Lake Surprise

Lake Surprise earned its name from the men who walked into it. In 1904 William Krome was surveying a route across Key Largo for Henry Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway when his crew found a shallow body of water that appeared on none of the charts they carried, reachable from Blackwater Sound and Barnes Sound only through obscure tidal creeks. Krome wrote in his diary that it was nearly two miles long by a mile wide, six to eight feet deep over a rock bottom, and not shown on any map or chart. They had no idea of its existence, he added, and it had played havoc with all of his calculations. Nothing else on the whole of Key Largo stood between his survey line and the open water it was aiming for. Filling a causeway across the lake should have been the straightforward part of the job. Instead the fill kept vanishing. The rock bottom Krome had recorded lay beneath a deep layer of unstable peat, and marl dredged from the sea bottom nearby sank into it almost as fast as the barges could place it. Fifteen months of dredging and dumping went into closing a gap a mile wide. The 1935 Labor Day Hurricane destroyed the railway, and the Overseas Highway was rebuilt along its right of way, so for seventy years cars crossed Lake Surprise on that same hard-won embankment. Then, between 2005 and 2008, the state rebuilt this stretch and took the causeway out altogether, carrying US 1 across on more than a mile of bridge so that water could move freely into Florida Bay again. The fill that took fifteen months to hold lasted a century, and was then deliberately removed.