Don't blow off hurricane warnings

Memoir tells of the 1928 hurricane

Well, we're back in another hurricane season. Not something to be taken lightly. 

Early settlers had their share of storms and the results could be frightening. Like today, it depended on the severity of the storm and its path. Two pioneer memoirs illustrate that in a vivid way.

The lighter remembrance was viewed through childhood eyes. Maria Davidson Pope wrote Remembrances of an Early Daytona Childhood fairly late in life - in her 60s or older. She was born in Daytona in 1874 and died at age 94 in 1969. 

She recounts with great detail the people and times of her youth. That includes periods of bad weather. As a child, she looked "forward to the fall gales with delight." These storms may or may not have been hurricanes. They were fierce enough to rattle windowpanes and blow boats loose from the wharves.

Flooding was a given on the low riverfront land. To lively children in a safe haven, that was an adventure. When the kitchen flooded, they played in the water, she wrote. "I remember paddling around on a small wooden table, turned upside down. Our great delight was to walk on stilts through the water. I so well remember the Puckett boys making me those stilts." 

Adults have different perspectives. In Memoirs of an Everglades Pioneer, Gertrude Petersen Winne shared dramatic memories of the horrible 1928 hurricane that tore through South Florida and killed thousands of people. 

There's a world of difference between a fall gale and that vicious 1928 storm, known as the Okeechobee Hurricane. An excellent fictional account is in Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. I'd long thought the underprivileged bore the brunt of that storm. Winne's memoir tells me otherwise. Rich and poor alike suffered. One difference is that more well-off residents may have had better access to weather forecasts. 

Winne and her family lived near the edge of Lake Okeechobee. Her husband was a fisherman in tune with the ways of wind and water. They heard the storm forecasts and watched conditions closely. "When the water in the creek rose 6 inches in 15 minutes, Ross [her husband] said, 'It's time to go.' "

They grabbed a few belongings and set out for West Palm Beach. They encouraged neighbors to do the same. Most declined. All - or almost all - who stayed behind died. The Winne family's three-story house was washed off its foundation and destroyed. 

The family almost didn't make it, themselves. The storm lashed into them before they reached West Palm. The car stalled out. When her husband opened the car door, the wind tore it back and bent the hinges. He shielded himself until a short break in the wind allowed him to get the door back on and get inside the vehicle. He'd also pushed the car into deep sand for stability and put rocks in front of the wheels. 

The couple and their children huddled inside the vehicle. They watched pine trees bend to the ground under the wind, saw roofs peel off buildings, and prayed that debris flying all around them wouldn't smash into the car. "During all this, the car surged and swayed like a mad ship but did not break loose from its mire of sand," Gertrude wrote.

During the eye of the storm, they got out and found that the paint on the car's exterior had been scoured off by flying sand. And heavy timbers had been forced into the asphalt pavement only a few feet behind the car. The family got the car started and managed to limp to safety in town, sometimes first getting out of the car and clearing the roadway of debris.

As soon as the storm ended, rescuers including Gertrude's husband headed out to the Everglades, she wrote. "The first truck to return from the Glades came in about 10 o'clock that night loaded with men, women, and children. Ross said if he lived to be a hundred, he would never forget the look on those people's faces - utter hopelessness and despair; some of the people looked so blank and bewildered they had to be led by hand."  

Gertrude wasn't able to return home for over a month. Her husband helped nonstop with rescue efforts and with burying the dead. It was gruesome. "Death. Death and destruction lay everywhere," she wrote. "Some 2,000 or 3,000 people lay dead, scattered over the countryside..." 

If you live in a hurricane zone and a warning is issued, heed it. Please. We're a century past these pioneer experiences, but some things don't change. The destructive powers of hurricanes are one of them. 

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To learn more about the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane, see the National Weather Service's memorial page at https://www.weather.gov/mfl/okeechobee

Moonlit night, full of mosquitoes

Look familiar? Not to me. The image from a
  Sun-Sentinel news feature shows Fort
 Lauderdale beach in the 1920s.

These days, fourteen hour of travel will take you more than halfway around the world. A hundred years ago, the full fourteen hours were needed just to get a person from North Florida to South Florida. 

In his autobiography, Gold Coast Pioneer (Exposition Press, 1953), M.A. Hortt describes the journey he took in 1910:

The train left Jacksonville at nine o'clock in the morning. It crawled along through the heat and mosquitoes almost at a snail's pace for fourteen long, weary hours, finally arriving in Fort Lauderdale at eleven o'clock that night. (100).

It was a beautiful moonlit night, he writes, during which he was almost devoured by mosquitoes.

The next morning, he discovered Fort Lauderdale's business district consisted of two stores. "There were no electric lights, telephones or paved streets" (101).

That wasn't the only surprise. Hortt was the designated representative sent to inspect land he and fellow Utah streetcar conductors had purchased west of Fort Lauderdale. He was to plant a test crop of tomatoes. When he got to Florida, he discovered the purchased land was underwater.

M.A. Hortt photo is
from his autobiography.

Conditions were blamed on the rainy season -- Hortt's visit was in June. Nonetheless, he soon turned his attention to real estate and went on to sell land in and around Fort Lauderdale for thirty years. He  served as the city's mayor in 1934-34. In his 1953 autobiography, he writes that he saw the area's potential right away:

"I thought I recognized great possibilities in Fort Lauderdale, with its beautiful waterways, sandy beaches, wonderful climate, bright sunshine, cooling ocean breezes and tropical verdure backed up by the fertile Everglades, and decided to take full advantage of this opportunity." (103-104)

If that sentence sounds promotional to you - it does to me! - keep in mind Hortt wrote those words decades after his 1910 arrival. Decades after successfully extolling the virtues of the area to would-be buyers.

Hortt did plant tomatoes, just not on swampland. His wife joined him in Fort Lauderdale and they bought a riverfront house on five acres. The garden tomatoes were a foot high, he writes, and growing alongside cucumbers, beans, cabbages, and squash when an October hurricane smashed  into the area, "raising havoc in general" (104) and raining for three days.

The Hortts evacuated to a hotel, where people fished from the front porch after the storm. The area had become one large lake. Hortt needed to use a boat to check on the family home. He found water lapping at the main floor, which was three feet above ground.

It's hard to imagine a rural Fort Lauderdale with five acres of riverfront land devoted to one homesite. Wikipedia says the city's population in 2017 was almost 200,000. 

It's also hard to imagine South Florida as outlaw country, but that's what it was back in the pioneer years. Hortt writes that he "grew up in the 'wild and wooly' West and thought all of the gangsters and bad men lived out there" (106). Once in Florida, he discovered the Ashley Gang. They were, he says, "as notorious as the Butch Cassidy gang out West" (106).

Something to think about next time I'm down in the giant metropolitan area Palm Beach-Fort Lauderdale-Miami has become. 

South Miami a city within a city

Watch this video on YouTube

We all know about Miami. We hear a lot about Miami proper and South Beach. But South Miami, not so much.

I didn't even realize there was a separate city named South Miami. So when I saw this video while browsing on YouTube, I was definitely interested. A Florida city I'd never heard of! Even though I've likely driven through it on one of the few trips my husband and I have made to Miami.

South Miami's motto is "The City of Pleasant Living." The city has about 10,000 residents and is  near Coral Gables. That, too, is a separate city. But Coral Gables has a fairly visible profile and independent identity. To me, that's partly because I associate it with Coral Castle, an attraction that actually isn't in Coral Gables. It isn't even in Miami proper. But that's another blog post.

Wikipedia reports that South Miami residents incorporated in the 1920s in hopes of staving off the "booming city" just north of them. Miami swallowed it anyway, by growing around it in influence and name recognition, if not in actual city borders.

As a municipality, South Miami went through some rough times. The city started off at 6 miles in size, but reduced its borders twice and now is about 2 miles in size. Border shrinkage wasn't the only issue. Read the history on the city's website to learn how South Miami was "saved by a fire engine with no flames in sight!"

Now that I've been introduced to South Miami, I wonder how many other cities are nestled within the metropolis I consider one giant city of Miami. More fodder for future blog posts, I'm sure.

Small museums preserve local lore

Florida is dotted with small museums and historic sites that depend heavily on volunteer love and support to stay open. These sites are well worth seeking out and exploring (and supporting). Here's a video overview of Florida Pioneer Museum in Florida City that I haven't yet had the pleasure to visit.

Small, local museums are great because they showcase what daily life was like for pioneers in a specific location. The docents are knowledgeable and enthusiastic about local history. More and more of these mini-museums are gaining a video presence. I'll start to share more videos on a regular basis.

Florida Pioneer Museum is near Homestead in South Florida. Next time you're in that part of the state, stop by.