Labor Day hurricane of 1935

Labor Day hurricane of 1935, one of the most powerful hurricanes to make landfall in the United States. It struck Florida and lasted for 10 days—from September 1 to September 10, 1935—with winds reaching 296 km (184 miles) per hour and a storm surge of about 6 m (20 feet). More than 400 people died. It was the first known category 5 hurricane to strike the contiguous United States, and until 1988 it was the most intense Atlantic hurricane as measured by barometric pressure.

On August 31, a tropical depression formed in the southeastern Bahamas, and it reached hurricane intensity the following day. It then intensified rapidly and turned toward the Florida Keys, making landfall on the afternoon of September 2, which was Labor Day, near Long Key. Throughout the night, the hurricane ripped through Florida’s Upper Keys with extraordinary ferocity, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. Almost every building over a distance of some 40 mi (64 km) between Key Largo and Marathon was torn up, while a wall of water raced in from the south, flooding everything in its path.

By the time Leonard Povey, an aviator living in Cuba, flew his small plane to verify the hurricane’s path (the first time a plane was used for such a purpose) and discovered that the storm was heading toward the Florida Keys and not Cuba, where it was thought to be going, it was too late for effective evacuation orders. There were three camps of World War I veterans on Windley Key and Lower Matecumbe Key, where they were working on the building of the Overseas Highway, employed by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. These veterans had once been part of the Bonus Army. At 2:00 PM, a train to evacuate the workers was requested, and the train left Miami at 4:25. When it at last arrived in Upper Matecumbe Key, it was swept off the track by the storm surge, which also destroyed much of the train track itself. The flimsy huts of the relief work camps were pulverized, with around 260 fatalities. The writer Ernest Hemingway, who was living in Key West and participated in rescue efforts, was outraged by the loss of life in the work camps and published an essay, “Who Murdered the Vets?” accusing the government of abandoning its responsibility to care for the war veterans.

The storm later curved northward and then inland, crossing the Gulf Coast on September 4 and hitting Cedar Key, damaging docks and fishing boats and killing three people. Weakening into a tropical storm, it then howled into Georgia and across the Carolinas on September 5, causing yet more damage, before regaining and then losing intensity as it blew back into the Atlantic Ocean. The storm was marked by a memorial, dedicated in 1937, in Islamorada on Upper Matecumbe Key.