The Great Gale of 1848 — Tampa, Florida

The Great Gale of 1848 was the hurricane that struck Tampa Bay on Monday, September 25, 1848, and it remains the benchmark storm in the written record of Fort Brooke and early Tampa. Tampa Historical describes the 1848 Great Gale as the most severe hurricane to affect Tampa Bay at that time and gives its dates as September 23 to 25, 1848. The center came ashore at Clearwater, on the Pinellas side of the bay, and then crossed the peninsula to exit near Cape Canaveral.

No instrument captured the full force of the gale. The only wind reading, 72 miles per hour, came from the post at Fort Brooke, and Tampa Historical notes that the storm predates the keeping of meteorological records. Even so, the water told the story: the 1848 storm produced the highest storm tides ever recorded in Tampa Bay, rising and falling 15 feet in 6 to 8 hours. A 2012 retrospective by Bay News 9 judged that the pressure and surge at Tampa Bay looked more like a strong Category 3 or even a Category 4 hurricane than the Category 1 suggested by that single wind figure.

Tampa in 1848 was barely a town. According to Ocean Weather Services, it was a small village of fewer than 200 people living outside the military garrison at Fort Brooke, the post that occupied what is now downtown Tampa. The City of Tampa Archives date that garrison to January 18, 1824, when Col. Brooke, James Gadsden and four companies of infantry arrived in Tampa Bay. The village had no municipal government of its own in the summer of 1848.

Several firsts had arrived in the months before the gale. Ocean Weather Services reports that Hillsborough County had appointed the first two pilots of the port of Tampa earlier in 1848, that the lighthouse at Egmont Key started operations in May, and that Tampa's first school opened on September 11, two weeks before the hurricane. Each of those new pieces of the Tampa Bay settlement would be tested within days.

Accounts gathered by Ocean Weather Services describe a calm, sultry weekend. On the evening of Sunday, September 24, northeast gusts and showers began, and residents reported that Tampa Bay glowed with phosphorescence almost bright enough to read by. By 9 a.m. on Monday the southeasterly winds were veering to the south and then the southwest, which pushed water from the Gulf of Mexico up the bay toward the Hillsborough River.

The barometer at Fort Brooke fell from 1013 millibars at 9 p.m. on September 24 to a minimum of 954 millibars on the afternoon of September 25, according to the same reconstruction. The strongest winds at the Tampa garrison blew between about 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. and did not ease until sometime between 6 and 8 p.m. The landfall near Clearwater carried an estimated minimum central pressure of about 945 millibars, and the estimated maximum winds at landfall range from 101 to 135 miles per hour.

Writing in 2025, Ocean Weather Services gave the Fort Brooke barometer low in the units of the day, 28.18 inches of mercury. Tampa Historical quotes historian Karl Grismer that by noon the water had risen 15 feet and stayed there for hours, which matches the post surgeon's report cited below.

The surge did most of the damage at Tampa. The Fort Brooke post surgeon reported that the tide rose to 15 feet above low water and that the water rose very fast between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Maj. R. D. S. Wade wrote from the fort that all the wharves and most public buildings were destroyed and that the flooding was exceptionally great, but that no lives were lost. Every vessel in the port of Tampa was driven up the Hillsborough River and destroyed by wind and water.

Other accounts collected by Ocean Weather Services say great waves covered most of the islands in Tampa Bay and that the garrison was almost completely inundated, with only the tops of the trees visible. At Fort Brooke the church on the beach, the soldiers' barracks, the Indian agent's office, the horse shed, and the Ferris residence, store and warehouse were wrecked. Every building on the bay and the river was destroyed except the Palmer Hotel, which was badly damaged.

Juliet Axtell, wife of the Army chaplain at Fort Brooke, wrote that not more than four or five buildings were left standing and concluded that Tampa was no more. Tampa Historical gives a matching count, stating that only five houses remained standing in Tampa and all the rest were damaged, while Bay News 9 summarizes the result plainly: Fort Brooke was destroyed.

Outside the garrison, the storm rewrote the shoreline around Tampa Bay. Bay News 9 reports that the surge cut the Pinellas peninsula in half: water from Tampa Bay flowed back through the middle of Pinellas County to reach the Gulf, and Allen's Creek was half a mile wide at its mouth. Many of the trees in Pinellas County were toppled, and Tampa Historical adds that winds felled almost all the trees along Indian Rocks Road and that citrus crops were wiped out.

Two passes on the Gulf beaches date to the gale. Bay News 9 states that John's Pass was cut on the Pinellas coast and New Pass in Sarasota County. Ocean Weather Services repeats a legend that a reformed pirate named John Levique discovered the new opening, which became John's Pass. Inside the bay, many navigation routes to Tampa were reported filled with sand and closed, making any charts drawn before 1848 useless to pilots.

The light at the mouth of Tampa Bay had barely begun working. The U.S. Coast Guard Historian lists Egmont Key Light as established in 1848, with an original tower built for $7,580 and Sherrod Edwards as its first keeper, and notes that it survived a powerful hurricane just five months after being officially certified. Bay Soundings reports that the light was first lit in April 1848 and was then the only lighthouse between the Panhandle and Key West, marking the entrance to the port of Tampa.

During the gale, Edwards loaded his family into a boat and tied it to palmetto trees at the highest point of Egmont Key; the 2025 Ocean Weather Services account says the boat was found the next day intact but lodged high in the treetops. The first tower was damaged beyond repair. A new, taller Egmont Key lighthouse was built in 1858 for $16,000, and Bay Soundings reports that it still stands at the entrance to Tampa Bay.

The bay had no time to recover. About two weeks later, on October 11 and 12, 1848, a second hurricane reached the Florida Gulf coast. Ocean Weather Services reports that it was weaker at Tampa than the September storm but still drove a surge of about 10 feet into Tampa Bay, a figure Bay News 9 also gives for the October 11 storm.

Civil government followed the rebuilding. The City of Tampa Archives record that on January 18, 1849, 14 men voted unanimously to establish Tampa Village with a trustee form of government, and that on January 25, 1849, the village elected five trustees. Firsthand testimony has continued to surface: in September 2023 the Tampa Bay Times published a letter in which Robert Jackson described the hurricane's damage to his place on the Hillsborough River.

The gale also became the yardstick for later Tampa Bay storms. The NWS Tampa Bay office describes the hurricane of October 25, 1921, as the most destructive to hit the area since 1848, a span of 73 years. The phrase used by survivor William Henry Whitaker, the granddaddy of all hurricanes, still serves as the storm's nickname in Tampa histories.