Lake Okeechobee

Lake Okeechobee covers about 730 square miles but averages only about nine feet deep. It is the largest freshwater lake in Florida and one of the largest in the United States, and its name comes from Hitchiti words meaning big water. Before it was diked, it was the heart of the Everglades: in wet seasons it overflowed its southern rim and sent a slow sheet of water south through the sawgrass to Florida Bay. That overflow became a disaster once people farmed the rich muck soils on the south shore. In September 1928 a hurricane drove the lake over its low mud levee and drowned at least 2,500 people around Belle Glade, Pahokee and South Bay, most of them Black farmworkers. It remains one of the deadliest disasters in U.S. history. Zora Neale Hurston wrote the flood into Their Eyes Were Watching God. The federal government answered with the Herbert Hoover Dike, which now rings the lake for about 143 miles. It kept the water in but cut the Everglades off from its source. Excess water is sent instead east and west down the St. Lucie River and the Caloosahatchee, where its nutrients have fed algae blooms along both coasts. The south shore is the country's leading sugarcane region, and Clewiston calls itself America's Sweetest Town. The lake itself is a nationally known bass fishery.