Chapter Fifteen
The following feature item appeared in the “ACCENT” section of the Tampa Tribune. It very accurately describes the activities in Sebring as it was written immediately following the tragic events.
The Tribune editor, Terry Plumb, graciously gave his permission for reprinting in the Bulletin.
The Day Moore Haven Disappeared
On September 19, 1926, one of the most devastating hurricanes ever to hit the United States swept through south Florida, causing the rupture of dikes along Lake Okeechobee. More than 150 were killed in the town of Moore Haven alone. A Sebring woman, Mrs. Lena Marchand, remembers the disaster well; she was a relief volunteer assisting the hundreds of refugees. Following is a remarkable letter, written to her parents describing the sights she witnessed. It appeared in The Kenesaw (Nebraska) Press less than a month after the hurricane.
BY LENA MARCHAND
Sebring. Fla., Oct. 13.-
Dear mother and father: At last I have come to a place where possibly I can collect my thoughts enough to tell you something of the storm and the relief work in Sebring. During our busy time, there was no time for me to read the papers, and I do not know about any of the flooded area accept Moore Haven, but it would seem almost impossible to exaggerate the description, the disaster was so great. One of our state doctors who has been at work in that field says it was the most horrible catastrophe he had ever witnessed.
To go back to the storm now- on Saturday, September 19th, the wind blew hard all day. Sometimes it looked like the pine trees near us would go down, it rained continuously all day, and by spells the rain came in torrents. It blew into the houses, and many which had never leaked had wet plaster.
Few people ventured out on Saturday but we were in need of groceries and went to town about noon to get them. The storm increased by the middle of the afternoon and continued until about midnight. Sunday morning was quiet, the sky had a peculiar cast, and broken shrubbery and limbs of trees scattered around were about all the evidence we saw of the storm, as the water had soaked away.
In our Sebring paper, though, were accounts of the storm and one article headed “Inestimable damage done to property here, plate glass windows broken, houses unroofed.”
Because of high winds being unusual in this section, many people were wrought up and frightened, but the real damage done here was small. Repairs were soon made and the damage forgotten.
In the same issue, an account was given of the storm at Moore Haven, which lies south of us about 60 miles, on Lake Okeechobee. It seems that three men had managed to get out of there ahead of the water on Saturday. They reported that water was several feet deep in the largest hotel and that the hotel was the highest point in town. An appeal for help was made and also a statement that the Sebring fire department had a special train made up here, and had taken motorboats by which they hoped to reach Moore Haven.
Part of the railroad was washed away, as they had anticipated, and even though ties were washed from under the rails in places, they managed to get over them with hand cars for some distance, which brought them to a point about six miles from Moore Haven. Here the boats were shoved into the water, and the trip was begun. The waters were still rough. It was the tidal wave, which caused the lake to back up on the land, that made the havoc.
When our men reached Moore Haven, they found several other boats there engaged in rescue work. Trees are not plentiful there, and in almost every tree were perched men, women and children. On house tops, floating on the lake on boards, on pieces of furniture and on all sorts of floating articles were people almost exhausted from fatigue, hunger and exposure but still clinging and hoping to be rescued.
It was after noon sometime when the first company of refugees were loaded into boats and as fast as boats arrived (several trains were sent that day) the people were transported to this little station where they were served with hot coffee and sandwiches, then taken on hand cars or flat cars which were pushed by men, to the place were they could be put on a train. The first company reached Sebring about 9:30 Sunday night.
The ladies had gathered up all the clothing and blankets that could be procured and we had made hundreds of sandwiches which we had ready to serve with coffee. Mr. Sebring opened the doors of the Nancesowee Hotel and back to the long tables in the dining room the people were taken providing they did not need to stop at the first aid station in the lobby first. It was so terrible. I see it all again and the things we witnessed almost ate our hearts out those - first few days.
Some had been picked up in nightclothes; others had clothing torn, and these were supplied with overalls when they reached land. Now, if you can picture a row of automobiles lining up in front of the Nancesowee, and from them emerging women and children, wet through due to the motor trip in the rain, in addition to their former soaking, clothing smudged with crude oil which came from huge tanks which burst and spewed out their contents on the water, skin grimed with oil and burned by the morning sun as it beat upon them in the trees and worse than all that, the ghostly look upon their faces; if you can picture this, you can have but a faint idea of what we women of Sebring experienced.
At the first table was one woman who seemed to be looking off into space. One of our ladies insisted that she eat something so that she could get dry clothing. She could not eat, but in a faraway voice replied, “If I knew that the bodies of my children could be found, I could eat.”
She told of how she and her husband happened to be in one room in the house and the five children in another when the house divided and the children were swept away and drowned. (The father stayed in Moore Haven one week longer searching for the children, but only two were recovered.)
Another grief-stricken mother told of how she had managed to get her four children out on top of the roof and kept them there all night, but she became so exhausted in the morning that when she relaxed her grip, one rolled off and drowned.
Another told of how she was marooned on a huge rock, a part of a wall. She had four little ones with her. There was just room for them standing, and several times during the night when sleep overcame a little fellow, she had to stoop over and pull one or the other out of the water.
An old lady 66-years-old, who lived on an island, was forced to climb a tree for safety. She told me she was there five days and nights without food. The water even reached to her knees in the trees, and, she said, at one time she was almost knocked down by the force with which a corpse hit her. A rabbit took refuge on her shoulder for hours.
I could write page after page of these dreadful experiences, but it would only cause you to suffer and it brings back those things which were almost too much for some of us.
Going back to the rescue work, I want to tell you that for seven or eight days, people were being brought in. Some had been picked up on little islands; others had drifted out on the prairie. Some parties were brought here who were found twenty miles from home.
It was necessary for each hotel to open its doors, and many were sheltered in private homes. The meals were all served at the Nancesowee, and they were good, nourishing foods, well prepared. The Sebring women had charge of the dining room for about 10 days, and then the Moore Haven women organized to take over the work. A chef was employed, and some colored helpers in the kitchen, after the first day or two. Supplies of food and clothing were sent in from different towns. The Sebring Chamber of Commerce had everything well organized when the Red Cross came in. The Red Cross took over the responsibility officially October 5.
Doctors and nurses came to our aid, and everything possible was done to alleviate the suffering of the unfortunate people. The sympathy given them helped them in a measure to forget their grief for the time being. A remarkable thing about it was that no epidemic and very few cases of serious illness resulted from the exposure, etc. So far, there has been but one death among those brought here. This lady had been an invalid for some time, and due to exhaustion and exposure, complications set in and death was the result.
By Monday, which ended the third week of their stay in the hotels, the remaining people were placed in tents by-the Red Cross. A week prior to this time, some had already been established in apartments and tents, the Red Cross paying the rent-for one month.
It is estimated that for several days Sebring cared for about 1,500 white and colored. Free transportation was furnished by the railroads and many left to be with relatives elsewhere, and many others went where they found employment.
At present, there are about 300 whites left in Sebring - the Red Cross distributes to those in outlying districts the same as to those in Sebring.
Some will never go back to Moore Haven, but some are anxious to go back. A day or two ago, the water was still knee-deep in Moore Haven streets. The people of Moore Haven declare that had the dikes been opened so that the water could have gone out gradually when the lake began to rise, the disaster would have been averted; it would have flowed over a larger territory, and never have reached the depth it did.
The state has promised to rebuild roads but cannot do so until water recedes. The ACL is running trains into Moore Haven now, and for several days flat cars loaded with automobiles, or remains of automobiles, have been coming into Sebring. No one is permitted to go into Moore Haven to salvage his goods unless he has had typhoid inoculations.
Many bodies were never found, and many could not be identified. The dead were thought to number about 300.
I began helping at the hotel Saturday evening, September 19, and for three days helped any place I was needed. Then they gave me the information desk, which I kept until the night of October 7. These have been busy times, and there were but a few people in Sebring who didn’t help some way or another.
Love to all,
Lena Marchand.
Editor’s note; Besides being the author of this gripping description of the 1926 disaster, Mrs. Marchand’s personal history could serve as the outline for an American history text. She was born to Lewis and Mary Liveringhouse in Goshen, Ind., October 24, 1889. Two weeks later, her mother and she joined her father in Portland, Ore., where he was a troubleshooter and assembly man for the McCormick Implement Company, supplier of machinery to the wheat farms in the north central states.
On a visit to relatives, the Liveringhouses were isolated in Nebraska by the Panic of 1893 which wiped out their savings. Lena attended high school, earned a teacher’s certificate, and married a young Frenchman named Alfred Marchand.
Two successive droughts discouraged the young farm family, and Alfred Marchand jumped at a chance to visit Florida when the Bowles Jennings Land Company of Jacksonville sent agents through the Midwest, describing holdings in Clay, Putnam and St. Johns counties.
Alfred and a brother-in-law took an excursion train from Kansas City to Jacksonville. They were taken to Hastings and Palatka to visit Irish potato farms. They later purchased land in Middleburg, between the forks of Black Creek, where they and several other families hoped to raise potatoes.
Within two years, all but one other family gave up the venture. The Marchand’s moved to Sebring in 1921 because of health reasons. Mrs. Marchand attended the University of Florida and Lakeland Southern College, but was out of school during the 1926 hurricane. Mr. Marchand died in 1949 of a heart attack.
The following article by Gene Plowden appeared in the Tallahassee Democrat on Sunday, September 18th, 1966
Moore Haven Still Remembers The Awful Hurricane Of ‘26
Forty years ago today, one of the most devastating hurricanes ever to hit Florida smashed this community, drowning nearly half its 900 inhabitants. The 1926 storm piled ocean-going vessels in the streets of Miami, caused $ 111,775,000 damage and killed more than 100. After battering Miami, the hurricane, with winds up to perhaps 150 miles an hour, barreled across the sawgrass to Moore Haven, 85 air miles to the northwest, where it took a frightful toll.
“We had about 900 people in the town then, and lost half of then,,” said “Uncle Joe” Peeples, who represented Glades County in the State Legislature for many years.
The land had flooded for several summers before the state built a levee along the southern end of Lake Okeechobee, 47 miles from west of Moore Haven to Bacom Point on the east. It was 20 to 40 feet wide at the base and five to nine feet high, of muck and sand. In the dull gray dawn, storm winds built up to a mighty crescendo and pounding waves melted the dike like chocolate, Water gushed through the town in a wall 10 to 15 feet high.
Mrs. Elsie Nall had finished school the previous spring and was a teacher in Moore Haven High. “We had a teacher’s reception at the school Friday night and got word that the storm was expected to hit us with winds up to 100 miles an hour,” she recalls. “They blew the siren at the light plant all night to warn the people. The lake had been high for two or three years and the water came in like a tidal wave when the dike broke about 7 or 8 o’clock Saturday morning.
“I took my sister’s two children up to the attic and we saw the Methodist Church float by. We could bear the bedroom furniture banging against the ceiling.”
Mrs. Rinda Daniel, postmistress at Moore Haven for many years, was at home with her two children, Mae, 16, and Broward, 9, when the dike broke 100 yards from the house. Her husband, W. E. Daniel, now 86, had gone across the road early that morning to look after his milk cow and heifer. When the dike broke, Daniel saved himself by clinging all day to the roots of a giant cypress tree that had been uprooted.
“The children and I got up on the colonnade between the living and dining rooms,” Mrs. Daniel recalled. “The piano was bouncing around in the living room like a rubber ball, but all the other furniture was washed away, even the wallpaper. Everything went out of my kitchen except the sink and a small safe we’d brought from the post office. A mattress floated in the kitchen, and a cottonmouth moccasin was lying on it.
“When my husband got home from across the road about dark, we were still on the colonnade and the four of us stayed there all night. The boy slept some but the others stayed awake so we wouldn’t fall off and drown.”
Mrs. Horace Howell, wife of the city marshal, tied herself and her five children to a mattress and tried to keep them afloat. As the children slipped off and drowned, she cut them loose one by one, to lighten the burden.
Wallace Stevens, a successful Okeechobee cattleman, was 100 miles away at Bartow at the time. “I think we got the word Sunday,” he recalls. “I went right in, and had to wade the last couple of miles. I asked what I could do to help. They gave me a boat and told me to look for bodies. The first I found were those of a mother clasping a year old boy in her arms.”
The home of Miss Bertha Gram, one of those that stood, was used as a temporary morgue while she made coffee for rescue workers. She remembers that James Couse swam across the street with a rope, anchored it to the top of the theater and rescued people who had squeezed into the projection booth.
The nearest cemetery was at Ortona, a crossroads 18 miles to the west. In some instances, relatives came in to claim bodies and took them out for burial. Some bodies were found three and four years later and some were never found.
Stevens said towns to the north were quick to offer aid, and many bodies were sent to Arcadia, Bartow, Sebring, Haines City, Lakeland, St. Cloud and Kissimmee for burial.
(This article is reprinted from Bulletin Number Eleven
Sebring Historical Society, October 1972. Pages 370-378.)