Okeechobee County, Florida
The story of Okeechobee
Everything below is a single verifiable claim with a citation attached. Where the record is a local legend rather than a document, it says so.
etymology
How it got its name
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The name is Hitchiti, the ancestral language of most Florida Seminoles: oki, water, and chubi, big. Big water.
industry
What it lived on
- 1930
By the 1930s the area was shipping hundreds of train cars of winter vegetables a year, alongside poultry farms, catfish operations and a bullfrog breeding industry.
claim to fame
What it is known for
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Lake Okeechobee is the eighth-largest natural freshwater lake in the fifty states and the largest contained entirely within the contiguous forty-eight - 730 square miles at an average depth of just nine feet.
figure
Worth knowing
- 1928
The 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane, the first recorded Category 5 hurricane in the North Atlantic, severely damaged the lake area.
landmark
What still stands
- 1837
The Okeechobee Battlefield, where on 25 December 1837 Seminole forces met US troops under Zachary Taylor in one of the largest battles of the Second Seminole War.
- 1928
Lake Okeechobee itself, ringed by the 40-foot Herbert Hoover Dike built after the 1928 hurricane, whose latest rehabilitation completed in January 2023.