in Belle Glade, 1941. Photo by
Marion Post Wolcott.
Pre-historic The
Belle Glade or Okeechobee culture was an
archaeological culture that extended around Lake Okeechobee and included the lower
Kissimmee River valley. It existed from as early as 1000
BCE until about 1700
CE. The culture is named for the Belle Glade site, which was excavated in the mid-1930s as part of a
Civil Works Administration project. The Belle Glade site included a
midden and a
burial mound.
Settlement The town of Belle Glade was founded during the
Florida land boom of the 1920s. During that period, there were a series of efforts made to put in place drainage systems to reclaim dry land from the Everglades, including land around
Lake Okeechobee. It was hoped that the reclaimed acreage could be put to better use, including agriculture. In 1921 the Florida legislature established an agricultural research station at Belle Glade to study methods of growing crops on reclaimed Everglades land. At that time, there were already 16 settlements on and around Lake Okeechobee, inhabited by around 2,000 people. A settlement, originally named Hillsboro, was built at what is now Belle Glade in 1925. In 1926 the Florida East Coast Railway extended its system to Belle Glade, which helped the town's development.
1928 hurricane A
powerful hurricane struck the area on September 16, 1928. The storm winds caused Lake Okeechobee to overflow its banks, inundating towns around the lake and causing widespread damage in Belle Glade. According to figures compiled by the Florida Department of Health, the storm killed 611 people in Belle Glade alone, and a total of over 1,800 statewide. Contemporary accounts stated that most of the dead were Black migrant farmworkers, a "large percentage" of whom were believed to be from the
Bahamas. Belle Glade was rebuilt, and
a large dike was erected to protect towns around the lake from storm-driven overflows.
World War II German prisoners of war were confined in camps located at Belle Glade and nearby
Clewiston during
World War II.
HIV/AIDS In the early 1980s, researchers began to notice a large number of people with AIDS in Belle Glade. The disease had first been identified by doctors in New York and California in 1981, and it was largely associated with communities of gay men in and around large cities. In Belle Glade, however, people with AIDS mainly identified as heterosexual, and around half were women. Some researchers, and notably Dr. Mark Whiteside and Dr. Carolyn MacLeod of the Institute of Tropical Medicine, in Miami, hypothesized that AIDS in Belle Glade might be connected to poverty and poor living conditions in the city's "colored town," where many people diagnosed with the disease also lived. Their theory, along with the very high per capita AIDS rate in Belle Glade, brought notoriety to the town as the "AIDS capital of the world." Whiteside and MacLeod's theory turned out to be incorrect, but subsequent research conducted in Belle Glade shaped scientific knowledge about the transmission of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, through heterosexual sex.
In recent years Today, the area around Lake Okeechobee is fertile and farming is an important industry. Sugar cane and vegetables are grown. Migrant
farmworkers are an important part of the labor force. Belle Glade received national attention when a 1960 CBS television documentary,
Harvest of Shame, graphically depicted the local migrant farmerworkers' daily existence and working conditions. Men and women still gather around 5 a.m. in the same lot you see at the beginning of
Harvest of Shame, waiting for buses to take them to the fields. The "loading ramp," as it's called, is a bleak, empty lot, surrounded by some small buildings with bars on the windows and a boarded up storefront. As of May 2014 the city has plans "to demolish the loading ramp and turn it into a park." The town is known for its
football tradition, and together with nearby
Pahokee has "sent at least 60 players to the
National Football League".{{cite news ==Geography==