The Labor Day Hurricane

If you stop at the memorial in Islamorada at mile marker 81.6 — the stone monument with the crypt beneath it and the carved wave breaking over palms — you're standing at the center of one of the worst disasters in Florida's history, and one that most people driving past have never heard of.

The Keys in 1935

It was the depth of the Great Depression. In Key West, once the wealthiest city per capita in the country, residents were getting by on an average monthly income of about $7.

Scattered through the Upper Keys were federal work camps housing hundreds of World War I veterans. These men came from the ranks of the Bonus Army — the veterans who had camped at the steps of the U.S. Capitol in the early 1930s demanding the compensation they'd been promised, and who were dispersed in July 1932 by Army troops under General Douglas MacArthur. Some were later given relief jobs through the Roosevelt administration, and a few hundred of them ended up in the Florida Keys, building a highway bridge alongside the railroad.

They were housed in flimsy shacks that would not survive a strong wind.

The storm nobody sized correctly

The hurricane that formed east of the Bahamas in late August 1935 was small — and that compactness helped disguise how ferocious it had become. Forecasting in 1935 meant scattered ship reports and barometer readings; there were no satellites, no reconnaissance aircraft, no way to look inside a storm.

The rescue train

This is the part that has haunted the Keys ever since — a chain of small delays, none of them catastrophic alone.

Fred Ghent, the state relief administrator overseeing the camps, knew the Keys were vulnerable and had a plan: call for a special Florida East Coast Railway train from Miami and bring the veterans out. There was one problem. The railway had told Ghent that a train available on short notice would require paying to keep one standing ready on a separate track. That was never done. A locomotive, tender, and eleven cars had to be assembled from scratch, which cost hours. Ghent made the call at 1:59 p.m. on Labor Day.

Then everything that could slow the train down did. It was held at the Miami River because the drawbridge was raised for holiday boat traffic. It stopped at Homestead to turn the engine around, so the locomotive would lead on the return trip and could use its headlight. Farther south, wind-blown debris on the tracks slowed it further. At Windley Key the locomotive struck a power cable sagging across the line, costing roughly another hour.

The train reached Islamorada a little before 8:30 p.m. — just as the storm surge arrived. Moments after it stopped, the full force of the hurricane struck the island. A reporter aboard later described the passenger cars being tossed about like straws. Only the 160-ton locomotive stayed upright on the rails.

Everyone aboard the train survived, though they spent a harrowing night struggling to keep their heads above the water. The veterans in the camps and the local residents did not fare as well.

Afterward

The devastation of the Upper Keys communities was near total. Identification of the dead became impossible in the September heat, and authorities resorted to cremation. The official count of 485 is incomplete — some of the missing simply vanished into the Atlantic or the Gulf.

Ernest Hemingway, then living in Key West, took his boat up to help with the rescue effort. What he found enraged him. In an article for the magazine The New Masses, he argued that the relief administration had failed to move the veterans out in time. His piece — bitter, direct, and asking who exactly had sent these men to live in shacks on a hurricane coast in September — remains one of the most furious things he ever published. You can read about his Key West years here.

For the railroad, it was the end. Forty-two miles of track were destroyed and the link to the mainland was never rebuilt. The company sold the line to the state and the county, and the bridges were converted to carry cars; the Overseas Highway opened in 1938.

Visiting the memorial

The Hurricane Monument in Islamorada, on Upper Matecumbe Key, was dedicated in 1937. It sits right on the highway at mile marker 81.6, across from the library — a coral rock monument with a sculpted relief of wind-bent palms and a rising wave, and a crypt holding the ashes of many of the dead. It's free, it takes ten minutes, and it is the most sobering stop in the Upper Keys.

The other place to understand this story is the Florida Keys History & Discovery Center in Islamorada, which holds photographs and accounts from survivors.

Modern Keys residents take hurricane evacuation orders seriously in a way that surprises visitors. This is why. Everyone down here knows about the train that didn't make it.