The Great Hurricane of Nineteen Twenty-Six

The land boom that built Fort Lauderdale died in a single night. In the dark early hours of the eighteenth of September, nineteen twenty-six, a monstrous hurricane came ashore near Miami Beach and tore straight up the coast. Winds topped one hundred fifty miles an hour, and a storm surge more than eleven feet high pushed in from the sea.

Many people had never seen a hurricane and did not understand its deadly false calm. When the eye passed and the air went still, crowds walked outside, only to be caught in the open when the back wall of the storm hit from the opposite direction. The storm killed hundreds of people across South Florida.

Fort Lauderdale, then a town of only about twelve thousand, was gutted. The winds tore the roof off the Broward County courthouse and wrecked the interiors of buildings across downtown, damaging roughly three thousand five hundred structures. The disaster did what nothing else had managed.

It ended the Florida land boom overnight, sent thousands of newcomers fleeing north with their emptied bank accounts, and pushed the region into hard times years before the rest of the country fell into the Great Depression. Full recovery would not come until the nineteen forties.