The Miami Herald from Miami, Florida • 122

2-BR THE MIAMI HERALD Saturday Sept 2 1978 Sljc iHiami Hcralt Broward News Section CAROL WEBER Editor DOUG CLIFTON Managing Editor FORT LAUDERDALE OFFICE 1 520 Sunrise Blvd News-Advertising: 462-1 550 Fort Lauderdale 33304 Circulation: 462-3000 HOLLYWOOD OFFICE 407 21st Ave News-Advertising: 923-8446 Hollywood 33020 Circulation: 462-3000 MAILING ADDRESS: PO BOX 14638 FORT LAUDERDALE 33302 First Residents Ate Snakes and Shellfish -The Large Unique Limestone Key West Resembles county librur records indicate that the Owners of Limestone 6 Rock SUSAN SACHS Miami Herald Bureau a Samleaslle home uas constructed in 1904 House About 2000 BC first residents might have dined on a meal of snake or shellfish The 1 meal probably lacked vegetables though '-1 Scholars reconstructing the life of the first settlers have been able to draw several conclu- Jions about the lifestyle of the In- -dians who first lived here i The first South Florida Indians Apparently migrated east and south from the west coast of the state i although a minority of archaeolo- gists believe they may have come from the Antilles They were forced to move by more powerful groups or were drawn to newlands by dreams of an easier life ''I IF IT WERE the latter they were following a false trail The 3and they came to was in the Jvords of Dr William Sears former chairman of the Department of Anthropology at Florida Atlantic University an area for human There was little mangrove with jts wealth of shellfish Except for the coastal sand ridge the area -was generally swampy Game was Scarce and scattered as were wild plants There was no metal to be Ifound and no stone harder than limestone f- Fortunately for the Indians the area while more hostile than their previous home was similar enough-'so that the skills they brougt with Them would stand them in good stead Take Aged Structure for Granite The elder Harrison is listed as the paster of the First United Methodist Church from 1904 to 1907 HERRICK RECALLS stories from her family that women from a Presbyterian church in Key West used to use one room of the eight-room structure as a tea room When she and her husband moved in they cut two extra windows in the downstairs portion of the house They discovered the concrete partition walls in the house were at least 18-inches thick A cistern had been built under the house and still exists although Herrick says she never used the water from it used in the structure keeps the downstairs part of the house delightfully cool in the summer and warm in the winter REALLY MISS she sighs from the living room of her new house next door really prefer old houses to new The Herricks bought the house at the corner of Reynolds and South Streets when they were newlyweds Records in the Monroe County library and own recollections date its construction to 1904 when the Rev A Harrison and his sons built it themselves One son Willy ran a photography studio in the ground floor Besides serving as food shellfish Europeans visited only occasion-provided tools weapons utensils ally during the next two centuries -and ornaments The shells were But the few visits they did pay I fashioned into pounders scrapers produced a silent killer: disease -axes picks arrowheads hatchet Disease had done in two centu-! heads awls ladels spoons and ries what a hard life do in 'pendants 35 trim the Indian population Three 1947 Storms Produced Record Rainfall i JOHN JEWELL Circulation Manager HERB MOLONEY Advertising Manager SHARK TEETH provided the sharpest cutting edges and shark vertebrae were worn as ornaments The sharks which were lured into tidal pools at high tides and blu-geoned to death after the outgoing tide trapped them also provided a lot of meat as did sea turtles Beside snake the inland game included bear deer panther wildcat and rabbit Plant foods apparently did not become significant in the diet until after 1000 AD Their shelters apparently were huts similar to the Seminole chick-ee Their pottery progressed over the centuries from a plain ware through several simple designs to the check on which a design was impressed with a paddle Evidence of their religious system is scant although several ceremonial burials have been found the earlist dated to about 600 AD As with most pre-agricultural and pre-industrial people the Indians of South Florida had a culture one which was based on the environment and which evolved slowly ALL THAT' changed in 1567 when the Spanish arrived The mission established on Biscayne Bay that year to Christianize the In--dians 'and to prevent them from preying on shipwrecks was abandoned several years later when it became evident that the natives to whom the Spanish gave the name Tequesta lacked interest in the' Spanish project reached hurricane intensity As the gray day began branches flew and trees fell Debris was driven into electrical lines tearing them down By 7 am Broward was without power Some 4700 persons had fled to Red Cross hurricane shelters in the courthouse and other strong buildings but thousands more remained in their homes winds licked roofs off some reported Herald columnist Jack Bell boards and tin and business signs were picked up and went hurtling along the street crashing into windows and parked cars Awnings which careless owners had left up were whipped asunder and blown away or through the glass windows of the places they had shaded Some merchants with too little knowledge of the power of the wind stood helplessly as their imperfect protection was jerked away Watchers in hotels and stores stood in awe as the force of the wind sucked windows outward glass crashing to the street blinds and shutters sucked outward to whip wildly until they were whisked Structurally most Broward buildings were ready for the blow After the 1926 hurricane which blew much of Hollywood off the map and killed at leasr 50 persons in Broward the South Florida Building Code was adopted As a result newer buildings had solid foundations to prevent the wind from flipping them over and tiedowns to prevent the roofs from being lifted off The people however were not as well prepared Many of those who moved south during the people around to see The keeper of the House of Refuge for shipwrecked sailors located about where Bahia Mar now is often allowed this building to be used as a bathhouse Thus it was in the early days of the century but not for long DC Las Olas-by-the-Sea subdivision was begun in 1914 When Broward County was created in 1915 one of the new first acts was to float a bond issue to finance extension of Las Olas Boulevard to the ocean The bridge and causeway were completed in 1917 Now the bathers no longer would need to either take a boat or go south to Dania where there was a bridge THE SWAMP remained however It was not until the booming and the development of the finger islands technique of dredging that it became feasible to drain it The Herricks also remodeled the upstairs changing the pine floors AS HER HUSBAND an engineer worked on the place he would joke that a straight wall or square joint in the according to Herrick The Rock House also contains a skylight in the cylindrical roof a working fireplace and wide spacious rooms uninterupted by hallways Two apartments have been made in the house since Herrick and her husband moved to a newer rock house next door in 1960 we cleared the lot next to the house we found enough of the stones to build another says Homer son North New River Canal just before the storm to keep floodwaters away from Fort Lauderdale was removed after it turned them into Davie instead In Hollywood the beach and lakes were under water Fort downtown was barricaded for three days Probably the most graphic memory for many Broward youngsters was the typhoid-fever shots that were given in all the schools and at Red Cross stations To those involved in agriculture however the memories are more grim crops had sustained $165 million in damage in other words they were for all practical purposes ruined Clearly something had to be done In April 1948 the Army Corps of Engineers gave Congress a comprehensive plan to place dikes around Lake Okeechobee and around other areas not valuable for farming and grazing turning them into secondary reservoirs These storage areas along with an extensive system of canals would in theory provide an adequate but not excessive amount of water for crops in dry and wet years maintain a water table high enough to prevent soil subsidence and salt-water intrusion provide water for municipalities perhaps temper the climate and furnish recreational facilities The plan was approved and the Central and Southern Florida Flood Control Distrit was created to carry it out By SUSAN SACHS Herald Stall Writer known in Key West as the but few people know much more about it Even the family that lived there for 27 years knows little more than the barest details Built of slabs of limestone the large house with its columns and verandas arches and curves resembles a sandcastle built by an ingenious child Not unlike wet sand dribbled on the beach the pieces of jagged rock were piled into delicate-looking columns and held with mortar Dorothy Herrick who with her husband Homer has owned the house since 1933 says the rock boom went back north after the great storm to be replaced by those who were sent to Broward for military training during World War II and returned with their families after the war These new Floridians had no first-hand knowledge of hurricanes inasmuch as Broward's last strong one had been in 1935 They realize that atmospheric pressure drops sharply during a hurricane and that windows will be blown out unless at least one is kept open At noon the world suddenly became calm Birds began to sing and the sun almost broke through the clouds The rain stopped Fort Lauderdale had entered the the calm center around which a hurricane revolves in a counter-clockwise direction Hurricane-hunters had reported the proceeding Saturday that the storm had a double eye but by the time it reached Florida there was just a single large one The eye also is the area of lowest pressure Mrs Paul Dooley at the Basin and Dry Dock west of Fort Lauderdale reported a reading of 2830 inches of mercury (normal is near 30) and Coast Guard Base Six located where Bahia Mar now is listed 2808 About 1 pm the eye past Mrs wind gauge which had been sitting calm for almost two hours after recording 80 mph winds in the morning suddenly-jumped to 120 This time with the center of the storm to the west the winds were from the south rather than the north As they mounted the water rose even higher New River over- sending brine into some of great hurri-cane of Sept 17 this one in 1947 killed no one Although it may -have been as strong as the legendary 1926 storm its legacy was -one of water rather than wind It came on top of a wetter-than-nctrmal summer and was followed by a tropical storm and a milder hurricane both extremely wet When all had passed Broward had received more than 100 inches of rain twice its annual average and most of the county was beneath massive sheets of water that covered as much as five million acres south of Lake Okeechobee To this day the extent of the inundation in 1947 is used as a bench mark in detemining the susceptibility of Broward lands to flooding The disaster also gave impetus for creation of the Central and Southern Florida Flood Control District Quite a bit of Broward farm land was under water from heavy summer rains when 1 first Florida hurricane formed in the Atlantic east of Martinique on Sept 9 As it worked its way northwest battering Puerto Rico along the way various portions of the US coast were put on alert By Monday Sept 15 South Florida appeared to be safe The storm apparently would strike much farther north The area from Vero Beach northward to Cape Hatteras was placed on alert for gale winds I Then as hurricanes so often do this storm did the unpredictable It slowed on its forward motion and began turning west By Tuesday night the Florida coast from Miami to Titusville was placed on hurricane warning Through the night the wind steadily -rose By dawn it had meal flood-control works that had been put in by various agencies were ineffective The next week a tropical storm moved inland from the Gulf south of Tampa dumping several inches of rain in the upstate watershed where water comes from Two weeks after that the hardest blow of all fell The Oct 1 1 storm was unusually small in aroa and just barely-reached hurricane status (75 mph winds) But it w-as one of the wettest on record As it cut across South Florida northeastward from Everglades City it dumped 134 inches of water on Miami in only 10 minutes Federal Highway was flooded all the way from Miami to Fort Lauderdale State Road 7 (US441) and all roads to the west of it in Broward were closedTlundreds of autos were stalled and abandoned On Pompano west side the water was waist deep After the storm passed the situation steadily worsened as flood waters from the Everglades worked seaward in some cases tearing out earthworks which had been thrown up after the September storm Sheets of water 20 to 40 miles wide and six inches to 10 feet deep covered much of South Florida Eleven counties w-ere more than half under water and seven others were affected to a lesser extent In Davie 90 percent of the homes were at least partially submerged and cattlemen drove their livestock onto the highways to keep them out of the water A dam which had been placed in the the finest homes in the of Atlantic Boulevard was under four feet of water and whi-tecaps broke on Las Olas Boulevard a mile inland Sail water drowned out the tomatoes in the muckland of eastern Dania Two freighters at Port Everglades were torn from their moorings The houseboat which held studios for radio station WFTL rode out the storm but the transmitter tower didn't By nightfall winds had fallen well below hurricane force as the storm moved westward on a course that would take it past Fort Myers into the Gulf of Mexico 19 In Florida it left some $30 million in damage of which $6 million was in Broward crop loss due to high water In Fort Lauderdale hardest hit of Broward cities 27 homes wre demolished and 400 damaged Three ocean-front homes in Deerfied Beach were destroyed by breakers and beach roads through the county were torn up or buried under piles of sand In all of the Gold Coast however there were only two reported fatalities: a looter shot and killed in Miami and a Lake Worth man electrocuted when he touched a live power line By the time the storm had passed there were few live power lines left In Broward more than 250 poles had been blown down and the entire county was without electicity (Florida Power and Light Co provided a portable generator for Broward General Hospital) Parts of the county still were dark several days later Despite this the largest single problem was flooding The storm had made it clear that the piece Oldtimers Hiked For a Beach Day Cover up Winford Goodwin of Fort Myers getting all that much sun bundled up in his lawn chair on the beach He was out in just his swimsuit for a while but since a sun worshiper from way back he knew when had enough Then he took cover under the covers Once upon a time and not so long ago at that a trip from downtown Fort Lauderdale to the beach involved a walk down a mile of sandy road and a boat trip across another mile of swamp- East Las Olas Boulevard was a one-lane unpaved track that ended at the east end of densely wooded Cooley Hammock about where SE 17th Avenue now crosses Be-yond was a mangrove swamp cutting the mainland off from the narrow sand ridge along the ocean The beachgoer would take a boat either all the way from downtown or from 17th Avenue and tie up on the east side of the Intracoastal Waterway about where the International Swimming Flail of Fame now is BATHING CLOTHES usually were worn underneath street zlothes If not there ware plenty of woods in which to change and few.