The City of Pahokee, The 1928 Hurricane, The Bahamas… and Dorian

Originally published on September 4, 2019

Migrant Vegetable Picker’s and Packing House Worker’s Quarters, Pahokee Hotel, near Belle Glade, Florida

This past Sunday on the way to Clewiston, I found myself thinking about the Old Pahokee High School — listed on the National Register of Historic places in 1996 — which housed hundreds of residents during the 1928 hurricane that made landfall near West Palm Beach on September 16, 1928.

It remains, by National Hurricane Center estimates, the second-deadliest hurricane to hit the mainland United States, exceeded only by the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. It was the fourth-strongest hurricane ever to hit Florida, tearing “across the Everglades to giant, shallow Lake Okeechobee, where thousands of migrant workers were harvesting fall crops,” writes National Geographic. Many of the bodies of the migrant workers were washed into the Everglades and never recovered.

Following the 1928 Hurricane — naming of US storms began in 1953 — the majority of the Caucasian bodies were identified and buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in West Palm Beach. Those of African Americans and Bahamians were laid in a…