'Water Will Run Downhill': Governor Broward and the Drainage Era

Napoleon Bonaparte Broward campaigned for governor of Florida in 1904 on a simple promise: drain the Everglades and turn it into an "Empire of the Everglades" of farms and towns. He won, served from 1905 to 1909, and launched the first state-run drainage program.

Dredges and canals

Broward famously declared that water would run downhill, arguing that canals cut from Lake Okeechobee to the Atlantic would simply let the marsh drain away. Dredges went to work in the mid-1900s, and the state created the Everglades Drainage District in 1907 to tax landowners and pay for the work. Over the following years, major canals such as the North New River, South New River, Hillsboro and Miami canals were cut from the lake toward the coast.

"Land by the gallon"

Promoters sold Everglades lots across the country, often sight unseen. Buyers arrived to find their land underwater. The scandal grew so large that it became the subject of congressional investigations, and the phrase "land by the gallon" entered Florida folklore.

What the canals actually did

The canals did lower the water in parts of the northern Everglades, opening rich black muck soils south of Lake Okeechobee to farming. But they also created new problems: drained peat soils oxidized and subsided, droughts became worse, fires burned through dried-out marsh, and the canals could not handle the heaviest rains. Towns around the lake were left exposed when hurricanes pushed water over its low banks.

A turning point ahead

Broward died in 1910, but the drainage idea outlived him. It would take two catastrophic hurricanes in the 1920s to force a different approach, and to bring in the federal government and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The engineers' doubts

Not everyone agreed that drainage would work. A U.S. Department of Agriculture engineer, James O. Wright, prepared a report around 1909 that predicted easy success, but the report was later criticized for overly optimistic calculations and became part of the controversy surrounding Everglades land sales. Rainfall in South Florida, it turned out, was far greater and more intense than drainage planners had assumed.

Promoters and colonists

Land companies such as those led by Richard Bolles sold tens of thousands of contracts for Everglades farms. Some settlers did make a living on the rich muck soils near Lake Okeechobee, growing vegetables and sugarcane. Many others found flooded land, no roads and no way to farm, and left.

New towns along the lake

The drainage era produced lakeside farm towns such as Moore Haven, Clewiston, Belle Glade, Pahokee and South Bay. They grew quickly in the 1910s and 1920s, drawing farmworkers from across the South and the Caribbean. Their exposed location between the lake and the drained fields would prove deadly in the hurricanes of 1926 and 1928.

The soil disappears

One of the most surprising consequences of drainage was soil subsidence. When peat is drained, it dries, shrinks and slowly oxidizes. Researchers at the Everglades Experiment Station in Belle Glade set a concrete post in the ground in the 1920s to measure the loss. Over the decades the ground dropped several feet around it, a vivid record of how drainage literally consumed the land it was meant to create.