On Sept. 1, 1935 Islamorada was a sleepy agricultural backwater, where life for the few hundred residents revolved around church, fishing and family.

Things would change drastically the next day, when the eye of the deadliest hurricane in Keys recorded history roared across Lower Matecumbe Key, obliterating a 10-mile swath of land that extended from Craig Key to the larger settlements on Upper Matecumbe and causing damage for miles beyond.

Packing sustained winds that were at least 185 mph, with estimated gusts of up to 250 mph, what has ever since been known as the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 brought a storm surge so high that the sea swallowed the islands whole. The barometric pressure that Monday night was 26.36 inches, the lowest ever recorded over land in the United States.

By the time the weather cleared, the storm had scattered its body count of at least 406 from Islamorada across Florida Bay to Flamingo. Bodies of the settlers as well as World War I veterans working on bridge and road projects were found for years afterward and the exact death count from the storm will never be known.

In the main settlement of what is now Islamorada, where most of the damage was wrought, all but one of the 61 buildings were leveled. Meanwhile, Henry Flagler's railroad, which was completed with so much fanfare just 23 years earlier, was ripped from the ground, never again to connect Key West to the mainland.

For those who survived, life would forever be different.

"It didn't seem the same when we came back down here," said Alma Dalton, who was 11 when she survived the storm by floating on debris after the home where she and her family had taken shelter was ripped to shreds. "The people wasn't here that was here before. There just wasn't anything here."

In the aftermath of the storm, Dalton and her family, out of house and home, spent half a year in Coconut Grove. When they returned to Islamorada, they came back to an island transformed. Gone for good were the tomato fields, Key lime groves and agricultural packing houses that had been a central part of the pre-hurricane economy.

"Commercial agriculture went with the '35 storm," said survivor Norm Parker, now 79.

He remembers his father, Capt. Edney Parker, farming pineapples and limes before the storm and taking them to the docks where they would be shipped up to the mainland. But the hurricane washed away Matecumbe's thin layer of topsoil, and what was left was spoiled with salt.

In the meantime, growing competition from the mainland, where fresh water was more readily available, and from Cuba, where pineapples were cheap, left local farmers with little opportunity to start again. The ongoing Great Depression added to the difficulty in restarting most any enterprise.

In need of new sources of income, and with rebuilding under way, many people turned to the trades. The late Bernard Russell, who later founded the Islamorada fire department, became a boat builder and cabinet maker.

Dalton's dad, Bertram Pinder, who before the storm was the caretaker for the Matecumbe Club, a getaway for wealthy sportsmen from the northeast, also turned to carpentry. Among other projects, he helped the Richardson family, founders of Vicks Chemicals -- of Vicks cough drops fame -- build a vacation home on the present day site of Cheeca Lodge. Pinder also helped Memphis-based cotton baron J.P. Norfleet build his new waterfront Islamorada getaway, Dalton said.

Fowler's Fish Camp, which later became Papa Joe's, was built the year after the storm. So was Whale Harbor, as a fish camp and marina.

Dalton said that this small but noticeable influx of lodges and wealthy snowbirds provided her dad with yet another way to replace his farming income.

"People started coming down to fish," she said, and Bertram would take them out for $5 per trip.

Parker too remembers his father, Edney, guiding during the post-storm period.

"The Islamorada area became a Mecca for wealthy people," he said.

It wasn't just workaday life that was transformed after the Labor Day Hurricane.

During the pre-storm days, the 270 residents of the Matecumbe area built their homes and shops on the edge of the ocean. When they returned, having learned a lesson from the storm, they rebuilt on higher ground.

Architecture changed as well. Post-storm construction was typically of strong materials, such as Dade County pine. And the federal government, in conjunction with the American Red Cross, constructed 29 homes of poured cement fortified with steel bars, 20 of them in Matecumbe. The homes, which featured 18-inch walls, were given to survivors.

Despite the physical and economic changes, the daily rhythms of life in Matecumbe returned to a semblance of normalcy after the storm. Gone were many loved ones and friends of those who survived. But the social and cultural lives of those who remained still revolved around church, school, home, and of course, the water.

Joseph Pinder, Dalton's younger brother, remembers his childhood in Matecumbe as a simple time, with Saturdays being spent at PTA bake sales and an evening's entertainment centered around swimming parties at the beach.

"We used to ride our bikes off the end of the dock and see who could go the farthest," Pinder, 80, said. "Then we'd take them apart and put them back together. It was a good life. It wasn't like it is now."

School in Matecumbe resumed in 1936 in a new building owned by merchant Eddie Sweeting.

Meanwhile, the Matecumbe United Methodist Church, located before the storm on the beach, was one of the first structures rebuilt, said Dalton. It was moved inland to its present location on Upper Matecumbe.

Local historian Jerry Wilkinson said churches would maintain their primacy in the fabric of community life for some time.

"The church in Islamorada was the social center until the 1950s," he said.

But other things would be transformed much sooner.

Concerned that war was imminent, federal authorities pushed hard to complete the roadway that for the first time would allow vehicles, including military convoys, to drive directly to the naval base at Key West from the mainland. The completed highway was dedicated in the summer of 1938.

Less than three years later the navy completed a pipeline that brought a reliable source of drinking water to the Florida Keys. In 1942, though early service was only intermittent, Islamorada went on the electric grid for the first time.

With World War II now under way, the town was no longer the isolated outback it had been in 1935. Islamorada had more or less joined the 20th century.

The Labor Day Hurricane, however, would remain its seminal historical event.

sgibbs@keysnews.com

rsilk@keysnews.com