Hurricane Monument

Hundreds of World War I veterans were living in federal relief camps on Lower Matecumbe and Windley Key on Labor Day, 1935, working on the road that would become US 1, when the most intense hurricane ever recorded to strike the United States came ashore on top of them. Sustained winds reached 185 miles an hour, and a barometer at Craig Key read 26.35 inches, still the lowest pressure ever recorded at a hurricane landfall in this country. A train sent down from Miami to evacuate the camps lost time on the way and arrived after dark, and the surge caught it at Islamorada, sweeping eleven of its cars off the rails. The locomotive stayed upright on the track. An estimated 423 people died in the Keys that night, 259 of them veterans. The Works Progress Administration built this monument two years later and dedicated it on 14 November 1937 before a crowd of several thousand. It is faced in keystone quarried a few miles up the road at Windley Key, and its frieze, carved for the Florida Division of the Federal Art Project, shows coconut palms bent flat above a breaking wave. The cremated remains of roughly 300 victims, many of them never identified, lie in a crypt beneath a ceramic tile map of the Keys set into the plaza in front of it. The railway never reopened. Florida bought the right of way from the bankrupt company, and the highway the veterans had been building was carried across the railway's own bridges and finished in 1938.