materials.txt

Hurricanes in history. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. https://www.nhc .noaa.gov/outreach/hi story/

Li, Yuepeng, et al. (2016). A numerical study of the impact of hurricane- induced storm surge on the Herbert Hoover Dike at Lake Okeechobee, Florida. Ocean Dynamics, 66(12), 16991714. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-016-1001-8

Mykle, R. (2002). Killer 'cane: The deadly hurricane of 1928. Lanham, MD: Taylor Trade Publishing.

Olausen, S. A. (1993). Sebring: City on the circle: A guide to the city's historic architecture. St. Augustine: Southern Heritage Press.

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Stephenson-Nelson Funeral Home. (n.d.). Who we are: Our story. Sebring, FL: Author. https://www.stephensonnelsonfh.com/history

Will, L. E. (1978). Okeechobee hurricane and the Hoover dike (3rd ed.). Belle Glade, FL: Glades Historical Society.