The 1928 HURRICANE THE STORY OF MY FAMILY The 1928 hurricane on Lake Okeechobee, Ritta Island and Fort Lauderdale By C. A. “Mutt” Thomas Edited by Bud Garner   WE MOVE TO RITTA ISLAND My father’s family lived on a farm seven miles northwest of Madison in Madison County Florida. The farm lay close to Hickstown Swamp, which was named after a renegade Indian who was killed nearby. My mother, whose maiden name was Susan Indiana Loper was born in the same community on March 20, 1894. My father, Charles Edward Thomas, was born in the old farmhouse, which my grandfather had built on February 18, 1892. I was born April 27, 1915 a brother and two sisters were also born in North Florida and another sister was born after we came to South Florida. My grandfather had nine children, two died young six boys and one girl grew up. When my grandfather was older, he was struck by lightning while and my uncle were working out in the fields when a sudden storm came up and they took shelter in an abandoned house on the place. They were standing near a window and my Grandfather was struck. He seemed to recover but died soon after. Grandmother had to sell a lot of the land. My aunt, Edna Thomas Drawdy moved in to Madison after she married and still lives there. My father was farming land that belonged to my mother’s people. He was farming cotton and peanuts and raising cattle and has up until we left there in the fall of 1921 to come to Ritta Island. This was after the first World’s War and times were hard, as farmers in north Florida were not making anything on their cotton. My Uncle, Richard Mays Thomas, had gone to Fort Lauderdale long before the war and had worked for a wealthy man, Hugh Taylor Birch as caretaker and manager of his estate off the mainland at Fort Lauderdale. Mr. Birch thought highly of Uncle Mays and kept him on as long as uncle Mays would stay. Uncle Mays had a chance, however, to earn $3.00 a day working on a dredge on the North New River Canal. This project was taken over by the Clark-Furst Construction Co. In 1910 it picked up Steam after a dredge moved to the site of South Bay to start the Okeechobee Lake end of the canal. It was finished in 1912. Mr. Lawrence Will, Glades historian, reported meeting Uncle Mays at Ritta Shore during the winter of 1914-15. Ritta Shore, on the mainland, got its name from Ritta Island. The Bolles Hotel had been built at Ritta shore in 1911 to house prospective customers for Glades land. Ritta Shore was later known as Miami Locks. It wasn’t until July 16, 1931 with the coming of the post office that it became known as Lake Harbor. Ritta Island is located a mile off shore from the Miami Canal; it had its first settlers about 1909 and others came. The U. S. Government surveyed all the Okeechobee islands in 1917 and soon after, largely through the work of Braddock and Winne on Torry Island, declared that they were open for homesteading. Johnny Windham had 55 acres on the east side and he Got Uncle Mays interested. They went in together, built adjoining houses, started clearing the land and began farming. Uncle Mays got my Daddy interested and when Johnny traded his rights to Uncle Mays and moved away, Uncle Mays persuaded us to cone join him. My dad had came down and visited with Uncle Mays in 1920 before he brought us down in 1921. My father borrowed $100.00 to make the move to Ritta Island. We made the trip from North Florida on the train. We changed trains in Jacksonville and went to Haines City; a spur of the Atlantic Coast Line, which had started operation in 1917 or 1918, took us from Haines City to Moore Haven. We brought with us our furniture and other possessions as well as five barrels of smoked meat. Someone stole a barrel in Moore Haven, or, at least it never got on the boat. We left the next day to go to Ritta Island on Captain Ed Forbes’ mail boat, “The Fox. “ This cabin boat left from Everglades Locks near the big cypress tree at Moore Haven. Captain “Little” Ed Forbes, the skipper lived on Ritta Island near the hotel that Captain Felix Forbes, his father, had built and the boat lay up overnight there before continuing on to Loxahatchee the next day. Mail from the Lake communities was picked up on the way and incoming mail from West Palm Beach was picked up in Loxahatchee and brought back. Passengers and merchandise were carried on the boat for additional profit. The Post Office on Ritta Island was built on the Northwest corner and was called “Mabry”. We moved into the house that Johnny Windham had left vacant on the southeast corner of the Island. The house was made of Florida pine consisting of a large living room, bedroom, small kitchen, back and front porch. The windows were screened with shutters and the porches were open. Most of the houses built then were unfinished inside with the ceiling rafters bare. Uncle Mays and Daddy started farming together. They cleared land by hand, planted it and farmed with hand tools mostly. Captain Felix Forbes had the only mule on the Island. It was necessary for all who could do so to work on the land. The children worked as soon as they were big enough and when they were not in school. In those days the family with the most kids had the best farm. My mother worked beside my father as she had done in North Florida. The land was originally covered by custard apple trees, which were easy to clear. You cleared the land by hand and the more land you cleared the bigger your farm. The more help a family had the more you could grow. Green beans and onions were the crops we grew that first season. They were shipped to Fort Lauderdale on Captain Shakleford’s freight boat and sold there. WE MOVE TO FORT LAUDERDALE 1922 In the late summer of 1922 the rains came and by September 30 the rainfall was 10 inches in excess of the annual average for the year. The level of Lake Okeechobee rose five feet. Travel from the Lake to Kissimmee could be made on a solid sheet of water. The lake level was 22 feet, or better. Later flooded. Ritta Island, which had an elevation of 21 feet as it had just been cleared and had not yet packed down. Bare Beach, Clewiston, Okeelanta as well as the islands were under water. Some land on Ritta Island is now 17.5 feet. The chickens hadn’t been off the roost in thirty days. Captain Forbes’ old mule would come up at night and pull them off by their tail feathers. They would squawk and Daddy would go out and put them back on the roost. He finally put up some wire and tin to keep the mule out. Chicken snakes fell on the mosquito nets that hung from the rafters and covered our beds at night. My dad would get up and throw the snakes outside. Water moccasins were everywhere. Even before the heavy rains came they were plentiful. I have seen my mother go out with a rifle when she heard one of her hens squawk in a certain way. She would find a dead hen and nearby a moccasin. She would shoot and kill the snake every time. The field corn had to be gathered in by boat and we shelled it in Gus McGehee’s barn on the west side of the Island. The only part of the island out of water was the ridge on his farm. My Uncle Mays and his wife moved to Ralph Bishop’s farm at Ritta where she kept house and cooked for Mr. Bishop. Uncle Mays worked for himself. The outlook was not good with water covering the island. Uncle Mays persuaded my dad to move to Fort Lauderdale. We went to Fort Lauderdale on Shakleford’s freight barge. We loaded on it our furniture, the shelled corn and all the chickens. We left at dark and entered the North New River canal. The first stop was at the old Everglades locks in South Bay. Mr. Willits had a store on the canal bank North of the old locks Daddy called to Mr. Willits to bring him a nickel’s worth of candy as the barge cruised slowly by the store, that took care of all the money we had when we left Ritta Island. It was early the next morning, after daylight, that we arrived at the Sewell Locks on the North New River Canal opposite Davie. There we sold to the lock -tender the chickens and the corn that we had placed on top of the barge. That gave us money to rent a house when we got to Fort Lauderdale. We went five miles further on, passed under the Henry Flagler railroad bridge and tied up at the dock. “The captain told us where we could rent a house. “My dad got off the barge, walked east three blocks across to the Andrews Avenue bridge and rented a house. It was on 13th Street one half mile on the South side of the river. Daddy was able to get a truck to move the furniture to the house. It was then or soon after that we had electric lights for the first time ever. We moved in and set up housekeeping that day and the next day my dad went out looking for a job. He got a job working for a Mr. Gibbs who was in the cement block business two blocks away near the railroad tracks. He pushed a wheelbarrow for $1. 00 a day pouring concrete for hand molded blocks. He worked at this for a week and a half; then the big colored man running the mixer didn’t show up. Daddy cranked it up and ran it for two days. Mr. Gibbs paid him $2.00 a day. The Negro showed up but now he rolled the wheelbarrow and Daddy ran the mixer. My dad wound up as a form setter and a plasterer at $2.50 an hour. Times began to get better. Mr. Gibbs got a good contract and my Dad’s job was that of setting forms for sidewalks at the sub-division of Crossland Park. Pay went up as the boom started. In 1923 he bought a model T-Ford. In 1924 the job pouring, sidewalks ended. He got another job mixing mortar at $20.00 a day or better. In 1923 the road to Belle Glade was rock surfaced and one-way steel bridges were installed at Twenty mile Bend, Six Mile Bend and at Belle Glade. In 1925 my dad bought a truck and started hauling produce from the Glades. In the meantime he had been sending money to Uncle Mays. Later, it turned out, they had overslept their homestead and after the 1928 hurricane it reverted to the state. My dad bought it back from the state after that. Water had remained on the land after the rains of 1922 until February of 1923. 1923 was a dry year but the water rose again. In October of 1924 nineteen inches of rain fell and the lake rose seven and one-half feet in five days. My Uncle Rufus, R. E Thomas, joined my dad in 1925 and they went in together hauling produce from the Lake as farming operations had resumed by then. Our family stayed in Fort Lauderdale and my dad traveled back and forth. I attended the South Side School. We went through the hurricane of 1926 in Fort Lauderdale. This hurricane wrecked Miami and went on to do much damage to Moore Haven and the west side of Lake Okeechobee. Before it struck, we left our house and went to the home of neighbors, the Smileys. They had a player piano and during the storm they played it even though the house began to shake. There was a bakery near by and bread was in the oven and jellyrolls had been put in a big desk. A milk truck stalled nearby. During the eye of the hurricane, we got milk out of the truck and then we went to the bakery and had milk, bread and jellyrolls to eat. In the second part of the hurricane the roof started to blow off the bakery and we tied it down. The windows were blown out. We went a block end a half to our house figuring it would be blown away. It was still standing with only a few shingles blown off, but everything still got wet. WE RETURN TO THE EVERGLADES. The hurricane of 1926 killed the boom and a month or so later we returned to the glades. Daddy moved us back in the Model T and the truck. We went down U. S. 1 to Lake Worth then west to Military Trail We went north on Military trail and crossed the West Palm Beach Canal and took the road down the canal to twenty mile Bend, as we do today. We crossed and followed the rock road to Belle Glade and on to South Bay. The road to Lake Harbor was a muck road. From there, we then took the muck road on to Sebring Farm. The move took all day. We rented a house from a Mr. James. Vernie Boots’ family lived nearby. Mr. Boots was farming too. He and his boys had a contract to keep the muck road from South Bay to Clewiston leveled off. Mr. H.O. Sebring, son of the founder of Sebring, Florida, bought the land and started Sebring Farms in 1918. He planned to have the biggest avocado farm of all. He cleared 200 acres of custard apple land and planted the trees but the floods in 1922, 1924 and 1926 killed the trees. The hurricane coming up in 1928 was destined to put a final end to this enterprise. On the farm there were several houses for white people and quarters for the colored. We called the house we rented in 1927 the “wrong side out house” because it had never been finished outside. Now my father was again farming on Ritta Island with Uncle Mays. They went back and forth on a 16-foot boat to work the land. Mr. Sebring had a canal dug from the Miami Canal out in the Lake to the land at Sebring Farms so he could bring his own supplies in by boat. He had a pump run by a steam boiler to pump the water off the land. He had to bring in pinewood to fire the boiler. The canal gave us a swimming pool at our back door; we even had a diving board. All of us could swim. My brother and sisters and I helped Daddy and Uncle Mays with the farm when we were not in school. All of us would go over to Ritta Island on the boat in the mornings. Daddy set out so much work for us to do. We usually finished up by four o’clock and we would wade back most of the way home because the lake was low. We swam the canal then we were hone. This was a distance of about a mile and a half. Daddy would usually work until almost dark, he would pole the boat, unless there were a lot of people in it then he would row. He and Uncle Mays brought out their produce on the boat. They hauled a lot of beans from the island to the mainland. We had started to school when we came back near the end of 1926 and finished the term in the spring of ’27. We went the school year of 1927-’28. The school was right out here in what is now my front yard. The school teacher, Mrs. Hughes, lived with her husband and little boy on a house boat on the Bolles Canal, three miles away. Every morning, she rowed herself and her boy in a little boat the three miles, tied it to the bridge and walked to the school. In the afternoon after school they walked back to the boat and rowed home. She and her husband, Mr. Hughes had just moved the houseboat south of the bridge here a week before the new term of school was due-to start for the 1928-’29 school year. The lake was down to 3 feet in the summer but it rained and raised the lake to 13.87 feet between the 6th and 13th of August and in September it had rained almost every day so the lake was over 16 feet elevation. My folks went to West Pain Beach on Saturday, September 15, 1928 to buy our school clothes. The new term of school was due to start on the following Monday. That’s when we found out there was a hurricane heading our way but were told it posed no threat to the Glades area. HURRICANE STRIKES. 1928 The Huffman Construction Company, under contract to the state, was finally building a highway from South Bay to Clewiston. A big dipper dredge was working a half-mile west of the Miami Locks. On this Saturday, because it was something new, almost all the boys were there watching the operation of the dragline that was driving piling across the South Florida Conservation drainage canal. It began to drizzle in the afternoon and the men knocked off and went to their houseboat. We went home and found that our folks had returned from West Palm Beach. They had been told that an oncoming hurricane was in no danger of turning toward the Glades. Clarence Lee and his wife lived in a house about 200 feet Northeast of our house. They talked about going to South Bay, which they did the next day, which was Sunday. Nobody really expected the hurricane to hit. Next day, we harvested a bunch of raw peanuts, came back: and boiled them about the middle of the afternoon. Everybody came over to eat them. The wind was really beginning to blow and you could see the wave action over the little old mud dike, which protected the mainland at that time. Everybody had enjoyed the peanuts and just before dark they picked a house for everybody to go and take refuge in. They picked V. B. Thirsk’s, the caretaker’s house. Everybody except Uncle Minor went there. He stayed in our house to look after things. By the time we got to Mr. Thirsk’s house water was already knee deep and rising, apparently the old mud dike, five to eight feet high and about forty feet thick at the base, had been breached by the lake and was washed away. The house was a good four feet off the ground. By the time all the families had got in, the water was high enough that it was coming into the house. They put all the small kids on the table in the kitchen as we went in the back door. The water continued to rise until it was halfway up the windows and rising more. In the Thirsk house, which was large, there was in addition to Mr. and Mrs. Thirsk, our family the Boots family, a Swede, Karl Karanch and several other people. The rest were colored. I don’t know how many there were. Mr. Will reports that there were 21 whites and 42 blacks. The colored people were in the front part of the house and they went through a hole in the ceiling and some of the whites went through the sane hole. My family all went through a hole in the kitchen. By the time all of us got up in the ceiling the water was up over the windows. The wind was deafening and when there was a lull you could hear the black people singing praying and crying. The weather picked up and the house was moving. Of course, I didn’t know what was happening, as I was only 13 years old but I was told later that the house floated off the piling and water cane up in the attic. Mr. Thirsk and Daddy had knocked some of the metal roofing loose, making a hole through the roof. Daddy got out and was pulling a piece of tin off the roof and the wind blew him off the roof. That was the last he saw of the house. He came up swimming on top of the water and he came in contact with a telephone pole. He hung on to the braces holding the first cross-arm until the water started down. The water was holding him up there. That’s how high it was. As the wind slackened and the water receded, he slid down the pole and huddled there all night Mr. Thirsk got out after Daddy and took his wife out. He reached back into the house and grabbed someone else to pull out and it happened to be me. He and his wife straddled the top of the house and he pushed me up there. He was trying to get other people out of the house when the house disappeared altogether. It was pitch dark and you couldn’t see anybody or anything I started swimming toward the other houses, which would have been East of this house that we were in. I don’t know now long I had been trying to swim until I bumped into some floating timber. I decided to hang on, which I did for the wind and the water carried me South of the old Sebring Farm. Eventually, the timbers I was holding on to and trying to ride stopped moving. The water got shallow, I tried to push them and couldn’t so I crawled up on them and pulled a little old sweater that I had on up over my head as the wind and the rain were driving so hard against me. I sat there until daylight. Then I attempted to swim back North. The water here was about knee deep and as I walked the water got deeper. After some hard wading I saw there were people off to my right. I started hollering and walking toward them. They finally heard me and it turned out to be Roy, Vernie and Willie Boots. They waited on me and thought until I got up there, that I was their fourth brother. It turned out that he was lost. We waded together and we finally saw the telephone pole that towered over the Miami Canal and regal palms at the Bolles Hotel. We kept going toward the hotel because we figured it might be standing which it was. We came out on the old highway about a half-mile from the Miami Canal. We came out near where Mrs. Larrick lives today. There were no houses there at that time but we came to a house South of the road here which I believed was Dr. Tatum’s which the hurricane waters had floated south, back about a fourth of a mile, from the old highway. In this house, and Mrs. Marlin Lee and their family and old Mr. Burt Little and his son survived the storm. The house had floated off its blocks on Sebring Farm, floated a quarter of a mile and it had weathered the storm with the people in it. We walked up to the house and met up with these people and they were chewing sugar cane that Mr. Tatum was trying to grow for old Southern sugar, which is U. S. Sugar today. We chewed some cane with them. The men folks had waded out and gone to the old Bolles hotel in Lake Harbor to see if they could find a boat. Mr. Lee brought one back to pick up his wife and small children. I waded up the ditch from that house to Road 27 which was right where Mrs. Larricks house is today which would be half way of tile middle of section one. We were watching while the men were trying get the boat tied up so everybody could get in it. I heard someone call my name I looked up and saw my Daddy across the canal. I jumped in and swam across to him I was glad to see him and he was glad to see me He had been looking for members of our family. He thought that we were all lost until he saw me. The Boots boys went to the Bolles Hotel. Daddy and I went back to the old Sebring Farm. We met Uncle Minor Thomas who had been searching for members of the family and hadn’t found anybody. He had gone up in the attic of the “wrong side out” house as the water rose. It was big enough for him, brother and me to sleep up there as we always did. The attic had broken loose from the house. He got out on top of it and it floated across the road and stopped. We sat straddle of it that night. We then met up with Mr. Thirsk and the four of us searched around and didn’t find anybody. We went back to the old Bolles Hotel to spend the night. It was open to everybody who could squeeze in. We went to sleep on the floor. Some of the women had beds, only a few beds were available, the men slept on the floor. We made do with what little we had to eat. Most of the crew that were on the construction job had survived and they had gone down and salvaged the canned goods that was on their cook boat, brought: it back to the hotel and set up a kitchen. They fed people with what little they could find. The caretaker of the hotel, which was being remodeled, had at first refused to let people come in. Someone had persuaded him to change his mind and when we arrived I did not see him around. I think he had been sent away. In the meantime some of the commercial fishermen got some of their boats running so they could go to Clewiston On Monday, after the hurricane, some of the men in Clewiston put boats together there. Jim Beardsley and Dean Duff were among those who came out to check on everybody at Lake Harbor. They took some people back to Clewiston and brought back food. Mrs. Hamilton, who was the lock tender, took over the kitchen and tried to head things up at the old Bolles Hotel. That morning after the storm, as people were grimly searching for the lost in the waters, old Mr. Callahan came out of his two-story house where he lived alone down below Lake Harbor. The old house was about to fall down but it had somehow withstood the storm. The old man got out on the roadway and was walking along. He was so deaf he could hardly hear. He saw everybody searching in the water but when someone said something to him he would cup his hand to his ear and say, “Eh”? Not being able to understand them. Finally, looking around, he asked, “What in the hell is going on?” They shouted, “We had a hurricane, where are you going?” He replied, “I’m going down to the post office to see if I got some mail”. They told him, “There ain’t no post office, it’s gone. Miss Maude Wingfield’s store and post office built out in the lake at Ritta had been blown away. Even in face of such great tragedy there was the momentary relief of the comic. Mrs. Hughes, the school teacher, and her little boy were among those who were lost. Mr. Hughes held on to his wife and little boy in one of the cypress trees out here along the old riverbed. They drowned in his arms. The wind and the water were just too rough. He hung on to them and knew exactly where they were when it was over and got them out first. They were the first bodies to be taken to the boathouse. We found all of our family on Tuesday. Uncle Mays and Aunt Berta were found up at Mr. Bishop’s farm but even though we looked we never did find their son and daughter. All the bodies were taken to the boathouse of the Bolles Hotel. On Wednesday they were wrapped in sheets and put in pine coffins that the people from Clewiston and that area had sent in by boats. All the dead were positively identified and their names put on the pine boxes. All of our family and everybody they had identified were taken to Clewiston on a large seine boat On Wednesday night, the seine boat broke loose from the tug that was pulling it. It drifted into rocky reef, which is just out of Clewiston. The boat was loaded with people and had to go on. We got to Clewiston and my daddy found a fisherman there who had his motorboat running and they went out and got the seine boat with the bodies on it and towed it in. The pine coffins were then taken from Clewiston by trucks to Ortona Locks under the supervision of Ed Frierson and Glenn Williams who lived at Liberty Point. The cemetery was on the other side of Moore Haven. We buried the dead that night at 12:00 o’clock Later on my daddy went back and had cypress wood crosses erected. The name of each person was painted on with white paint. Daddy always kept the place clean and the markers kept up. In 1943 I put permanent markers there. We came back to Clewiston that night and my dad left me to spend the night with Dean Duff, at his house on the ridge. My daddy came back to Lake Harbor and searched some more for my uncle’s little boy and girl but he couldn’t find them. He tried to salvage and save anything of ours that he could find. He came back the next day. The day after that my mother’s brother (Joseph Loper) came in from Davie, Florida and my dad’s brother from Belle Glade and we went with them to Hollywood. We met my aunt Edna Drawdy, my father’s sister, from Madison, who had come down before the hurricane to visit Rufus Thomas in Hollywood. They made a decision to send me back to Madison with Aunt Edna to go to school. My daddy returned to Sebring farm and Ritta Island to salvage what he could and start farming again. I stayed in Madison and went to school until about a month before school was out. My daddy wrote and said he needed me to help him on Ritta to finish up a tomato crop he had to harvest. My Aunt bought me a ticket and put me on the train to West Palm Beach. My daddy picked me up there and I came back to Lake Harbor and helped him finish up what little farming he had to do and I went back to Madison the following years and came home every summer, I graduated from Madison High School in 1935. I went to the University of Florida for three years. I had to drop out to help my Daddy on the farm and never did return to the University. (Mutt) Thomas married Virginia, in 1941 in Allapatta, and they went to Lake Harbor where she taught school. The Lake Harbor hurricane dead who were found and identified were buried in the Ortona cemetery. They were: Susan L. Thomas -1895-1928 Wilbur E. Thomas-1917-1928 Mary Sue Thomas-1919-1928 John Bate Thomas-1925-1928 Annie Clair Thomas-1921-1928 Edna Louise Thomas-1927-1928 Richard H. Thomas-1887-1928 Berta S. Thomas McCranie -1928 Karl Hararectch-September 16, 1928 Carrie Hall-September 16,1928 Virgil S. Boots-September 16, 1928 Madison Hall-1916-1928 William H. Boots-Sept. 16, 1928 Permanent headstones erected by C. A. “Mutt” Thomas in 1947 in memory of members of his family and others that lost their lives in the 1928 Hurricane. (“Mutt” Thomas is the nephew of Melvin Johnson, husband of Ovieda Hardin Johnson of Pompano Beach. Oviedas’ Family, The Hardins, were pioneers of Pompano, being among the first settlers in this area. ) Their permission given for the printing of this story. bg SOURCES Thomas, C. A. “Mutt” and Virginia, conversations and tape recordings 1977, 1978 Boots, Vernie A Tape recording July 1977