The storm ended the 1928 harvest season on the south shore of Lake Okeechobee.
The flood struck the south-shore economy hard. The muck plain was the most productive agricultural land in Florida, and the crops standing on September 16th did not survive.
The loss of the harvest was the smallest of the agricultural losses.
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The muck itself was damaged.
The Okeechobee muck plain was created by centuries of organic accumulation in the shallow basin south of the lake — centuries of plant material growing and dying and decomposing in the anoxic conditions of the subtropical wetland, building up into a layer of extraordinarily fertile black organic soil that could be ten feet deep in some areas.
The drainage infrastructure — the canals that the state and the agricultural interests had built in the first two decades of the century — had dried this soil and made it cultivable. The drained muck was the agricultural opportunity that had drawn the investment, the infrastructure, the labor, the communities to the south shore.
The flood deposited lake sediment on the muck surface. The lake sediment was mineral, not organic, and it covered the muck in areas near the failed levee sections with a layer of material that altered the agricultural character of the land. In some areas the deposition was significant.
More damaging than the sediment was the saltwater intrusion in the drainage canals. The flood that moved through the levee filled the canals with lake water and reversed their flow toward the coast, pushing into the lower reaches of the canal system the kind of mineral and brackish conditions that the canals had been built to eliminate.
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The agricultural operations that had been in production before the flood faced a landscape that required rehabilitation before it could be returned to cultivation.
The rehabilitation required labor — which was the labor force that had just been decimated and scattered by the flood. The harvest season workers who had survived the flood on the south shore were, in the weeks after September 16th, leaving the south shore. The conditions of their employment — the contract, the advance against wages, the housing in the camps — had been dissolved by the flood. They were free to leave. Many of them left.
The landowners and agricultural companies that had survived the flood found themselves with damaged land, no crop, and no labor force, in a season when the rehabilitation of the land and the preparation for the next planting would require all three.
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The agricultural recovery of the south shore muck plain after the 1928 flood was, by the measure of the agricultural interest, eventual and substantial.
The muck plain was still the most fertile land in Florida. The drainage infrastructure, repaired and extended, still functioned. The capital that had been invested in the south shore did not disappear with the flood; it was damaged and some of it was destroyed, but the infrastructure that made the land valuable remained.
The Archivist noted that the agricultural recovery rose on the same foundation that had produced the disaster: the same labor system, the same geography of exposure, the same unequal relation between landowner, laborer, and crop.
The muck plain was replanted.
The labor came back.
The next harvest was harvested.
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What did not recover in the same way was the specific population of agricultural laborers who had been on the south shore on the night of September 16th, 1928.
Some had died. Some had left and did not return. Some returned to the south shore in subsequent seasons under foremen who had survived and who recruited again from Georgia and Alabama.
The harvest labor force on the south shore in 1929 was not the same people as the harvest labor force in 1928. The work was the same. The conditions were the same. The geography was the same.
The people were different.
The people who had died had been replaced by the same system that had placed them on the muck plain in the first instance.