Belle Glade is a city in the far western reaches of Palm Beach County, Florida, on the southeastern shore of Lake Okeechobee, roughly 40 miles west of West Palm Beach. It is the commercial and cultural center of the Glades, a farming region whose economy has long been built on the lake's extraordinarily fertile muck soils. The area was inhabited by the Calusa and later the Seminole before drainage and settlement opened the land to agriculture in the early twentieth century. The community was established in 1918 as Hillsboro at the head of the Hillsboro Canal, and it took the name Belle Glade — short for "Belle of the Glades" — in the years that followed. The 1928 Okeechobee hurricane devastated the town, with the lake's waters rising several feet in an hour and destroying much of the settlement; the storm remains a defining event in local memory. Belle Glade rebuilt and grew into the region's hub for sugarcane, vegetables, and the processing and shipping that go with them. Today Belle Glade has a population of about 16,700 and a diverse, tight-knit character. Sugar remains the backbone of the economy, from the fields to the mills, and the city is widely known as "Muck City," a name coined for the dark, rich soil and popularized nationally by the extraordinary number of professional football players who came out of Glades Central High School. Agriculture shapes both the landscape and the rhythm of life. Belle Glade offers an authentic, working-class slice of South Florida far from the coast. Residents are served by Palm Beach County schools, a Palm Beach State College campus, and a walkable core on State Road 80. For those drawn to agriculture, lakefront recreation, and a community with deep roots, Belle Glade is a distinctive place within one of Florida's most affluent counties.