The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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The 1926 Hurricane Relief Train to Moore Haven

Evidence: corroborated.

On Saturday, 18 September 1926, the category 4 Great Miami Hurricane made landfall across South Florida and drove the waters of Lake Okeechobee over the earthen muck dikes surrounding Moore Haven, submerging the agricultural community under thirteen to fifteen feet of floodwaters and drowning an estimated 150 to 300 residents[star-1926-09-20][rimoldi-ibanez-2020]. While Avon Park suffered only minor structural damage—principally the shifting of its disused 1893 school house off its foundation blocks[maxwell-1976]—Highlands County served as the primary interior staging corridor and humanitarian lifeline for the Lake Okeechobee disaster zone[star-1926-09-20].

Mobilization and Dispatch

Word of the Moore Haven catastrophe reached Highlands County late on Saturday night, 18 September, as commercial telegraph lines failed across South Florida and the first refugee trains from the lower east coast arrived in Avon Park and Sebring over the Atlantic Coast Line (ACL) Railroad[star-1926-09-19][star-1926-09-20]. Within three hours of the initial alert, municipal and civic authorities across Highlands County mobilized an emergency expedition[altvater-fire-dept].

The relief effort was organized cooperatively between the municipal governments of Avon Park and Sebring, the local volunteer fire departments, the American Red Cross, and the county’s two American Legion posts (Highlands Post 69 in Avon Park and Leslie Collier Post 74 in Sebring)[altvater-fire-dept][stephenson-nelson-about]. The Atlantic Coast Line Railroad assembled a special relief train consisting of locomotives, boxcars loaded with provisions, passenger coaches, and flatcars[star-1926-09-20][altvater-fire-dept].

Sebring Fire Chief Allen C. Altvater (1897–1994) took executive charge of the field rescue party[altvater-fire-dept]. Under his direction, Highlands County volunteers loaded the train with:

  1. Marine rescue craft: Rowboats and skiffs equipped with outboard motors gathered from area lakes to navigate submerged streets[altvater-fire-dept].
  2. Medical personnel and supplies: Local physicians, nurses, bandages, clean water, typhoid vaccines, and emergency pharmaceuticals assembled by Avon Park and Sebring civic organizations[star-1926-09-20][altvater-fire-dept].
  3. Mortuary detachment: Licensed embalmers J. Ross Blythe and Jack M. Stephenson—founders of Stephenson & Blythe, which later became Avon Park and Sebring’s enduring Stephenson-Nelson Funeral Home—accompanied by an embalming fluid representative, who boarded with embalming fluids, surgical instruments, rubber sheets, and shipping caskets[stephenson-nelson-about].

On Sunday, 19 September 1926, the Highlands County relief train steamed south down the Atlantic Coast Line’s Haines City Branch corridor through Lake Placid and Palmdale toward Moore Haven, forming one of five regional emergency rail contingents dispatched from central Florida (alongside trains originating from Lakeland, Sanford, Tampa, and Sebring)[star-1926-09-20].

Operations at the Disaster Zone

As the relief train approached the Glades, catastrophic track damage halted rail traffic. Surging lake waters had undermined the railroad roadbed across the marshes, leaving rails twisted and suspended over washed-out muck beds several miles north of Moore Haven[altvater-fire-dept].

The Highlands County rescue detachment offloaded rowboats and wading parties from the stalled train and pushed through floodwaters directly into the inundated town[altvater-fire-dept]. Working in knee-deep water and deep silt under tropical heat, Altvater’s firemen and volunteers rescued stranded survivors from rooftops, attics, and floating debris, transporting them to the railhead for medical triage[altvater-fire-dept].

Stephenson and Blythe encountered unprecedented casualty conditions. Because the town was submerged and local funeral infrastructure had been washed away, they established an emergency field morgue inside the flooded Moore Haven post office[stephenson-nelson-about]. Setting up embalming equipment across postal sorting desks and working around the clock in standing water, they prepared scores of deceased victims for identification and burial[stephenson-nelson-about].

Refugee Reception and Pinecrest Cemetery Mass Burial

The Highlands County relief train returned northward loaded with hundreds of destitute survivors, unaccompanied children, and deceased storm victims[star-1926-09-20][rimoldi-ibanez-2020].

Avon Park and Sebring converted churches, lodges, and vacant boom-era hotel spaces into emergency refugee shelters and feeding stations, clothing and boarding more than one thousand Moore Haven refugees over the following fortnight[altvater-fire-dept][rimoldi-ibanez-2020].

Because saturated ground in Glades County prevented local burials without coffins floating to the surface, the first twenty-six bodies recovered by the rescue detachment were transported by rail into Highlands County[stephenson-nelson-about][rimoldi-ibanez-2020]. Citizens and civic volunteers in Sebring excavated a common trench at Pinecrest Cemetery, where the twenty-six victims—six of whom could never be identified—were interred in a dedicated mass burial section with community funeral rites[stephenson-nelson-about][rimoldi-ibanez-2020].

The rapid mobilization of the Highlands County relief train remained one of the definitive civic milestones in the county’s early history, demonstrating the logistical capability of the newly completed Atlantic Coast Line rail network and cementing the regional humanitarian bond between the Ridge towns and the Okeechobee agricultural communities.

References

Where this comes from

Evidence
corroborated — More than one independent source agrees.
Review
unverified — Drafted from sources but not yet checked by a volunteer.
Rights
society

Sources

  1. Associated Press, Trains Carry Aid to Stricken Area, Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), 20 September 1926, page 5 (1926) · newspaper
  2. Associated Press, Hurricane reports, Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), 19 September 1926, page 1 (1926) · newspaper
  3. Stephenson-Nelson Funeral Home, History and Staff, Stephenson-Nelson Funeral Home & Crematory (2026) · secondary
  4. Camila Rimoldi Ibañez and Kyria Wickham (supervised by Dr. Charlotte Pressler), Disaster at Moore Haven: How the 1926 Great Miami Hurricane Destroyed a Small Town on the Shores of Lake Okeechobee (2020) · secondary
  5. Allen C. Altvater, History of the Sebring Fire Department and 1926 Moore Haven Disaster Relief Expedition (1980) · secondary
  6. Leoma Bradshaw Maxwell, The First Hundred Years of Avon Park, Florida (1976) · secondary

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