The Hurricane Monument and the Labor Day Storm of 1935

At Mile Marker 81.5 in Islamorada — twenty minutes south of Key Largo — a stone monument stands beside the highway, marking the mass grave of the victims of the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, the most powerful hurricane to make landfall in the United States. The storm hit the Upper Keys on September 2 with sustained winds of 185 mph and a storm surge that put the islands under twenty feet of water, killing more than 400 people — most of them World War I veterans working on a federal road-building project.

The veterans had been sent to the Keys by the Roosevelt administration as part of a work relief program, housed in flimsy camps with no evacuation plan. When the storm bore down, a rescue train was dispatched from Miami, but it arrived too late — the surge swept the tracks, overturned the locomotive, and killed many of the people it was sent to save. The train's wreckage was visible from the highway for years afterward.

Ernest Hemingway, living in Key West at the time, drove up to survey the damage and wrote a furious essay for New Masses magazine: "Who sent nearly a thousand war veterans to live in frame shacks on the Florida Keys in hurricane months?" The essay named names and assigned blame with the directness that only Hemingway and outrage could produce, and the political fallout contributed to improvements in hurricane warning and evacuation that would save lives in future storms.

The monument is modest — a coral-rock obelisk with a simple plaque — and most drivers pass it at fifty-five miles per hour without stopping. But the bones beneath it belong to men who survived the trenches of World War I and died in a labor camp on a sandbar because their government housed them in hurricane country without a plan, and that story is worth the two minutes it takes to pull over and read the plaque and stand in the Keys wind that once carried a storm strong enough to erase an island.