In the central part of south Florida there's a body of water called Lake Okeechobee ( OH - kee - CHO - bee ), a name meaning simply "big water" in the Seminole language. It's a fitting name for the largest lake in the state, and one of the largest in the country, measuring roughly 35 miles / 56.3 km north to south, and 28 miles / 45 km east to west. The lake is not so much in the heart of Florida as maybe its liver or kidneys. It's a special place; a big, marshy basin a little north of the Everglades, just a couple hours' drive from the Gulf of Mexico to the west and even closer to the Atlantic Ocean to the east. You can check out our earlier map of the Straits of Florida here to see Lake Okeechobee in context.
In the Middle of Things
While exploring the boundaries in this region I came across a delightfully unique feature of Lake Okeechobee, a quirk of the way administrative lines have had to be drawn around the large lake. Click to enlarge the map and see if you can spot it.
This map illustrates Lake Okeechobee and its surroundings, which consist of state preserves and smaller lakes, urban and agricultural areas, and a recognized Seminole Nation Reservation. The Atlantic Ocean can be seen in the upper right corner.
Notice the yellow lines highlighting the county boundaries in the area. As it turns out, there are five counties bordering Lake Okeechobee: Glades, Okeechobee, Martin, Palm Beach, and Hendry. So who has jurisdiction over the lake? All of them? None of them? Actually, the county lines are drawn so that each county gets a slice, protruding from the extents of each one's lake shore at one interesting point, a common coordinate point located at approximately 26.955 N, 80.883 W.
This coordinate is where the north and west borders of Palm Beach County meet when extended to make an approximately right angle, occurring near enough to the center that it represents a happy compromise for the five lakeside counties. It results in three of them having hilariously distorted angular shapes, the most extreme being Hendry County, whose relatively small share of the lake shore means it gets a unicorn horn-like sliver of the lake within its bounds. The middle of Lake Okeechobee is the only place in the United States where county lines are drawn in this manner.
What an interesting area! The Floridian peninsula is a relatively narrow land mass dividing two significant bodies of water, and connecting multiple cultural regions. I'm from North Florida, and I've spent some time in Miami and visited Central Florida, and I've been struck by the cultural diversity of the state as well as how much the racial composition of the population varies in different parts of it. The blending of primarily Black, White, and Hispanic groups, with relatively high rates of immigration from nearby Spanish-speaking nations and many others, combined with the historic influence of ancient Seminole and Timucuan heritage and the impact of Spanish colonialism, results in a state with a fascinating and unique cultural profile.
Everybody's Here
I haven't spent much time in the area around Lake Okeechobee, so after visualizing the quirky phenomenon of the county lines, I was curious to learn about the people in the area. Click through the slideshow to explore some map layers illustrating some demographic information in the same area we looked at before.
In order, these layers visualize total population, followed by the percentage of the population represented by Hispanic, White, Black, and Native American racial groups. This data, shown by census tract, is the most recent from the American Community Survey. Use the legend as a guide to understand the demographic map layers.
In the total population layer, tracts where the population is less than 500 people are shown with no tone, and the rest increasing in purple tone at increments of 5,000 total people. The most populous areas are relatively small regions in Port St. Lucie and West Palm Beach. The vast majority of the map is comprised of agricultural areas punctuated by small towns, and parks and reserves dedicated to the preservation of Florida's precious ecosystem.
With total population in mind we can better understand the proportions represented by various racial groups. Percentages under 10% are shown with no tone, and the rest are shown at increments of 20% with increasing rose tone. Note that we're discussing only the three most predominant racial groups, plus the Native American and Pacific Islander group; this is not a fully comprehensive representation.
Racial Distribution
The data shows that in the Palm Beach County portion of the lake shore area a relatively higher proportion is comprised of Hispanic groups, representing a majority in some census tracts. There are also centralized areas of Fort Pierce and the West Palm Beach city area where Hispanic populations are in a majority, and relatively large percentages in Martin and Desoto Counties.
The White population is in a majority in most tracts shown, with the noticeable exceptions of the lakeside portion of Palm Beach County with a Hispanic majority, parts of Martin County, and the whole of Hendry and Collier Counties. There are localized portions in the cities near the Atlantic coast where White populations are not in the majority. There are several gaps for state preserves where nearly nobody lives.
In some areas the predominance of Black populations is at an inverse to that of White populations, indicating higher degrees of regional segregation, there being majority Black populations in Hendry and Collier Counties and in the same portion of Martin County that has low percentage of White residents. There are also relatively large Black populations in localized parts of Okeechobee, the coastal cities, and the lakeside part of Palm Beach County. There is also a very small Black percentages in the places with the strongest White majority, namely in large portions of Highlands, Okeechobee, St. Lucie, Martin, and Palm Beach Counties. There are however many census tracts with more even populations.
The Native American population in this area, which should be understood to refer predominantly though not exclusively to regional Seminole populations, is at a low minority is all areas. However, the data shows that there are slightly higher Native American populations at greater than 10% in two regions, one to the south of the lake in Hendry County, and one to its west in an area encompassing Brighton Seminole Reservation. There is a possibility that the Native American population has been undercounted due to trends of underrepresentation in US Census response from reservations, a discrepancy in which the US Census Bureau has been striving to see improvement.
Another weakness of some census data is that can over-consolidate racial groups to the point of losing information. For example, by lumping all Hispanic groups into one category, we miss the reality Hispanic populations encompass a wide range of backgrounds -- families deriving from Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela to name a few. It also perhaps doesn't make the most sense to consolidate Native American populations with Pacific Islanders, two groups that each refer to many nations -- especially here on the Atlantic Coast where there may be relatively fewer Pacific Islanders than Native Americans.
But as far as our purposes go in this series of map layers, the data can tell us a lot about the demographics in the region surrounding Lake Okeechobee, and gotten a picture of the distribution of several racial groups. It can be interesting to see how much or little the distribution changes along county lines, the same lines that become so humorously arbitrary when pulled away from the shore to the center of a big lake in the middle of the landscape.
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