CHAPTER NINE
IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING THE HURRICANE, MIAMI RESIDENTS WERE DAZED AND edgy as they sifted through the ruins of their city, buried the dead, and tried to put their lives back together. The last thing they needed to hear was that another deadly storm was on the horizon.
But that’s exactly what they heard when prankster Charles Haines went dashing through hotel lobbies shouting that another hurricane was coming.
Men panicked. Women fainted. And Charley Haines got ninety days on the chain gang.
Haines was less than a month into his sentence, however, when the real thing—another extremely powerful hurricane capable of inflicting catastrophic damage—ripped across western Cuba, turned right, and headed straight for South Florida.
The storm began on October 14, 1926, as a tropical depression off the coast of Nicaragua in the southwestern corner of the Caribbean Sea. As the windy rainstorm was slowly meandering northward and gradually gaining strength, Henry Baker, who was in charge of the Red Cross’s relief effort in Miami, told the New York Times that, for the first time in its history, it had failed to meet its fund-raising goals to help victims of a disaster.
“Reports from all sections of the country showed that donations had practically ceased,” he said.
Baker would not explain why the Red Cross had fallen short of its goals. But a memo from Red Cross national chairman John Barton Payne laid the blame at the feet of Florida governor John Martin and businessmen who had understated the losses and downplayed the damage of the September hurricane.
Meanwhile, despite the arrest of rumormongers and pranksters such as Charles Haines, hurricane panic was spreading in Miami. The word on the street was that another hurricane was going to strike Miami on Tuesday, October 19.
Hundreds of people boarded northbound trains and cranked up their tin lizzies and headed for the Dixie Highway to get out of town ahead of the storm.
“Women have been coming to my office in hysterics as the result of these rumors, and I know that many have left the city,” US Weather Bureau meteorolo-gist Richard Gray told the New York Times.
Gray said such reports were foolish, and he blamed “patent medicine almanacs” for publishing wildly inaccurate forecasts.
Those almanac forecasts were indeed off, but, as chance would have it, not by much.
On the evening of October 19, the tropical depression that had been browsing aimlessly across the Caribbean found a deep current of very warm water, and it did what meteorologists today refer to as “bombing out.”
Feasting on the warm waters, the storm’s peak winds rapidly intensified, zooming from about 90 miles an hour to 140 miles an hour in only about eighteen hours. By the morning of October 20, as its eye entered the Gulf of Batabano off the southwestern coast of Cuba, its peak winds were screaming at around 150 miles an hour.
The hurricane struck Havana around 10:45 that morning. As the vicious storm pounded its way across the ancient Cuban capital, “fishing boats floated down streets, dead cows dropped on rooftops, and houses flew overhead like birds,” a survivor recalled.
Around 650 people were killed, and more than 10,000 were injured.
By early afternoon, the storm’s eye had left the island. But instead of continuing its northward trek into the Gulf of Mexico, it made a sharp turn to the northeast into the Straits of Florida, the narrow waterway that separates Cuba from the Florida Keys and the Bahamas. And although the hurricane lost a little of its strength as it slowed to make its turn, its peak winds were still clocking a devastating 125 miles an hour as it settled into a northeast track. On that course, if the storm’s eye wobbled even slightly to the north, its strongest winds could cross Miami. And winds of 125 miles an hour would have inflicted massive new damage on the city, undone much of what had been repaired, and been a devastating blow to boomers’ efforts to rehabilitate Miami’s image.
For the second time in barely a month, a pair of square black-on-red flags was raised over lighthouses, Weather Bureau offices, and post offices to signal that hurricane-force winds were expected. And again, only four days after Solomon Davies Warfield’s full-page ads in newspapers across the country had assured readers that the dangers of hurricanes in Florida had been greatly exaggerated, page-one headlines in some of those same papers announced that another deadly tropical cyclone was headed for Florida.
News of the powerful storm was telegraphed to the Miami Daily News from Belen Observatory in Havana.
Miami mayor Edward Romfh had been among those who, only a few weeks earlier, had accused the Red Cross of overstating hurricane damage to his city. His comments had inflicted serious damage on the Red Cross’s effort to raise money to help storm victims, and had contributed to the failure to meet its fund-raising goals. But with another ruinous storm at his doorstep, Romfh asked Red Cross officials to take over his city’s preparations for the storm and set up shelters in the city.
The Red Cross set up aid stations throughout Miami.
The exodus from Miami escalated as hundreds of residents decided they simply could not stand the emotional strain of enduring another terrible storm. They boarded northbound trains to get as far away from the city as possible, and the Dixie Highway was clogged with northbound cars carrying women and children out of the city.
Schools and businesses closed.
“Miami Prepares to Meet Storm,” headlined the afternoon Miami Daily News edition of Wednesday, October 20, 1926.
The evening of Wednesday, October 20, 1926, began in a frighteningly similar fashion to the awful night a month earlier. As darkness fell, winds steadily increased and rain fell in torrents.
This time, however, Miami got lucky. Although Key West, about 150 miles southwest of Miami, was lashed with 100-mile-an-hour winds as the eye passed near that city of 20,000 residents, the hurricane’s eye—and its most powerful winds—stayed offshore. The outer edge of the storm still brought rain, high winds, and terrifying reminders of the earlier hurricane to Miami residents. Trees came down and fell across power lines and knocked out electricity, but fortunately, that was the worst of it.
The next day, hundreds of Miami’s terrified, hurricane-weary residents gathered at the post office to watch those awful red-and-black hurricane warning flags hauled down from the flagpole. They were so delighted that they broke into a spontaneous celebration.
“The sun is shining brightly in Miami and its inhabitants, after a night of anxiety, are busily engaged in their everyday tasks,” said a Miami Daily News editorial on Thursday afternoon, October 21. “Thursday’s sunshine is emblematic of Miami’s future, unmarred by threatening clouds.”
Red Cross officials, however, were assembling a glum forecast as the 1926–27 tourist season approached. A few days after the October hurricane scare, Henry Baker met with other Red Cross leaders in Atlanta to discuss the progress of the agency’s work in Florida.
Despite such cheery public optimism as was expressed in the Miami Daily News, the Red Cross leaders were skeptical about the city’s immediate future. Among the topics they discussed was a prediction that tourism revenues, which had totaled about $145 million during the 1925–26 season, would drop by as much as 40 percent during the 1926–27 season, which was just around the corner. That would be devastating to small-business owners and workers who depended on tourism to pay their bills.
Unemployment was still very high, and the steep drop in tourism would mean that it would stay high during the time that it usually eased. And in the wake of the slide in real estate prices, many Florida residents were stuck with no equity in a house that was no longer worth the mortgages they were struggling to pay. In twenty-first-century parlance, their mortgages were “underwater.”
Some homeowners were burdened by as many as nine mortgages. When banks stopped making loans after a third mortgage, finance companies were stepping in to provide desperately needed cash—also escalating homeowners’ debts.
And even worse for the Red Cross, Baker was certain that “influential local institutions”—meaning local and state boards of real estate brokers and the Miami Chamber of Commerce—would launch a well-funded, all-out publicity campaign against the Red Cross if the agency continued to try to tell the truth about conditions in Florida.
While Red Cross leaders tried to help those who needed it and fight the headwinds of misinformation, some powerful men continued their determined effort to distort economic conditions in Florida.
The November 1926 edition of the respected journal Review of Reviews published essays by four business leaders who were deeply invested in Florida. The essays, collected under the heading “Florida after the Storm,” were requested by the Review of Reviews editor, Albert Shaw, who said he’d asked the “leading men of affairs” in Florida to inform his readers of the “conditions and prospects” in the state.
The essays were written by Hamilton Holt, president of Rollins College in Orlando; Richard Hathaway Edmonds, editor of the Manufacturers’ Record; Barron Collier, who had essentially been given his own county in 1923 by the Florida legislature after promising to complete the Tamiami Trail; and Peter O. Knight, the Tampa attorney who a few weeks earlier had taken to the pages of the Wall Street Journal and Arthur Brisbane’s millions of readers to downplay the hurricane damage and disparage the Red Cross’s efforts to raise money for storm victims.
All four writers repeated the misleading statement that the hurricane’s impact on Florida had been minimal because it had affected only Miami and Moore Haven. But in reality, nearly one-third of the money driving the Florida boom was in Miami banks, and the city was leading the nation in bank clearings—that is, checks being cashed or deposited. And the city had been called “the greatest market per capita in the world today” by Literary Digest. So to say that Florida was fine because the hurricane had only hit Miami was like saying that since a bullet had only pierced the heart, the rest of the body was unharmed.
And the Review of Reviews essayists added their own touches of misdirection.
Holt, the Rollins College president, noted that “thousands of dollars” had been contributed to the Red Cross to relieve suffering in Florida, but did not mention that the Red Cross had failed to reach its fund-raising goal because of the determined campaign being waged by Warfield, Knight, and others.
Manufacturers’ Record editor Edmonds said Red Cross chairman Payne had misled the nation, and accused him of disparaging “the people of Florida who went to work so vigorously, so cheerfully, and so optimistically” to rebuild after the hurricane.
Knight, the attorney who worked for Warfield, repeated his claim that damage from the storm would not exceed $25 million—even though the Miami Chamber of Commerce had publicly estimated damage at more than $100 million—and said that the only industry that had been harmed by the storm was the citrus industry. But the loss of so many citrus trees still had a silver lining because it would mean higher prices for the growers, he said.
“The tourist business . . . was not involved,” Knight wrote. “There will be more tourists in Florida this winter than ever before, and by January 1 every vestige of damage, so far as the tourist business is concerned, will have disappeared.”
Collier said he was moved by the “misfortune” of Miami and Moore Haven, but added: “I join Governor Martin in his just and strong condemnation of those who use the misfortunes of two cities to injure a whole commonwealth.”
As 1926 drew to a close, Red Cross officials summarized their efforts in Florida, issuing on Christmas Eve a news release saying that 16,000 families totaling 60,000 people had been helped by the Red Cross effort in Florida. The Red Cross was making “an award a minute” of financial aid, and had disbursed more than $3.4 million—about $45 million in twenty-first-century dollars. Meanwhile, two of the state’s largest railroads were reporting good news to their stockholders. Both the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad and the Seaboard Air Line Railroad had set records for revenue in 1926. The Atlantic Coast Line had grossed $97 million, and the Seaboard had recorded $67 million for the year.
Warfield, Seaboard’s owner, was pouring money and dreams into Florida. And he’d also told Edwin Menninger’s South Florida Developer about plans to build repair shops in Indiantown for his railroad. That would add one thousand jobs to Martin County. And in anticipation of the completion of the Tamiami Trail linking Tampa and Miami, he had inaugurated train service to Naples and other cities on the Gulf Coast.
But the crown jewel of Warfield’s Florida empire was the extension of his railroad from West Palm Beach to Miami. Thanks to the new extension, the Seaboard Air Line Railroad now would offer direct connections from New York to Miami.
At 6:25 p.m. on the evening of January 5, 1927, Warfield and hundreds of businessmen and bankers boarded a southbound Seaboard Air Line train at New York’s Pennsylvania Station. It was the inaugural run of a train featuring amenities that would quickly make it a legend—the Orange Blossom Special.
Additional trains—also part of the Orange Blossom Special’s inaugural run—joined the New York group in Philadelphia and Baltimore. The trains chuffed southward into the night through Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, carrying around six hundred well-heeled passengers who controlled millions of dollars’ worth of potential investments.
Florida governor John Martin and a group of Florida dignitaries that included Tampa attorney Knight joined the celebratory caravan. They were accompanied by dozens of reporters from Florida and national news services, such as the New York Times, the Philadelphia Record, the Atlanta Constitution, and others.
Once the Special reached Florida, it stopped at every town and hamlet along the way. Much of Florida dropped its daily routine and turned out to welcome the train.
“School children in white summer clothes were there, singing and waving flags; farmers came from miles around, traveling in motor cars or on foot, to greet Mr. Warfield and Governor Martin,” wrote a reporter for the New York Times. “At Fort Myers, the citizens arranged an elaborate reception, with brass bands and an automobile parade through decorated streets. There was a similar reception in Naples, which was welcoming a railroad for the first time in its history.”
The celebration continued on the state’s east coast. Parades, local dignitaries, and attractive young women greeted the Special at every stop. Warfield, Martin, and Knight vied to see who could kiss the most girls at each station, and a reporter for the Miami Daily News declared Knight the winner.
As the four trains comprising the Special neared Miami, the celebrations became more complex. At Opa-locka, developed around an Arabian theme by aviator Glenn Curtiss, the festivities included men dressed as Arabian warriors on horseback and women in harem costumes.
During the stop at Hollywood, the earthy, acerbic Knight entertained the crowd and reporters with pithy comments about the passengers from the large northern cities.
“I’m tired of that bunch of millionaires from the north who make up the first section of this train having all the glory at these receptions,” Knight said. “We of the third section are just Florida crackers, but we’re proud of it, and if it hadn’t been for us, the financiers up ahead would never have come to Florida at all.
“One thing is certain. Those hard-boiled, cold-blooded capitalists didn’t come here just because they like us or wanted to be nice. It takes fourteen cocktails to make any one of that bunch germinate the first spark of sentiment.”
Reporters didn’t ask Knight how he had managed to count the number of cocktails necessary to soften up a Yankee banker on a train supposedly prohibited from selling liquor.
The Orange Blossom Special arrived in Miami at dusk on January 8, hours late because of all of the celebrations along the way. Fireworks exploded as the trains rolled to a stop at a temporary Seaboard Air Line station at Seventh Street and Twentieth Avenue. At Royal Palm Park on the waterfront, the crowd was entertained by Arthur Pryor’s Band. The band included more than two dozen musicians led by virtuoso trombonist Arthur Pryor, who had once so dazzled an audience of German soldiers that they had insisted on taking apart his instrument to see if it was real. The band had recorded the novelty song “The Whistler and His Dog” in late 1925, and the catchy, lilting tune was still being hummed and whistled across the nation.
The Orange Blossom Special’s arrival in Miami brought a renewed sense of optimism to the city’s boosters, which included the Miami Daily News.
“Today Miami enters upon another era of progress,” the Daily News said in a front-page editorial on January 9, 1927.
The new Seaboard Air Line service to Miami was an indication that the erratic boom-based economy of 1925–26 was being replaced by stable growth. “Booms frequently follow railroad expansion; but railroads do not follow booms,” the editorial continued.
Warfield’s decision to invest heavily in South Florida was based on a careful cost-benefit analysis. And the Seaboard’s benefit from its Miami extension would be income from shipping fruits and vegetables grown on land reclaimed from the Everglades, the Daily News said. The South Florida Developer predicted that the farms also would be needed to feed the thousands of workers coming to Indiantown to work at the new sawmill and train repair shop.
“When expansion of the character Miami now witnesses is consummated, we may rest assured it is only after all the risks have been carefully weighed,” the Miami Daily News editorial said. “. . . Railroads open up undeveloped lands and create markets at the same time. That is Warfield’s mission in Florida. It will be fulfilled.”
Despite the new optimism among Miami boosters, however, there were stubborn signs of problems in Paradise. A few weeks after the Orange Blossom Special merrymaking, Henry Baker, the chairman of the Red Cross’s relief effort in Miami, reported to the agency’s national headquarters that unemployment was becoming “more acute daily.”
In a January 27 report, Baker noted that families who had not needed help in the weeks immediately after the September hurricane now needed financial assistance.
“No one would expect that unemployment would be a serious problem here at this time of year,” Baker wrote.
A few days later, the Miami Herald—one of the early deniers of serious hurricane damage—published an editorial acknowledging that there was “a great deal of actual destitution in Miami.”
“Little children are actually suffering on account of lack of food,” the Herald editorial said. “Delicate women, scores of them, have insufficient food. Men are actually going hungry, looking for any small jobs that may turn up from the proceeds of which they may help their families.”
The Herald noted that the county’s welfare board—which was responsible for providing help for those in need—had “almost ceased to function” because the county had not had the money to keep the board funded. The Herald editors asked “generous-minded people of Miami” to make donations to the welfare board.
Around the time that the Herald was seeking donations to help the city’s needy, an innocuous businessman rented a bungalow for a winter vacation in Miami Beach. He said his name was Al Brown, and his business card said he was a dealer in secondhand furniture.
Brown was a beefy, jowly man with thinning black hair who might have been regarded as just another businessman who’d done well enough to afford to take several months off in the sun. But a long, nasty-looking scar on his left cheek belied his bland-sounding name and set him apart from the typical vacationers. Clearly, Brown had incurred some risks on his path to success.
In the coming months, Brown would provide a small stimulus to the ailing South Florida economy. And his presence would not go unnoticed by local officials or the national press.
By mid-February, the Red Cross was ready to fold up its tent and get out of Miami. On February 14, vice chairman James Fieser sent a special-delivery letter from Miami to Red Cross National Headquarters saying the Red Cross’s mission did not include staying in Florida to help those unable to find work. Besides, they couldn’t stay if they wanted to. They were out of money.
Solomon Davies Warfield was known as an autocratic business leader who could be very charming when it suited his purposes. As February turned to March and word spread that the Red Cross was pulling out of Miami, Warfield and other prominent Miami business leaders decided it was time to bury the hatchet.
On March 1, 1927, Henry Baker, the director of the Red Cross relief effort in Miami, was the guest of honor at a testimonial luncheon at the Columbus Hotel. The gathering was hosted by James Gilman, the former chairman of a citizens’ committee formed to help with Miami’s post-hurricane recovery.
Among the speakers who praised Baker and the Red Cross’s relief effort was Miami mayor Edward Romfh, whose actions had helped to cripple the Red Cross’s fund-raising effort.
Romfh said the Red Cross effort had been “magnificent,” and that the city had been very lucky that Baker had been in charge.
Baker was equally magnanimous, saying that he’d been in charge of 147 disaster-relief efforts across the United States, and had never seen such a “vigorous and intelligent” local relief effort.
“There is an elusive but definite something here which I can only define as the Miami spirit,” Baker said. “It is a spirit of cooperation, understanding, and vigorous determination to overcome all problems.”
The following day, Baker was invited to a smaller gathering with a few of Miami’s high rollers. This gathering was held at the First National Bank in the private dining room of the bank’s president—Miami mayor Edward Romfh.
Warfield, the charmer, had an ulterior motive for meeting with Baker in a more private setting. He wanted to coax information from the Red Cross official. Joining Baker, Warfield, and Romfh at the lunch were Miami Herald publisher Frank Shutts and Glenn Curtiss, the aviator turned developer.
Baker sent a letter the following day about the meeting to Fieser, who had returned to Red Cross headquarters in Washington, DC, “The luncheon did not have to do with our disaster relief except in a rather indirect way,” Baker wrote.
Baker said that the reason Warfield and the others had invited him to lunch was to ask him what he’d learned during his Red Cross work about the “financial matters of Miami and the East Coast of Florida,” adding that “Mr. Warfield was quite interested in this phase of post-hurricane developments.”
Baker said Warfield had asked him and the others to keep their conversation confidential, and went so far as to ask Baker not to say anything to his supervisors in Washington. Baker honored that request in his letter, but he did say that the conversation was related to “a big reclamation project” in the Everglades. He promised Fieser that he would fill in the details in a private conversation when he returned to Washington.
Baker added that Warfield had nothing but praise for the Red Cross’s efforts in Florida, and invited Baker to visit his office in Washington sometime. Apparently, Warfield’s determined effort to discredit the Red Cross’s integrity wasn’t mentioned.
Baker’s private comments to his colleagues when he returned to Washington are lost to history because there’s no record in the National Archives of what he said about his private meeting in Miami with Warfield, Romfh, and the others about the 1926 hurricane in the Red Cross files. But it’s likely that completing the construction of the Tamiami Trail was one of the Everglades “reclamation” projects they discussed.
And another tycoon was pouring money into that project.
Barron Collier had persuaded the Florida legislature to essentially give him his own county—a county larger than the state of Delaware—in 1923 in exchange for promising to complete the Tamiami Trail through the Everglades and his namesake county. If Collier hadn’t realized how difficult it would be to keep that promise when he made it, he certainly realized it three years later. And he may have been wondering if he’d have been better off promising to build a road to the moon instead.
Today, the Tamiami Trail, 274 miles between Tampa and Miami, is part of US 41. Much of the Trail is lined with strip malls, shopping centers, franchise restaurants, convenience stores, and gated communities. And even along the stretches where development is restricted and the Everglades are relatively undisturbed, a motorist speeding along the wide asphalt highway at sixty miles an hour is not likely to notice much of what makes that stretch of road so unusual.
But it is unusual—in fact, it’s one of the most unique stretches of highway in the world.
“It leaps like a flung lance, blue-black in the blazing distance, shimmering with a mirage, clear and clean across the whole of South Florida,” author Marjory Stoneman Douglas said of the Tamiami Trail in her classic work, The Everglades: River of Grass. “Along it buses thunder between Miami and Fort Myers and Tampa, and automobiles and huge trucks. The road roars with their passing, but after that the silence flows back again, the ancient inviolable silence of the Everglades.”
The Trail “reaches and vanishes from sky to sky; from dawns of pale silver and tangerine over the grape-colored ramparts of Gulf Stream clouds to sunsets in the blue winters like explosions of orange and bronze and brass,” Douglas wrote.
“People rushing across it look and see nothing,” she continued. “‘But there’s nothing,’ they say. They see neither the Everglades nor the Trail’s drama.”
For all of the exotic wildlife in the Everglades, it is indeed surprisingly quiet. Silence and stillness are mandatory for a first-time visitor to even begin to comprehend this strange and wonderful place.
There’s a twenty-four-mile remnant of a branch of the original Tamiami Trail just off the modern US 41, about forty miles west of Miami. The road was rebuilt in places after Hurricane Wilma sent floodwaters across it and washed out some sections in 2005. The road remains unpaved and still resembles the Tamiami Trail as it was when it was opened nearly a century ago.
A canal, created when the limestone underlying the Everglades muck was used to build the original roadbed, runs parallel to the Trail.
It’s not unusual to see an alligator sunning on the far bank of the canal. If you get out of your car to take a photo of the gator, you begin to absorb the silence. And if you remain quiet and still and allow your eyes and your consciousness to adjust to the surroundings, sometimes you see the wildlife.
Of course, it takes no adjustment to see the small, jet-black mosquitoes that immediately surround you. After a few moments of stillness, perhaps you’ll see turtles on a log; or a huge frog whose natural camouflage makes it nearly invisible in its surroundings; or several otters somberly watching you from the canal in the near distance; or a motionless anhinga perched on a limb, its wings spread to dry; or a thick, dark water moccasin gliding through the black water.
You don’t see these things when you’re in a hurry.
Suddenly a splash will break the silence. A turtle or a frog has dropped into the water, and instantly alligators you had no idea were so near rush from the grass and flora and hit the water in frenzied pursuit of whatever made the splash. That’s the drama Douglas alluded to.
You hurry back to your car a bit shaken as you realize unseen deadly predators were watching you the entire time you were standing there.
The wilderness seems endless and impenetrable and untamable. And Barron Collier promised to build a road through the wildest part of it.
By September 1926, work on the Trail had been starting and stopping for ten years, and many people doubted it would ever be completed. Collier’s work crews still had thirty-one miles to go to reach the Dade County line.
The national publicity about the September 1926 hurricane’s devastation in Miami may have spurred Collier to push to finish the trail as quickly as possible.
Collier had made his fortune in advertising, and he understood how a public image affects business. With Miami on the ropes after the storm, Collier and other Florida boosters knew something was needed to boost morale and redirect the nation’s perception of Florida away from images of death and destruction.
Otto Neal, who worked on the Tamiami Trail construction project, recalled that in late September 1926—when newspapers were full of stories about the hurricane’s devastation—he was told to report to the office of David Copeland, a former US Navy engineer that Collier had hired to supervise the work.
Copeland asked Neal if they could push the road to the Dade County line by April 1, 1927. “He said that it HAD to be done,” Neal told the Collier County News shortly before the Tamiami Trail opened in late April 1928.
Neal told Copeland that he thought they could make the deadline, but suggested that another piece of heavy equipment known as a “walking dredge” should be put on the job.
Within a month, Collier had tracked down one of the remarkable contraptions, bought it, and shipped it to the job site.
At first glance, the walking dredge, built in Bay City, Michigan, looked immovable. Seen in profile, the machine, made of steel beams, could be said to vaguely resemble a giant praying mantis. It was essentially a large scoop attached to a steel frame. The machine, which now sits at Collier-Seminole State Park near Naples, was so ingeniously designed that in 1993 it was designated a National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
That designation gave the walking dredge the same historic significance as the Saturn V rocket that carried men into space between 1967 and 1972.
The engine that powered the dredge sat on a large wooden platform on the steel frame, which was about forty feet wide by about thirty feet long. The operator’s controls were in front of the engine, and the engine and operator were protected by a shedlike wooden shelter with a tin roof.
The platform and frame were supported by four wooden “shoes” at each corner of the machine. Two more shoes were at the center of the frame. Using a system of cables and pulleys, the operator could lift the four corner shoes off the ground so that the weight was temporarily supported by the middle shoes, and thus move the frame and platform forward about ten feet.
A long boom in front of the platform supported a one-cubic-yard steel bucket with manganese teeth. The bucket could scoop up about 2,800 pounds of rock with each bite.
But it was a long, grueling, and dangerous process to reach the point where the dredge could scoop up chunks of limestone and pile up the rock to be used for the roadbed. And it took a special kind of construction worker to plunge into the Everglades to build a road.
Accounts vary about how many men died building the Tamiami Trail. Meece Ellis, who worked on the construction project for eight years, told the Orlando Sentinel in 1998 that only one man was killed. That man died when he fell off the platform of the dredge and hit his head on the bucket, Ellis said.
But other other accounts say that men died from construction accidents, alligator attacks, and snakebites.
Many men who hired on with the construction project were former farm-hands from Georgia. The state’s cotton crop had been devastated by the boll weevil in the mid-1920s, and the south Georgia farm boys had heard that workers were needed to build the Trail. They were willing to work and live in horrendous conditions for a few dollars a day, plus room and board.
The men had to literally take on the Everglades with just a few tools and their bare hands. And they surely saw the sights that had prompted Dr. Jacob Motte to describe the Glades as “a most hideous region” in 1837.
“First a crew went forward through sawgrass and water and rocky hammocks with axes and machetes, cutting a trail,” Douglas wrote. “They worked up to the armpits in water, tormented with mosquitoes in the season, always watchful for rattlesnakes and the uncounted dark heads of moccasins. They lived, ate, and slept in muck and water.”
The men lived in rolling sheds that were moved along as the work progressed. It took men of unusual toughness and determination to stick with this type of construction and see it through to the end.
At one point, Collier was asked how many shifts he had at work building the Tamiami Trail.
Three, he replied—one shift on the road down from Tampa looking for work, one shift working on the construction project, and one shift who’d quit the project and were going back to Tampa.
“The men on the job were wonderful,” Otto Neal told the Collier County News in 1928. “Many would work all night Saturday and Sunday to get their machines in perfect order for the new attack Monday. The men seemed to realize the proportion of the work and the benefits that would be derived by the travelling public and wanted to see the thing through. They did their part—and they did it exceptionally well.”
Undoubtedly there was some truth to Neal’s glowing recollection of his fellow workers. But the men who built the Tamiami Trail were not saints.
Ray Crews, who would become the father of Harry Crews, a legendary writer and instructor at the University of Florida, followed a childhood friend from Georgia to join a Tamiami Trail construction crew. He was seventeen years old.
“They were not violent men, but their lives were full of violence,” Harry Crews later wrote about his father’s experience. “When Daddy first went down to the Everglades, he started on a gang that cut the advance right-of-way and, consequently, was out of the main camp for days, at times for more than a week.”
During one of their expeditions away from the camp, Ray Crews was nearly killed when a steel cable broke. It looked like an accident, but the teenager was certain that it was deliberate.
“When he almost got killed working out there on the gang, [his friend] Cecil almost killed a man because of it,” Harry Crews wrote. “Daddy’s foreman was an old man, grizzled, stinking always of chewing tobacco and sweat and whiskey, and known through the construction company as a man mean as a bee-stung dog. He didn’t have to dislike you to hurt you, even cripple you.”
There were few comforts for the construction gang, most of them rough young men with no outlet for their hormones. Since Ray Crews could not have what he wanted, he tried to want what he could have, his son wrote.
Ray Crews worked at that job for six years, and one of the few times he left the swamp was to seek treatment in the town of Arcadia for a case of gonorrhea after an ill-considered tryst with a woman—whose name he never learned—who’d snuck into the work camp.
“He had not wanted her, but they had been in the swamp for three years,” Harry Crews wrote. “They worked around the clock, and if they weren’t working or sleeping, their time was pretty much spent drinking or fighting or shooting gators.”
Someone had a camera, and when they had a few moments, Ray Crews and his friends shot photos of their adventures deep in the swamp.
Moonshine was another source of diversion for the construction gangs. And it wasn’t hard to find. The late Ashley Gang had not operated the only stills in the Everglades.
Ellis, the former dredge operator, admitted seventy years later that he kept a jug of moonshine at hand on his machine.
Roan Johnson was another young Georgian who worked on the Trail. He left his home in Quitman, a few miles north of the Florida border, in 1926 to join a cousin working on the construction crew. He was eighteen.
Like all new hires, Johnson started out working on the crew that hacked through the woods and swamp to lay out the right-of-way for the Trail.
“I remember the water was everywhere . . . clear, clear water, just everywhere,” he told the Miami Herald in 2003.
The men constantly had to pull off their boots and dump water out of them, Johnson said.
Johnson also remembered the insects—hordes of horseflies and mosquitoes so thick that it was like the construction workers “had stumbled into a biblical plague.”
At night, mosquito netting protected the men’s bunks. The nights were “dark as only a swamp can be dark,” Crews wrote.
Johnson said the construction workers didn’t worry too much about the presence of alligators.
“You knew they were there, but they didn’t bother you,” he told the Herald.
Still, foremen slung high-powered rifles across their shoulders and constantly scanned the woods and swamps for danger while their men worked.
The men were fed in the work camps, but Meece Ellis said the workers often didn’t eat the meat that was provided because by the time it reached the camp, it had gone bad. So the workers bought wild game such as turkeys, wild hogs, and deer from Seminole Indians who lived in the Everglades.
Occasionally, the scent of fresh meat enticed Florida panthers—a smaller subspecies of the American cougar that lives only in South Florida—to prowl around the camp.
The work gang that followed the crew clearing the right-of-way laid down a crude sort of railroad, using cypress logs for crossties and rails. A drilling machine had been rigged up to ride this cypress railroad. The wheels were automobile tire rims, which fitted over the logs so the drill could be pulled across the wet, soggy muck.
“Sometimes the drills stuck in the mud and there would be days of back-breaking man-labor, with heavy hand jacks, to set them up again,” Marjory Stoneman Douglas wrote.
It’s hard to imagine that the soggy Everglades has a base of solid rock beneath the black water and muck, but it does. And engineers eventually realized that the only way to build a road through that swamp was to clear away the muck and build the road on top of the limestone that lay beneath the water, muck, and saw grass.
So the drilling crew dug holes every one hundred feet—thousands of holes. The men who worked behind the drill crew led ox teams pulling wagons of dynamite on the cypress railroad. They dropped dynamite into those holes. Every so often, the workers backed well away from the recently drilled holes, and the dynamite was ignited.
From late 1926 until the Tamiami Trail was completed in 1928, more than two million sticks of dynamite were used to break up Everglades limestone. In its November 1928 issue, Explosives Engineer magazine reported that the Tamiami Trail construction crew was using about twenty tons of dynamite per mile.
After each blast, the walking dredge was brought up, and the operator scooped up the limestone fragments, 2,800 pounds at a time, and piled them alongside the canal that was formed by the explosions.
The limestone was crushed and compacted and eventually became a surprisingly smooth road. Working under these awful conditions, the construction crews built a mile or two of road each month.
On April 10, 1927, Collier’s construction gang achieved a milestone—they reached the Dade County line.
“Just ten days behind the schedule that we set for ourselves, and I tell you, that isn’t so bad,” Otto Neal proudly told the Collier County News. “After that we dug our way four miles on through the other side of the Dade County line to meet the dredges coming from the east coast, and the most difficult rock of all was found in this four-mile stretch in Dade County.”
It was around this time that Ray Crews and his friend Cecil quit their jobs with the Tamiami Trail construction crew and headed back to Georgia.
They had money in their pockets, and each had a gold watch engraved with their name and “Pioneer Builder of the Tamiami Trail.”
With a bottle of whiskey on the floorboard of a Model T Ford, Crews and his friend took nearly three weeks to amble up the Dixie Highway from Miami to Jacksonville.
“In the car with him as they drove, there was a shoebox full of pictures of my daddy with five or six of his buddies, all of them holding whiskey bottles and pistols and rifles and coons and leashed alligators out here in the rugged dug-out sea of sawgrass and mangrove swamp through which they had built the Tamiami Trail,” Harry Crews wrote. “His is the gun that is always drawn; his is the head that is turned back under the whiskey bottle.”
They had been deep in the swamp while the real estate speculation mania had swept across Florida and crested, and it had started to ebb by the time they finally came out of the Everglades. And while Florida’s economic conditions probably held little interest for two young men with money in their pockets, time on their hands, a bottle of booze, and years of pent-up libido, there were deepening signs of trouble all around them.
About the same time that Ray Crews and his friend Cecil started their leisurely trip up the Florida coast, a heavily guarded armored car left Miami, bound for West Palm Beach. It was carrying $2 million in cash.
Miami banks were sending the money to prevent three West Palm Beach banks from failing.
The New York Times of March 8, 1927, reported that banks in Palm Beach County had been struggling since shortly before the hurricanes of September and October 1926. Bankers in Miami feared a domino effect that would drag down more banks if they didn’t step in and help.
Three banks in Palm Beach County had failed in June 1926, the Times reported. The continued slump in real estate, an upheaval in local politics, and the recent failure of another bank “have created a feeling of unrest and lack of confidence resulting in persistent and continual withdrawals on the part of depositors,” the Times said.
The First American Bank and Trust Company, one of the banks teetering on the brink of failure in March 1927, had been hemorrhaging deposits, losing more than $10.5 million in withdrawals in less than a year.
“Consistent withdrawals averaging $1 million a month brought deposits in The First American Bank and Trust Company from $13.5 million down to less than $3 million in ten months’ time and was responsible for its failure to open this morning,” the Times reported.
The slumping real estate market also caused problems for smaller investors, including a star Major League baseball player.
On March 16 at the Boston Braves’ spring training camp in St. Petersburg, first baseman Jacques Fournier—who had a reputation for being as quick with his fists as he was with his bat—punched out a man who tried to talk to him after an exhibition game against the New York Giants. Unfortunately for Fournier, the man he clipped on the jaw was a deputy sheriff trying to serve him with a court summons.
“The version I got was that [the man] didn’t announce himself nor his intentions but proceeded to get in an argument with Fournier,” Braves manager Dave Bancroft told reporters. “My first baseman resented his manner and punched him.”
Fournier was being sued for $5,000 by a real estate firm in Sarasota. Fournier had put down a binder on some real estate in Sarasota, Bancroft said. “Later he decided to call the deal off, and my understanding is that both parties agreed,” he said. “I suppose the other party figured he could hold him to the contract.”
“Fournier did not know he was socking an officer, and furthermore, he thought the whole matter was settled long ago,” Bancroft said. “A hearing on the charges has been set for next week in Sarasota, but we hope to fix it up before that.”
Bancroft kept his slugger out of jail by posting a $1,000 bond and guaranteeing that Fournier would show up in court.
One Florida commodity whose demand and prices had not been affected by the real estate downturn was whiskey. Fierce—and sometimes deadly—battles still were being fought between bootleggers and the Coast Guard off the Florida coast.
On August 7, 1927, Horace Alderman and his partner Robert Weech took on a load of booze at Bimini, the westernmost island of the Bahamas, and headed back to Florida in broad daylight. They were spotted by a Coast Guard patrol about thirty-four miles off Fort Lauderdale. The two bootleggers were captured, but three Coast Guard crewmen were killed in a struggle with Alderman.
Alderman would be convicted of murder and, in keeping with the maritime tradition of execution, hanged, but the jury that convicted him also rebuked the Coast Guard for the tactics it was using against rumrunners.
Florida boosters, including Edwin Menninger, were looking for ways to reassure themselves about their stumbling economy. In late September 1927, Menninger met briefly with Solomon Davies Warfield in New York, and on October 3 he had a longer meeting with Warfield in Baltimore. Warfield told Menninger he’d try to stop by Stuart during a trip to Florida he’d planned for mid-October.
But Warfield had to cancel his trip. He was feeling a lot of discomfort because of a double hernia, and on October 12 he was admitted to Union Hospital in Baltimore for surgery.
On October 21, while Warfield was still in the hospital, Menninger’s South Florida Developer reported that the Seaboard Air Line Railroad’s plans were going to be a major boost to Martin County and Florida. Warfield’s railroad had moved its Florida headquarters from West Palm Beach to Indiantown. The company also transferred its maintenance and repair crews from Wildwood to Indiantown.
The Developer said that Eugene Kifer, vice president of the Land Company of Florida and a land agent for Seaboard, told an audience in nearby West Palm Beach that Stuart and other cities would “reap great benefits from the development of Indiantown and its farm lands.”
Kifer said that Seaboard had already spent about $1.9 million—more than $25 million in twenty-first-century dollars—on its plans for Indiantown, and they were just getting started. Seaboard’s work in and around Indiantown already had prompted construction of housing, a school, and a hotel, the Developer said.
Seaboard also sent agents to large cities in the Northeast and Midwest to speak to audiences about the company’s plans for Florida, and those lectures had prompted hundreds of people to move to Indiantown, Kifer said. The company would spend $500,000—about $6.6 million today—advertising its efforts in a national advertising campaign, he said.
“Mr. Kifer urged the abandonment of any doubt as to the successful future of the state,” the Developer said.
Only a week after the Developer’s confident prediction of prosperity in Martin County and Florida, however, came stunning news. Solomon Davies Warfield was dead.
Warfield’s doctor told the New York Times that Warfield’s recovery from hernia surgery had been “uneventful,” and that around 6:30 p.m. on October 24, he’d been sitting up in bed, chatting with a nurse and a vice president of Seaboard.
Suddenly, Warfield lost consciousness. Physicians rushed to his bedside, but there was nothing they could do. A blood clot had formed in Warfield’s heart, and he was dead.
Edwin Menninger looked for optimism in the face of what he realized could be a disaster for Martin County.
“Stuart as a community will feel this blow, coming as it does when it was known to be Mr. Warfield’s policy to extend the Seaboard into this city,” Menninger wrote on the South Florida Developer’s editorial page on October 28. “But doubtless the policies already outlined will be carried out and other men will be raised up to continue the great work of this mastermind in railroad building.”
The Seaboard Air Line Railroad had sunk too much money into its plans for Florida and Martin County to walk away after Warfield’s death, Menninger wrote.