Tropical Surge: A History of Ambition and Disaster on the Florida Shore

Benjamin Reilly, “Tropical Surge: A History of Ambition and Disaster on the Florida Shore”, Pineapple Press (2005) 338 pp.

Reilly’s book presents a detailed history of Key West, Miami, and the building of Henry Flagler’s Overseas Railway to Key West along with detailed anecdotes given by survivors of the September 1926 Lake Okeechobee disaster and the Labor Day 1935 Key West devastating hurricanes.  (I think I will try and remain in Wisconsin and out of Florida during September after reading this book).

My Notes:

Pg. Xiii:  The goal of this book is to chronicle the dramatic clash between human ambition and subtropical hurricane realities that took place between 1831 and 1935 along the south Florida shore.  Flagler’s Extension railway will serve as a vital central thread to the story, since it weaves together the histories of Key West and Miami.  The first five chapters explore the founding, development, and growing ambition of Key West and Miami.  The last three chapters examine the hurricanes that shattered south Florida’s fragile prosperity, especially the Key West Storm of 1919, the Great Miami Hurricane of September 1926 and 1928, and the Labor Day storm of 1935.

Pg. 28:  Shipwrecks before the advent of steamships were occurring about one per week off the coast of Key West, providing the inhabitants a lucrative employment in salvaging operations.  Between 1849 and 1859 there were at least 248 recorded wrecks in addition to an unknown number of ships which either freed themselves from the reefs without assistance or vanished without a trace.

Pg. 49:  Florida’s Seminole people owe their origins to the tribes of the Creek Confederacy, a powerful association of related Indian peoples centered in modern-day Alabama and Georgia.  In the period after 1700, these Creeks began to penetrate Florida as settlers in the northern portion of the state.  Eventually friction with the U.S. government occurred, especially since these Creeks made a practice of offering shelter to escaped slaves.  In 1817 Andrew Jackson was given permission to launch a large-scale expedition against the Seminoles despite the fact that this territory belonged to Spain.  In fact, part of the reason for the invasion was to scare the Spanish out of Florida by demonstrating that should America choose to flex its growing muscles, Spain was powerless to protect its legal claim to Florida.  Spain seems to have gotten the message—only four years later they agreed to sell Florida to the U.S.

Pg. 50.  The Seminoles withdrew deeper into the Florida Peninsula.  By the mid-1820s, the surviving 5,000 or so Seminoles had settled in a swath of territory ranging from the Apalachicola River in the Florida panhandle all the way to the Manatee River and modern-day Sarasota County.  By the 1890s there were only about three hundred Seminoles remaining in the swamps of south Florida after the three Seminole wars.

Pg. 82:  By 1893, Flagler’s railroad was nearing Lake Worth.  In April, 1896 Flagler’s rail line finally opened for business and Biscayne Bay’s isolation from the rest of America ended forever. 

Pg. 101:  By 1876 Key West boasted that it had twenty-nine factories, employing 2,100 people, and producing 62.5 million cigars annually.  Within another fourteen years, Key West cigar-making produced as many as one hundred million cigars each year by a population of six thousand mostly Cuban cigar-makers.  However, in 1886 a deadly fire swept through downtown Key West and destroyed eighteen cigar factories.  The Spanish were suspected as they had ample reason to seek vengeance against the inhabitants of Key West.  The Cuban population of Key West was fervently anti-Spanish and had organized itself into a number of revolutionary societies dedicated to the liberation of Cuba from Spanish rule. 

Pg. 118:  The American conquest of the Philippines in the 1898 Spanish-American war had occurred almost by accident.  If the American Pacific squadron had not been on the way to Hong Kong at the war’s start, it probably would not have occurred at all—but Americans were loath to part with the colonial treasure that had so fortuitously fallen into their hands.  This decision came as a rude shock to the Philippine revolutionary movement, which had fought in support of U.S. forces during the war.  It took until 1902 to quash the former allies in the Philippines at a cost of 4,200 American soldier’s lives, in addition to 20,000 Filipino insurgents and 200,000 civilians, who perished due to a combination of hunger, disease, and the brutal pacification tactics of the U.S. Army.

Pg. 179:  In January of 1912 the Overseas rail line to Key West was completed.  The total cost borne by Flagler ($30 million) of the railroad was equivalent to over a half-billion dollars in modern-day currency.  By way of comparison, the first transcontinental railroad linking Omaha to Sacramento cost about $50 million.  This railroad never turned a profit; in fact, it did not even make enough to cover its maintenance costs.

Pg. 203:  Miami Beach was first incorporated in 1915, it could claim only 644 permanent inhabitants.  In the first years of the 1920s the population exploded, hotel after hotel sprouted up on the Atlantic shorelines, by 1925, Miami Beach boasted fifty-six hotels with four thousand available rooms.  By 1923 Miami’s population was an estimated 50,000. 

Pg. 266:  In the months before the 1926 September Hurricane, heavy rains had swollen Lake Okeechobee nearly to the point of overflowing: over ten inches had fallen in both July and August, and nearly fourteen inches of rain had been recorded between the first and fifteenth of September.  

When the hurricane winds began on the 17^th of September, they produced a freshwater storm surge in Lake Okeechobee.  The northeasterly winds of the ‘first storm’ pushed the water almost completely away from the northeastern part of the lake, temporarily transforming lake bottom into mudflats and causing a perceptible upward slant in the surface of the lake towards the southwestern shore.  Sloshing water poled up to a height of twenty-six feet along Okeechobee’s southwest rim, directly above the imperiled town of Moore Haven.  (The hurricane of 1928 finished the destruction begun in 1926)

 The 1935 Labor Day Hurricane was the strongest and most intense hurricane to make landfall in the United States in recorded history.  It was the first of three Category 5 hurricanes that the United States endured during the 20th Century (the other two being 1969's Hurricane Camille and 1992's Hurricane Andrew).   In any event, a train was sent to rescue the WPA workers in the Keys.  It was almost entirely swept away before reaching the camps late on September 2. When it had finally arrived in Upper Metecumbe Key only the engine survived the winds and wall of water that swept through the area.  More than 400 people were killed in the Keys from this storm.  Flagler’s Overseas Railway was dismantled by the owners even though all the bridges had survived.