Local History
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Traditionally inhabited by indigenous people, first the Calusa Indians then the Seminole and Miccosukee, pioneer settlers began arriving in our area in the late 1800s.
Despite its proximity to some of the best fishing in the country, Everglades, as the area was known when the first post office was established in 1891, was originally an agricultural community. Residents grew a variety of crops ranging from sugar cane to avocadoes (known as “Alligator Pears”) along with tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, eggplant and many more. Located below the line of hard freezes that often befell Florida’s food crops, farmers in Everglades were making a small fortune as the sole supplier of winter vegetables to markets in the north.
Advertising tycoon Barron Gift Collier arrived in the early 1920s and immediately recognized the region’s potential as a destination for sports tourism. Purchasing the expanded home of town founder George Storter Jr., Collier renamed it the Rod & Gun Club and opened for business in 1923, attracting a large clientele of wealthy hunters and fishermen. The turn-of-the-century “Tarpon Craze” was still driving new visitors to Southwest Florida, and the fishing in Everglades was nothing short of legendary.
Mr. Collier met the demand by creating a small company town nestled squarely at the edge of Florida’s last frontier. He built a courthouse and a bank, and planted flowering trees along the roadways where an electric trolley carried passengers to create an idyllic model municipality - a full 50 years before Walt Disney began to imagineer the Sunshine State. He added a 3-story, 45-room hotel across the newly built boulevard, and met the challenge of keeping fresh sheets on all those beds by opening a commercial laundry down the street. Today that building is home to Museum of the Everglades.
Barron Collier financed the construction of the Tamiami Trail, a highway across the Everglades connecting the coasts, to accommodate an expected boom in tourism facilitated by the advent of the automobile. The road was finished in 1928 and is still considered a miracle of modern engineering. While the initial influx of visitors by car gave the local economy a welcome jolt, the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that ensued brought Mr. Collier’s Everglades empire to a near standstill.
The history of Everglades (now Everglades City) is much more than this condensed version of the Barron Collier era given here and, as the stewards of those stories and others still being written, we invite you to visit Museum of the Everglades and experience the wonder of this slice of “Old Florida” and the region’s rich heritage for yourself.