Most powerful hurricane in US history was a nameless storm that rocked Florida on Labor Day 1935

MELBOURNE, Fla. – As Labor Day weekend approaches, Floridians are closely monitoring Hurricane Dorian, which could hit the Sunshine State early Monday as a Category 4 hurricane.

Folks in 1935, before weather satellites, Doppler radar, the internet and even television, didn't have that option.

And on Labor Day that year, which also fell on Sept. 2, some 500 people lost their lives as the most powerful hurricane ever to make landfall in the United States ripped part of the Upper Florida Keys to shreds.

That was about half of the population that lived in the area at the time.

The storm was so powerful that it knocked a train – sent to evacuate some 400 World War I veterans working in the area – off the tracks. The unnamed storm – hurricanes didn't get names until 1950 – had sustained winds of 185 mph with gusts of 200 mph.

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Nearly every building on Upper Matecumbe Key was destroyed or mostly destroyed.

Most of those who died drowned in storm surge estimated at 18-20 feet above sea level. Bodies continued to be discovered weeks after the storm passed. One woman was blown over 40 miles of open water to Cape Sable at the southern tip of the Everglades. When she was discovered, she was still clutching the body of her young son.

Perhaps half of those killed were World War I veterans employed be the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, a Depression-era agency designed to provide work for the unemployed. They were in the Keys to help build the Overseas Highway to Key West. They were paid $30 a month, plus room and board.

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At the time, a two-lane road from Miami extended as far south as Lower Matecumbe Key. A second stretch went from No Name Key down to Key West. But motorists had to ride a ferry for the 41-mile stretch from Lower Matecumbe to No Name Key.

In 1935, tracking storms was a haphazard operation, with reports from ships at sea being the main source of hurricane information, said Brad Bertelli, curator at the Keys History & Discovery Center in Islamorada.

The first signs of a developing storm were noticed east of the Bahamas on Wednesday Aug. 28. The U.S. Weather Bureau, the predecessor of the National Weather Service, issued its first storm advisory Saturday, Aug. 31, just two days before the storm made landfall.

The Weather Bureau predicted the storm would make landfall in Cuba on Labor Day.

Locals, mostly Key lime farmers, who had experience with hurricanes, though, weren't so sure. As they watched the barometer fall, many evacuated north to the Miami area, Bertelli said. Had they not done so, the death toll would have been even higher.

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"Locals had weathered storms before," Bertelli said. "But nothing like this."

But for the most part, the men working on the road, had no experience with hurricanes of any intensity. Locals warned of the impending doom, but the road workers, many of them combat veterans, replied along the lines of "I've faced machine gun fire, nothing scares me," Bertelli said.

Even if they had heeded the warning, though, the veterans would have had no way of evacuating. Hurricane plans called for a train to be sent down from Miami to pick up the workers and carry them to safety. But no effort was made over the weekend to send the train down.

Given that it was a holiday weekend, some of the workers had already made their way to Key West or Miami to celebrate.

Those who remained, though, were left in ramshackle shelters just off the beach.

"Those poor guys were sitting in work camps basically at sea level in tents and clapboard shacks," Bertelli said.

The call for the evacuation train was finally made on the afternoon of Labor Day. By the time it left the mainland and entered the Keys, waves were already washing over the tracks. A series of incidents including an open drawbridge and a steel cable snagging the train delayed its progress.

The train finally rolled into Islamorada shortly after 8 p.m., just as the storm was approaching peak intensity. The storm pushed the rail cars from the track, leaving only the locomotive upright.

Meanwhile, to the south in Matecumbe, the storm was killing people in a variety of ways. Some were speared by flying lumber, Willie Drye wrote in "Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935." Others were brained by flying coconuts. Many were simply washed out to sea by the storm surge.

As powerful as the storm was, it was also relatively compact, leaving the lower Keys and the southern portion of the mainland unscathed. But the storm laid waste to nearly everything in its path from just south of Key Largo down to Marathon.

"Upper Matecumbe was the center of the community" Bertelli said. "And pretty much every house and building was destroyed and mostly destroyed."

The storm surge undermined the rail beds and twisted the tracks of Henry Flagler's Florida East Coast rail line, which first connected Key West to the mainland in 1912. The section of the railway through the Keys never reopened.

Today a memorial to those killed in the storm stands along U.S. 1 near mile marker 82 in Islamorada. Some 4,000 people attended the unveiling in 1937.

A plaque at the memorial simply reads: Dedicated to the memory of the civilians and war veterans whose lives were lost in the hurricane of September Second 1935.

Follow John McCarthy on Twitter: @JournalistJohnM

This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Hurricane history as Dorian looms: Most powerful Florida storm in 1935