The Land Boom and the Great Florida Bust, Nineteen Twenty-Six

In the early nineteen twenties, a real estate fever gripped Florida unlike anything the state had seen. The automobile had arrived, the new concrete roads were pushing south, and northern newspapers ran breathless accounts of fortunes made overnight in Florida lots. By nineteen twenty-five, a million visitors a year were arriving, and the real estate transaction machinery had grown into something resembling a controlled hallucination.

The central instrument of the boom was a piece of paper called a binder. You paid a small deposit, sometimes as little as ten percent, and received a binder entitling you to purchase a lot at a specified price. Before you ever made the full payment, you could sell that binder to someone else at a profit.

Binders changed hands multiple times before a property was ever actually transferred. In the peak year of nineteen twenty-five, Dade County alone recorded transactions totaling more than one billion dollars in nominal value, a figure that had almost nothing to do with the actual worth of the swampy, mosquito-rich land being traded. The collapse came in phases.

Freight congestion on the railroad lines into South Florida became so severe in late nineteen twenty-five that the major railroads declared an embargo and stopped accepting general freight for months. Building materials could not arrive. Then, in January nineteen twenty-six, the steam schooner Prinz Valdemar capsized in the entrance to Miami Harbor and blocked it for nearly a month.

The news spread north; the confidence evaporated. Then came the hurricane. The Great Miami Hurricane of September eighteenth, nineteen twenty-six made landfall at Miami as a Category Four storm.

It killed an estimated three hundred seventy-three people and destroyed or severely damaged nearly twenty thousand homes. Another major hurricane hit in nineteen twenty-eight, striking the southern shore of Lake Okeechobee and sending a wall of water across the farming communities south of the lake. That storm, the Okeechobee Hurricane, killed an estimated twenty-five hundred people, with some estimates considerably higher, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in American history.

The Florida boom was over. The Depression arrived here three years before the rest of the country felt it.