Note: The following comes from a 2017 article for the News-Press by Cynthia Williams.
During the post-World War I Florida real estate boom of the 1920s, the population of Fort Myers increased six times over. One of the hopeful new arrivals was my grandmother, Elva Davis Williams. She was 32 and single, with three sons to support. She found a job with an attorney and when school let out back home in Fayetteville, Tennessee, her father put 14-year-old Davis and the 9-year-old twins, Bill and Berry, on a train for Florida. They rolled into the beautiful new Atlantic Coast Line railway station on Jackson Street in Fort Myers in June 1925.
Some 40 years later, Berry wrote about his childhood in a book titled, “The Hickory Tree.” The following excerpts from the chapter, “The Florida Fling,” show us Fort Myers in 1925, as well as the killer hurricane of 1926, from the point of view of the 10-year-old boy who was my father.
‘The Florida Fling’
“In no time at all, Mother and we three boys were settled in a three-room, stucco house on Palm Beach Boulevard, at Van Buren Street. The house, set in the middle of a recently cleared palmetto patch, must have been a subdivision sales office. It was that small.
“We three boys slept in the largest of the three rooms, Davis and Bill on a double bed, I on an army cot with a quilt for a mattress. There was no running water except what dribbled from the rainwater tank into the kitchen sink.
“Palm Beach Boulevard had just been asphalted out as far as the newest subdivision, Russell Park. “A half mile beyond Billy’s Creek was a new picture show called the East Fort Myers Theater. It was one of the two open-air theaters in Fort Myers, the other being downtown near the Lee County Bank. “After Bill and I got a job selling newspapers, we saved enough money to go to the best picture show in town, the Arcade Theater. Shows there cost 15 cents.”
Killer hurricane
Elva and her sons toughed it out in Fort Myers for seven months, until Elva found a better job in Sarasota. Nine months later, the killer hurricane of 1926 struck. Storm-tracking technology as we know it did not yet exist, so on Sept. 18, while this category 4 hurricane swept over Miami and churned on toward the west coast, the twins were enjoying “Son of the Sheik” at the movies.
When they stepped out of the movie theater, the wind almost knocked them down. They ran for home. In less than an hour the hurricane struck.
“The safest place Miss Elva could think of for us was under the bed, so under the bed Davis, Bill and I went. As we lay there, we could hear the timbers creak in the house. In one terrific gust of wind, the upper part of the house almost parted from the lower half. We could see the timbers rise, then settle back again. We were scared and made no attempt to hide it.
“For almost two hours the wind and rain howled, then seemed to die away. We were in the eye of the storm; in about 20 minutes the wind returned, and for almost an hour more the hurricane raged.
“When we thought it safe to go outside, we went out to see the damage. The little frame house next door was gone. All electricity was off, the telephone lines were down, and hundreds of trees were uprooted. Within the next few days, we found that whole sections of town had been flooded. Many families were having to get groceries from the top shelves of stores by rowboat. Hundreds of people had been drowned at Lake Okeechobee when the lake overflowed.
“The Florida bubble had burst and almost drowned the state. Optimistic businessmen predicted that it would pass and Florida would boom again. Mother didn’t doubt that Florida would rise again, but she determined that would do it without her and her three children. She wrote her father and told him that we were coming home.”
This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: From the Archives: Fort Myers in 1925 and the hurricane of ’26
Reporting by Fort Myers News-Press / Fort Myers News-Press
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