Battered by Florida Hurricane: a bungalow at Avon Park after the storm of September 1928
Credit line
South Bend News-Times, 26 September 1928, page 15, via Library of Congress, Chronicling America. International Newsreel photograph.
Rights
Status: public-domain. Published in the United States in 1928, before 1930, in the South Bend News-Times; digitized by the Library of Congress in Chronicling America
Original item: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn87055779/1928-09-26/ed-1/?sp=15
What the picture shows
A one-story screened bungalow, its roof-line intact but its screened porch and one side wall thrown out of true, with the trunk and limbs of a large uprooted tree lying across the near corner of the house and the dark mass of the root plate in the foreground. The printed caption reads: “This huge tree was uprooted in a flash by freakish hurricane as it swept through Avon Park, Fla., and half of a pretty bungalow was lifted from its foundations by leverage exerted by the tree. Occupants of the house escaped with serious shaking up and a few bruises.” The picture is credited to International Newsreel and to AT&T, which carried it by wire.
Why it matters
This is the only known photograph of storm damage inside Avon Park from either of the great hurricanes of the 1920s. The town was far from the coast and the Lake Okeechobee shore where the storm of 16-17 September 1928 killed thousands, and the wire reports of the day said damage in the central Florida towns was “minor in most of them”; this picture is the measure of what “minor” meant on one Avon Park street. The house and the street are not identified.
Related
Where this comes from
- Review
- unverified — Drafted from sources but not yet checked by a volunteer.
- Rights
- public-domain — Published in the United States in 1928, before 1930, in the South Bend News-Times; digitized by the Library of Congress in Chronicling America Held by Library of Congress. Rights statement
Sources
- Library of Congress, Battered by Florida Hurricane: a bungalow at Avon Park after the storm of September 1928
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