The Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928 was the most deadly hurricane ever to strike the state of Florida. An estimated 2,500 persons in South Florida died when the storm came ashore on September 16, 1928, near the Jupiter Lighthouse, and traveled west across Palm Beach County to Lake Okeechobee. Many of the hurricane’s fatalities, most of them migrant farm workers, occurred when the Lake Okeechobee dike was overwhelmed and the populated south side of the lake was flooded with a fifteen-to-twenty-foot storm surge. The floodwaters carried victims and survivors as far as ten miles from the lakeshore along nearly the entire south half of the lake, from Moore Haven to Pahokee. Noted Florida writer Zora Neale Hurston used the events surrounding the tragedy in her 1937 novel, “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” as she described the recovery and burial of the dead. The Ortona Cemetery contains the unmarked graves of several hundred victims of the 1928 hurricane, as well as victims of the 1926 hurricane that devastated Glades County. Several hundred African-American victims of the Okeechobee Hurricane were buried in a mass grave in the City of West Palm Beach’s pauper cemetery.
Slide toward Today to fade the historical sheet and see the modern map underneath.