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The Everglades story begins long before highways, drainage canals or sightseeing. Miami Airboat operates within the Everglades and Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area, part of South Florida’s wider Everglades landscape. Across the peninsula, along the southwest Gulf coast, another chapter of the region’s human history unfolded over many centuries. It belongs to the Calusa, a people whose society was built around water.
According to the Florida Museum of Natural History, the Calusa’s coastal realm stretched from Tampa Bay to south of Marco Island and as far east as Lake Okeechobee. The museum describes Calusa influence lasting from roughly 100 CE to the mid-1700s, and estimates that at their height they ruled some 20,000 to 50,000 people. The National Park Service places the Calusa in the southwest region of South Florida, while the Tequesta, Jega and Ais lived along the east coast. These were distinct peoples, and they should not be confused with the Seminole and Miccosukee nations whose histories in South Florida developed later and continue today.
A Powerful Society Without Farming
Many large, complex societies depended on staple crops such as corn. The Calusa did not. The Florida Museum describes them as expert fishers and calls them one of the few cultures in North America to develop a complex, stratified society without a staple crop. The National Park Service notes that they depended on fishing and systematic foraging, living among coastal mangroves.
The Park Service describes the Calusa as a complex chiefdom: a number of village communities organized within a chiefly hierarchy. Archaeologists, it notes, regard that level of organization as exceptionally sophisticated for a society that did not farm. The Florida Museum’s Randell Research Center summarizes it plainly: for many centuries the Calusa sustained tens of thousands of people from the fish and shellfish of the rich estuaries west and south of Fort Myers.
Building With Shells
In a landscape with little stone, shells became raw material. The Florida Museum lists spears, fishhooks, jewelry, utensils and religious ornaments among the objects the Calusa crafted from shell. The National Park Service explains that some shell mounds are piles of discarded shells that had been used as tools, and that the Calusa also built large-scale “shell works” with ridges, mounds, platforms and courtyards. The exact purposes of these features remain uncertain; the Park Service suggests possibilities such as separating gathering areas from sacred spaces or providing barriers against mosquitoes.
The Florida State Parks history of Mound Key, an island in Estero Bay, says the island was developed over some 2,000 years of Calusa civilization and likely began as a flat, mangrove-lined oyster bar. As the population grew, food remains were heaped into middens, forming the mounds visible today. Mound Key is believed to have been the Calusa cultural center known as Calos.
Archaeology has added detail to that picture. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020, researchers including Victor Thompson of the University of Georgia and William Marquardt and Karen Walker of the Florida Museum examined structures at Mound Key known as watercourts. As the Florida Museum reported, radiocarbon dating indicates they were built between about A.D. 1300 and 1400. The largest covers about 36,000 square feet, enclosed by a berm of shell and sediment about three feet high. The researchers interpret the watercourts as short-term holding pens for schooling fish such as mullet, storing them for hours to a few days before they were eaten, smoked or dried.
At the Pineland site on Pine Island, the Florida Museum has curated what it calls the largest systematic collection from a major Calusa town site, more than 140,000 items, from shell and bone tools to Spanish-made glass and metal that record later contact.
Contact, Loss and Memory
Spanish records bring the Calusa into written history. Florida State Parks notes that Juan Ponce de León landed in the area in 1513, and that Spain’s short-lived Jesuit mission of San Antonio de Carlos on Mound Key was abandoned by 1569. According to the National Park Service, Spanish observers documented Calusa shell works, intricate ceremonial art and a complex political system. The Florida Museum adds that Spanish accounts described a leader’s house atop a shell mound said to hold 2,000 people.
Contact also brought catastrophe. The National Park Service reports that by 1763 both the Calusa and the Tequesta had been severely reduced by European diseases. Florida State Parks cites disease, warfare with neighboring peoples and other factors in the end of Calusa civilization around 1750. Survivors, according to the Park Service and the Florida Museum, retreated into the Everglades, migrated to Cuba or joined other Native groups.
The Randell Research Center notes that a dwindling number of shell mound sites still dot the estuaries between Charlotte Harbor and the Ten Thousand Islands region of the Everglades. They show that South Florida’s wetlands and coasts were never an empty wilderness waiting to be discovered, but places of knowledge, labor and community. The best way to learn more is through museums and published research, leaving archaeological sites and materials undisturbed.
Learning this history adds another dimension to the wider landscape. If you would like to see a different part of it for yourself, you can explore Miami Airboat’s tour options within the Everglades and Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area.
Sources
The Everglades is a homeland as well as a wetland. For the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, it is the place where families survived war and removal, kept their language and culture, and built a modern sovereign government. This article draws principally on the Tribe’s own published history. It is offered for readers who spend time in South Florida’s wider Everglades landscape, including the Everglades and Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area where Miami Airboat operates. Miami Airboat is not affiliated with the Miccosukee Tribe, and the Tribe’s account remains the best place to learn its history.
Roots Older Than the Removal Wars
The Tribe traces its people to speakers of Elaponke, a language family whose speakers once lived in many Tribal Towns across northern Florida, at least the southern half of Georgia and southeastern Alabama. The Tribe identifies the Amacano, also recorded as the Maca[ri]squi, native to the wetlands and coastal areas of north Florida, as the core of the modern Tribe and the source of the name “Miccosukee.” Many ancestors lived around Lake Miccosukee, east of present-day Tallahassee. By the 1790s, according to the Tribe, the Miccosukee Tribal Town there was the largest Indigenous settlement in Florida.
The Tribe’s history also addresses names. Outsiders often grouped Florida’s Native peoples as “Creeks” and later as “Seminoles.” The Tribe states that the Miccosukee maintained a distinct identity. Today the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida and the Seminole Tribe of Florida are separate nations.
War, Removal and the Move South
The nineteenth century brought sustained conflict. The Tribe records that in early 1818, during the First Seminole War (1816–1818), Andrew Jackson’s troops and Creek allies burned the Miccosukee Tribal Town. After Florida passed to the United States in 1821, federal pressure for removal west of the Mississippi River increased, and the Indian Removal Act of 1830 intensified it.
The Second Seminole War began in December 1835. The Tribe describes it as the longest and costliest war the United States fought against Indigenous people. Many died or were forcibly sent to what became Oklahoma. Miccosukee people moved their camps south into the Everglades, drawing on long-held knowledge of hunting, fishing and living in South Florida. The Third Seminole War (1855–1858) was the final removal effort, aimed at camps in the Everglades and Big Cypress Swamp. The Tribe estimates that the Indigenous population fell from roughly 3,000 around 1800 to as few as 100 to 200 by 1858. Those who remained did not leave.
Life on the Tree Islands, and a Changing Landscape
For about six decades afterward, the Tribe writes, isolation worked in the Miccosukee’s favor. Families lived in small camps on tree islands, or hammocks, in the Everglades and Big Cypress Swamp. They traded alligator hides, otter pelts and bird plumes at South Florida trading posts for goods such as coffee, salt and ammunition. The Tribe credits this period of self-imposed isolation with preserving Miccosukee language and culture to a degree many other Native nations struggled to maintain.
Three early twentieth-century changes ended that isolation, according to the Tribe: expanding Everglades drainage, Miccosukee work in Miami tourist villages, and the building of the Tamiami Trail between Tampa and Miami from 1915 to 1928. Canals, levees and the road itself altered water levels, wildlife and tree islands, and the Tribe notes those effects continue today. With traditional income harder to earn, camps near the Tamiami Trail moved closer to the highway.
Recognition, Self-Government and Stewardship
In the 1950s, federal “Termination” policy and government classification of all Florida Native people as Seminoles led Miccosukee people living along the Tamiami Trail to assert their own identity. The Tribe describes years of advocacy, including buckskin declarations sent to the United States and foreign governments and a 1959 diplomatic visit to Cuba, where the new government recognized the Miccosukee as a sovereign nation. Federal recognition followed in January 1962. Recognition was a governmental milestone; Miccosukee identity and history are far older.
The Tribe’s 1962 constitution calls for protecting natural resources. On May 4, 1971, the Tribe took over programs previously run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which it describes as one of the earliest exercises of modern self-determination by a Native nation. Today the Tribe operates its own government, courts, police department, schools and health and social services. Since 1983, it has shared its history and culture with visitors through the Miccosukee Indian Village and Village Museum.
Land and law have remained central. Since 1964, according to the Miccosukee Reserved Area Act, the Tribe had lived on a strip of land on the northern edge of Everglades National Park under Park Service permits. The act, signed on October 30, 1998, replaced that permit with a framework under which the Tribe can live permanently and govern its own affairs there. The Tribe also describes significant investment in water quality and Everglades restoration. In August 2024 the National Park Service announced co-stewardship agreements with the Tribe covering work in Everglades and Biscayne national parks, and the Tribe reports further agreements with federal partners in 2025.
Knowing this living history adds another dimension to the landscape. If you would like your own introduction to the wider Everglades, you can explore Miami Airboat’s tour options within the Everglades and Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area.
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Today, much of South Florida’s water moves through canals, levees and pumps. It was not always so. Visitors to the Everglades and Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area often think of open sawgrass and shallow water, but the wider Everglades has been shaped by more than a century of efforts to drain it, farm it and control its floods. Those efforts did not share a single purpose. Some canals were meant to open farmland, some to carry boats and some to protect people from flooding. Understanding those differences helps explain the landscape South Floridians live with today.
An 1880s Bet on Drainage and Steamboats
The first large-scale attempt came from a private investor. In 1881, Philadelphia businessman Hamilton Disston bought four million acres of Florida land for $1 million, according to a historic resources study prepared for the Florida Bureau of Historic Preservation. The University of Florida’s special collections describe his overarching goal as draining the Everglades to create agricultural real estate.
Disston’s plan also had a navigation goal. The same historic resources study says he envisioned steamships traveling from the Gulf coast up the Caloosahatchee River into Lake Okeechobee and on up the Kissimmee River. By August 1883, a channel from the Caloosahatchee River to Lake Okeechobee had been opened. Disston did not succeed in draining the Everglades, and he eventually sold much of his investment, but University of Florida archivists note that his work helped pave the way for later development.
Broward, the Drainage Tax and the Land Rush
In the early twentieth century, draining the Everglades became state policy. The National Park Service’s South Florida collections exhibit credits Governor William Sherman Jennings (1901–1905) with crafting the legislation that led to drainage projects across the state. His successor, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward (1905–1909), campaigned on draining what he called an “abominable pestilence ridden swamp.”
According to the same exhibit, work on the first dredging project in South Florida, the North New River Canal at Fort Lauderdale, began on July 4, 1906. Railroad and canal companies largely paid for drainage through a tax of five cents per acre on land sold to them. The Historical Society of Palm Beach County says the state formed the Everglades Drainage District in 1907 and sold large tracts to land companies between 1908 and 1910. It lists five major canals that carried water from Lake Okeechobee toward the Atlantic:
- Miami Canal
- North New River Canal
- Hillsboro Canal
- West Palm Beach Canal
- St. Lucie Canal
The society notes that these canals did double duty, draining land and moving farm goods. The National Park Service’s Developing the Everglades page says dredging between 1905 and 1910 turned large tracts of wetland into agricultural land and helped spark the first of several South Florida land booms.
Real estate companies advertised the drained land as extraordinarily fertile. The National Park Service reports that thousands of buyers moved to South Florida, and the vast majority left financially ruined and disappointed. By the 1920s, as towns such as Fort Lauderdale and Miami grew, developers cut more canals and built new roads, and canals, roads and buildings gradually displaced native habitats.
From Drainage to Flood Control
Hurricanes shifted the focus toward flood protection. The South Florida Water Management District says that after damaging hurricanes in 1926 and 1928 struck coastal communities and the Lake Okeechobee region, the need for flood control to protect lives and livelihoods was clear. Construction began on a dike around Lake Okeechobee, along with improvements to waterways connecting the lake to both coasts. The Depression and long cycles of drought broken by hurricanes slowed that work.
In 1947, after years of drought, heavy rains soaked the lower east coast, and two late-season hurricanes brought widespread flooding. Florida asked the federal government for help. In 1948, Congress authorized the Central and South Florida Project, which the district describes as the largest civil works project in the country. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built its system of canals, levees and water-control structures over the following two decades. In 1949, the Florida Legislature created the Central and Southern Florida Flood Control District to manage the project. That agency later became the South Florida Water Management District.
Unlike the early drainage schemes, this project had many stated purposes. The National Park Service lists them as water supply and flood protection for urban and agricultural lands, water for Everglades National Park, fish and wildlife habitat, navigation and recreation, and prevention of saltwater intrusion.
A Changed River of Grass
The results were mixed. The National Park Service notes that the project still provides many of its intended benefits. It also concludes that altering regional wetlands, estuaries and bays, along with population growth and changing land use, “has significantly degraded the natural system.”
That conclusion set the stage for a new chapter. Later generations would try to use engineering to repair some of what earlier engineering had changed, a story told in this series’ article on Everglades restoration. The drainage era is a reminder that the canals crossing South Florida were built for specific reasons, and that each generation’s choices about water still shape the landscape.
Knowing this history adds another layer to any trip into the wetlands. If you’d like to see South Florida’s sawgrass country for yourself, you can explore Miami Airboat’s tour options within the Everglades and Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area.
Sources
A great egret standing in shallow water is one of the most familiar sights in South Florida’s wetlands. A little over a century ago, that bird’s feathers were a valuable commodity. The story of how people fought to protect Florida’s wading birds, and what one early warden paid for that fight, adds another layer to the region’s history, including the landscape of the Everglades and Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area.
Feathers Worth More Than Gold
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the feathers of herons and egrets decorated fashionable women’s hats. The National Park Service’s Flamingo exhibit says the plume industry brought a boom to Flamingo, a small settlement on Florida Bay, and that “by 1903, egret plumes were twice as valuable as gold.” Hunters in the Flamingo area mainly targeted rookeries of herons, great egrets and snowy egrets.
Plume hunting struck birds where they gathered to nest. According to Audubon Florida’s history, Florida had become the primary hunting ground for plume hunters, and birdlife that had been abundant was becoming scarce, and in some places disappearing, with incredible speed.
A Movement Takes Shape
Opposition grew in several places at once. The National Audubon Society traces its roots to 1896, when Harriet Hemenway and Minna B. Hall organized afternoon teas in Boston to persuade society women to give up feathered hats. Those meetings led to the Massachusetts Audubon Society. In Florida, the Florida Audubon Society held its first meeting in Maitland on March 2, 1900.
New laws followed:
- 1900: The federal Lacey Act prohibited interstate trade in wildlife killed in violation of state laws, according to Audubon Florida.
- 1901: Florida passed the Audubon Model Law, outlawing plume hunting in the state. William Dutcher of the American Ornithologists’ Union helped Florida Audubon persuade the legislature.
A law on paper still had to be enforced across remote rookeries and waterways. Audubon Florida says Dutcher administered the American Ornithologists’ Union’s Thayer Fund to hire wardens to protect birds, and that he hired lighthouse keepers in Key West and the Dry Tortugas.
From Plume Hunter to Game Warden
Guy M. Bradley was part of that enforcement effort. The State Archives of Florida says he was born in Chicago in 1870 and moved to Florida as an infant. The National Park Service describes him as a Flamingo resident and a former plume hunter who became a game warden in South Florida.
According to Audubon Florida, Dutcher hired Bradley in 1902 as a warden in South Florida on the recommendation of Florida Audubon Society members Kirk Munroe and Mrs. Kingsmill Marrs. The National Audubon Society calls him its “first hired Audubon game warden.” The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission notes that he was hired by the Audubon Society and deputized by the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office. In 1905, the newly incorporated National Association of Audubon Societies took over the warden program, and Audubon Florida says its leaders worked to keep the Florida wardens, including Bradley, on the job.
On July 8, 1905, Bradley was killed by poachers while investigating gunshots near his home in Flamingo, according to the National Park Service. The FWC records that he was 35, that he was trying to arrest people suspected of poaching egrets, and that his killer was not convicted. He had served for three years.
What Came After
Bradley’s death did not end the violence. Audubon Florida reports that another Audubon warden, Columbus G. MacLeod, was killed in the line of duty at Charlotte Harbor in 1908. It says that killing stirred the nation’s conscience and that Audubon intensified its nationwide campaign against wearing feathers.
Protection gradually widened. The National Audubon Society notes that New York’s Audubon Plumage Law of 1910 prohibited the sale or possession of feathers from protected species, and that the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 made it illegal to kill any non-game bird in the United States. The National Park Service’s Flamingo exhibit says plume hunting was eventually banned.
Bradley is still remembered. The National Park Service named its renovated visitor center at Flamingo, inside Everglades National Park, in his honor. The FWC notes that the Audubon Society established the Guy Bradley Award for wildlife officers. In 1953, the National Audubon Society adopted a flying great egret as its symbol, describing it as one of the chief victims of turn-of-the-century plume hunters.
That history can change how you look at a wading bird in the marsh. Wildlife sightings are never guaranteed, but if you’d like to spend time in South Florida’s wetlands, you can explore Miami Airboat’s tour options within the Everglades and Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area.
Sources
Long before Everglades National Park appeared on any map, a hammock of towering royal palms at the southern end of the Florida peninsula became the focus of a determined conservation campaign. It was led not by government officials but by members of Florida’s women’s clubs, organizing at a time when most of them could not yet vote. Their work produced Royal Palm State Park, dedicated in 1916, and gave the later national park a starting point.
Paradise Key and the Case for Protection
The hammock was known as Paradise Key. According to the National Park Service, the area was surveyed by federal surveyor Jack Jackson in 1847, and scientists studying the region in the late nineteenth century recognized its botanical significance. A history published by the University of Florida’s digital newspaper project describes the key as home to nearly a thousand royal palms, some rising 100 feet or more.
Its future was uncertain. Accounts from the National Park Service and the Coral Gables Woman’s Club connect the push for protection to Henry Flagler’s railroad development in South Florida. The University of Florida account credits Mary Barr Munroe, a member of the Florida Federation of Women’s Clubs, with bringing Paradise Key to the federation’s attention and proposing its protection at the 1905 convention.
May Mann Jennings and the Federation’s Campaign
The campaign’s best-known leader was May Mann Jennings. She had been Florida’s first lady from 1901 to 1905, during her husband William Sherman Jennings’s term as governor, and she was active in causes including women’s suffrage, child welfare and conservation, according to the State Archives of Florida. The Florida Memory exhibit on Jennings and the Florida Women’s Hall of Fame both place her presidency of the Florida Federation of Women’s Clubs from 1914 to 1917. The National Park Service identifies her as chair of the federation’s preservation committee.
Her approach combined political connections with organized members. The University of Florida history says Jennings used her ties in Tallahassee and her network of politically engaged women to press the state to provide the land and let the federation maintain it. The State Archives notes that she personally lobbied the trustees of Florida’s Internal Improvement Fund to grant property to the federation.
The campaign succeeded in stages:
- 1915: According to the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the legislature passed the Royal Palm Park bill and Governor Park Trammell signed it in June 1915. The federation describes Royal Palm as a park created directly by an act of the legislature.
- 1916: The National Park Service reports that the state provided 960 acres to the federation for the park, and that Mary Lily Kenan Flagler, Henry Flagler’s widow, matched that acreage. Royal Palm State Park was dedicated on November 23, 1916, the same day as the Ingraham Highway linking Florida City to Paradise Key.
- 1921: The state added 2,080 acres, bringing the park to about 4,000 acres, according to the National Park Service.
Royal Palm is sometimes called Florida’s first state park. That label needs context: the land was granted to and cared for by the women’s federation, an arrangement quite different from how Florida’s state parks are run today, and the federation’s own description focuses on the park’s creation by legislative act.
Keeping a Park Running
Creating the park was only the beginning. The women’s federation took on its care. The National Park Service records that Royal Palm Lodge was built in 1919 to house caretaker Charles A. Mosier and to accommodate visiting scientists and park visitors. The University of Florida history notes fundraising efforts such as a “mile of dimes,” and says the 1921 legislature granted the federation $2,500 a year for the park.
A 1930 letter from Jennings to federation members, held by the State Archives, shows how demanding that stewardship could be. It mentions storm and fire damage, a $10,000 rehabilitation appropriation from the 1927 legislature, and an annual state appropriation cut in half during the Depression. The letter also frames Royal Palm as a nucleus for a larger national park. The Florida Women’s Hall of Fame credits Jennings with directing the park from 1915 to 1936.
From State Park to National Park
That national park vision was eventually realized. The National Park Service acquired Royal Palm State Park in 1947, the year Everglades National Park was established, and the old lodge served for a time as park headquarters and visitor center. Florida Memory notes that Jennings also worked alongside Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Ruth Bryan Owen and others to advance the national park effort.
Royal Palm’s story is a useful reminder that conservation history is not only about famous founders. It also depended on club meetings, lobbying, fundraising and years of routine maintenance by people whose names are less familiar. In 2016, the federation marked the park’s centennial with a rededication, a sign of how much that history still matters to the organization that fought for it.
Today, Royal Palm is part of Everglades National Park and is managed by the National Park Service. Miami Airboat is a separate business, and its tours take place in the Everglades and Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area, a different part of South Florida’s wider Everglades landscape.
Learning the history adds another dimension to the landscape. If you would like to see a different part of the Everglades, you can explore Miami Airboat’s tour options in the wildlife management area.
Sources
- National Park Service, Royal Palm State Park
- State Archives of Florida / Florida Memory, In Her Own Words: May Mann Jennings, 1872-1963
- State Archives of Florida / Florida Memory, Primary Source Set: May Mann Jennings (1930 letter)
- University of Florida, US Caribbean & Florida Digital Newspaper Project, May Mann Jennings & the Creation of Royal Palm State Park
- General Federation of Women’s Clubs, Royal Palm State Park Re-Dedication
- Florida Women’s Hall of Fame, May Mann Jennings
- Coral Gables Woman’s Club, Royal Palm Park
- Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Everglades and Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area
In Miami, it is SW 8th Street, and many visitors heading west toward the Everglades still travel it today. The Tamiami Trail, part of U.S. 41, is one of South Florida’s most familiar roads. Its history has two very different parts: a long campaign to build a highway across the Everglades, and a much later effort to fix what that highway did to the water.
Building a Road Across the Everglades
The name joins the two cities it was meant to connect, Tampa and Miami. A historical marker erected in 1958 by the Historical Association of Southern Florida describes the Trail as tying together South Florida’s Atlantic and Gulf coasts. According to the State Archives of Florida, wetlands, mosquitoes, alligators and cypress swamps made travel across southern Florida difficult before the road existed.
The project took years. The Miccosukee Tribe’s history dates the Trail’s construction between Tampa and Miami from 1915 to 1928, and the marker describes the opening as the climax of thirteen years of planning and work. The National Park Service says construction took more than 11 years and cost $7 million for the full roadway, and that builders used roughly 3 million sticks of dynamite in Collier County alone to create canals and fill for the road.
The marker credits several contributors:
- Captain J.F. Jaudon, for the persistence that kept the project alive;
- the “trail blazers,” whose 1923 automobile trip across the Everglades dramatized the need to finish the highway;
- Barron G. Collier, for his support of the effort.
Opening Day in 1928
The Trail officially opened in late April 1928. Sources differ by a day: the 1958 historical marker and the State Archives give April 25, with the marker naming Governor John W. Martin as the official who opened it, while the National Park Service gives April 26.
For travelers, the road was a major change. For the people already living in the Everglades, it was also a turning point. The Miccosukee Tribe’s account lists the Trail’s construction among three developments that ended Miccosukee isolation in the early twentieth century, along with drainage and tourist villages in Miami. It adds that the completed Trail forced increased interaction with the outside world, and that Miccosukee families near the highway moved their camps closer to it as subsistence living became impossible.
A Road That Worked Like a Dam
The second part of the story concerns water. The Everglades depends on slow, broad flows moving south across the landscape. A raised roadbed running east to west cut across that path.
The National Park Service describes a 25-mile stretch of the Trail that acted as a dam, blocking the natural southward flow of the “River of Grass.” Another NPS page on the Tamiami Trail Next Steps project calls the highway one of the primary barriers to water flow through the ecosystem. The Everglades Foundation uses similar language, describing the road as an asphalt dam that cut water off from flowing south into Everglades National Park and Florida Bay.
The Miccosukee Tribe’s history links the Trail’s disruption of natural water flow, along with the wider system of drainage canals and levees, to significant changes in water levels, animal life and tree islands throughout the twentieth century.
Reopening the Flow
Restoring water flow meant rethinking the road itself, including lifting sections of it onto bridges. The National Park Service, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Florida Department of Transportation and Federal Highway Administration all took part in planning and construction, according to the NPS.
A 2020 National Park Service news release reports that a one-mile bridge was built in 2013 and that 2.3 miles of bridging were completed in 2019. The NPS says engineers lined up the bridges with historic sloughs so water could pass more effectively. The Florida Department of Transportation reports that construction on a later phase, raising the eastern Trail and adding bridges and culverts, began in April 2021. Readers interested in that project’s current status should check FDOT and NPS updates directly.
The Tamiami Trail’s history shows how thinking about the Everglades changed over a century. In the 1920s, crossing the wetland was treated as the achievement. Later, letting water cross the road became just as important.
Learning the history adds another dimension to the landscape. Miami Airboat operates airboat tours in the Everglades and Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area, part of South Florida’s wider Everglades landscape. If you would like to see the sawgrass for yourself, you can explore Miami Airboat’s tour options.
Sources
- National Park Service, Removing the Cork in the Bottle: Reconstructing Tamiami Trail to Restore Water Flow to Everglades National Park
- National Park Service, Tamiami Trail: Next Steps
- National Park Service, Contract Awarded for Completion of Tamiami Trail Next Steps Project (2020)
- State Archives of Florida / Florida Memory, Research Starter: Building the Tamiami Trail
- State Symbols USA, Tamiami Trail Historic Marker (marker text, Historical Association of Southern Florida, 1958)
- Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, A Brief History
- Everglades Foundation, Tamiami Trail: The Road That Blocked the ‘River of Grass’
- Florida Department of Transportation, District Six, S.R. 90/U.S. 41/SW 8 St/Tamiami Trail Next Steps Phase 2 Roadway Project
- Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Everglades and Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area
Creating a national park can take much longer than imagining one. For South Florida’s lower Everglades, the gap between a proposal and a dedicated park stretched across nearly two decades. Ernest F. Coe is the name most closely tied to that campaign, but the story also belongs to scientists, elected officials, journalists and civic groups who kept the idea moving. Today, Miami Airboat operates airboat tours within the Everglades and Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area, part of South Florida’s wider Everglades landscape. The national park is a separate place, but its history helps explain how the region came to be seen as worth protecting.
A Landscape Architect in Coconut Grove
According to the National Park Service, Coe was born in New Haven, Connecticut, studied at Yale’s School of Fine Arts from 1885 to 1887, and later worked in landscape design. He and his wife, Anna, moved to Miami in 1925 and settled in Coconut Grove.
The Park Service’s biography says that during his explorations of the Everglades, Coe saw rare birds being killed and unusual orchids being removed from the wild. He feared that species would be lost without protection, and he began pressing for Florida’s tropical environment to be preserved.
From a Letter to an Act of Congress
In 1928, Coe wrote to Stephen T. Mather, the first director of the National Park Service, proposing a national park in the lower Everglades. That same year, supporters organized an association to promote the idea. The National Park Service’s finding aid for Coe’s papers reports that the Tropic Everglades National Park Association was formed at a meeting in Miami Beach on December 11, 1928. Botanist Dr. David Fairchild was elected president, and Coe served as its executive leader. The group later became the Everglades National Park Association.
The campaign quickly reached Washington. Senator Duncan B. Fletcher introduced park legislation in December 1928. On March 1, 1929, President Herbert Hoover directed the Park Service to study whether a park was feasible, and in early 1930 an inspection party visited South Florida. The finding aid lists its members, including Park Service director Horace M. Albright, Arno B. Cammerer, Roger W. Toll, T. Gilbert Pearson of the National Association of Audubon Societies, Dr. Hermon C. Bumpus, Fairchild, Representative Ruth Bryan Owen of Miami, and journalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas.
Congress approved the authorizing legislation on May 25, 1934, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed it on May 30, 1934. The Park Service’s park establishment history notes that the 1934 act described an area of 2,164,480 acres. It also set a strong preservation mandate: the park was to be kept as wilderness, with no development that would interfere with preserving its unique plants and animals.
Thirteen More Years
Authorization was a milestone, not a finish line. In the Park Service’s words, it took “another thirteen years to acquire the land and define the boundaries.” The 1934 act did not by itself put land into federal hands. That still had to be assembled.
Two contributions from Florida helped close the gap. The Park Service reports that the 1946 Florida Legislature appropriated $2 million to buy privately held land. The Florida Federation of Women’s Clubs also donated Royal Palm State Park, about 4,000 acres on Paradise Key, which became the nucleus of the new national park.
President Harry S. Truman dedicated Everglades National Park at Everglades City on December 6, 1947. His published address from that day acknowledges John Pennekamp as chairman of the ceremonies, along with Interior Secretary Julius A. Krug, Governor Millard Caldwell and Senators Spessard L. Holland and Claude Pepper. A Park Service anniversary release lists Coe and Douglas among the Floridians in attendance, along with Daniel Beard, the park’s first superintendent. The same release describes Everglades as the first national park set aside for its biological uniqueness.
Remembering Coe, and the Coalition
Coe died on January 1, 1951. The Park Service quotes the Secretary of the Interior as saying that Coe’s years of effort had earned him “a place among the immortals of the National Park movement.” On December 6, 1996, the park’s main visitor center was christened the Ernest F. Coe Visitor Center in his honor.
The Park Service describes Coe as having pushed the park forward almost single-handedly, and his persistence is well documented. Its own records also show how many others were involved:
- David Fairchild, who served as the association’s president
- Senator Duncan B. Fletcher, who introduced the first legislation
- Ruth Bryan Owen, T. Gilbert Pearson and the other members of the 1930 inspection party
- The Florida Legislature, which funded land purchases in 1946
- The Florida Federation of Women’s Clubs, which donated Royal Palm State Park
- John Pennekamp and the Florida officials recognized at the 1947 dedication
Taken together, the record suggests that a park boundary reflects many proposals, votes, purchases and donations rather than a single moment of inspiration.
Learning the history adds another dimension to the landscape. If you would like to see part of South Florida’s wider Everglades for yourself, you can explore Miami Airboat’s tour options within the Everglades and Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area.
Sources
Sometimes protecting a place starts with changing how people describe it. For much of the early twentieth century, many people treated the Everglades as a swamp to be drained and developed. In 1947, Marjory Stoneman Douglas offered readers another way to see it, as a river of grass. The National Women’s Hall of Fame credits her bestseller with helping move public opinion away from that “useless swamp” view and toward the idea of a resource worth protecting.
That shift in perception still shapes how visitors understand South Florida’s wetlands, including the open sawgrass of the Everglades and Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area, where Miami Airboat operates.
A Writer Before an Advocate
Douglas was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on April 7, 1890, according to Friends of the Everglades. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1912 and came to Miami in 1915 to live with her father, Frank Stoneman, whom the State Archives of Florida identifies as the Miami Herald’s first editor.
At the paper she started as society editor and soon moved on to editorials and other writing. Between 1920 and 1923 she wrote for the editorial page, including a column called “The Galley.” The National Women’s Hall of Fame notes that she also served with the American Red Cross during World War I. Later, as a freelance writer, she published more than 100 articles, mostly fiction, according to the Florida Artists Hall of Fame. Forty of her stories ran in the Saturday Evening Post, many of them with environmental themes set in the Everglades.
Her involvement with the national park idea began well before her book. The National Park Service lists her as a member of the 1930 inspection party that toured South Florida while the park was under consideration. Friends of the Everglades says she served on the park committee in the 1930s and 1940s.
The Book: The Everglades: River of Grass
The book came out of a series. Friends of the Everglades says Hervey Allen, an editor at Rinehart and Company, asked Douglas to write about the Miami River for the Rivers of America books. She asked to write about the Everglades instead, and he agreed.
The Florida Artists Hall of Fame says she spent five years on research, and that the book sold out its first printing within a month of its 1947 publication. A revised edition followed in 1987. The National Park Service describes the book as setting out the importance and beauty of South Florida’s natural ecosystems and the need to protect them. The State Archives of Florida notes that it is often credited as a pioneering work of the emerging environmental movement.
The book appeared in the same year that Everglades National Park was dedicated, and Douglas attended the December 1947 ceremony, according to a Park Service anniversary release. The Park Service says her advocacy played a significant role in establishing the park. That role sat alongside the work of many others, including Ernest F. Coe, David Fairchild, members of Congress, the Florida Legislature and the Florida Federation of Women’s Clubs.
A Second Career in Advocacy
Douglas’s best-known organizing came decades later. Friends of the Everglades says she founded the group in 1969, at age 79, to stop a large jetport planned for the wetlands. According to that account, the project was halted after one runway was built. The Florida Artists Hall of Fame places the proposed jetport in the Big Cypress region. She went on to lead the organization, which remains active today.
Her work drew national recognition:
- In 1993, President Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. That same year she was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame.
- On April 4, 1985, a Florida Department of Natural Resources administration building was named for her, according to the State Archives of Florida.
- The Florida Artists Hall of Fame notes that a 1.3-million-acre wilderness area in Everglades National Park bears her name.
- The National Women’s Hall of Fame inducted her in 2000.
Douglas died in 1998 at age 108.
Her legacy offers visitors a different kind of landmark: an idea that changes what they notice.
Learning the history adds another dimension to the landscape. If you would like to experience part of South Florida’s wider Everglades for yourself, you can explore Miami Airboat’s tour options within the Everglades and Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area.
Sources
Most Everglades history is about water, wildlife and the people who lived with both. One chapter is about missiles. For about fifteen years during the Cold War, a U.S. Army air defense battery kept Nike Hercules missiles ready to launch from a site inside Everglades National Park. The National Park Service now calls the site, HM-69, “one of the best preserved relics of the Cold War in Florida.”
Our Everglades History series covers the wider region around the Everglades and Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area. HM-69 is in Everglades National Park, which the National Park Service manages, and our tours do not go there.
A Crisis Close to Home
According to the National Park Service, an American U-2 spy plane photographed Soviet missile sites in Cuba on October 14, 1962. The Park Service explains that U.S. air defenses had been built mainly to stop Soviet bombers coming over the North Pole. That left South Florida largely unprotected from the south. The Park Service notes that the site later chosen for HM-69 is 160 miles from the Cuban coast.
The Park Service says the Army’s 2nd Missile Battalion, 52nd Air Defense Artillery, was deployed in late October 1962. The battalion had four batteries of about 150 men each. The Park Service’s 2004 Cold War in South Florida Historic Resource Study gives a closer timeline. It says the Nike Hercules troops left Fort Bliss, Texas, on October 28, reached Homestead Air Force Base on October 31, and had their batteries ready to fire by November 14, 1962. The study also notes that the first missiles to arrive carried conventional warheads, not nuclear ones.
On November 26, 1962, the NPS says, President John F. Kennedy went to Homestead to present the 52nd Air Defense Artillery with the Army’s Meritorious Unit Commendation. The first positions were temporary. Two batteries set up tent camps just outside the park entrance. The historic resource study describes mosquitoes and flooding, and says Hurricane Flora damaged the temporary positions in October 1963.
From Tent Camp to Permanent Base
According to the historic resource study, the Army announced in August 1963 that the South Florida missile sites would become a permanent part of the national air defense network. The NPS says park managers gave the Army a permit to build a base inside the park. The study says the permanent site was built on land once farmed by the Iori farming operation, in the area now called the Hole-in-the-Donut. After the farm went bankrupt, the land was transferred from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to the Army.
Sources give slightly different dates for when the permanent base opened:
- The NPS HM-69 page and the historic resource study both say the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed the base in 1964.
- The same NPS page says A Battery moved to the new permanent site in 1965. The study also says South Florida’s missile soldiers moved into their new facilities that year.
- A 2012 Everglades National Park news release puts A Battery’s move into the park in 1966.
South Florida’s geography shaped the base. Nike sites elsewhere usually kept missiles in underground magazines. The historic resource study says Florida’s high water table made that impossible here, so HM-69 used three aboveground missile barns instead. The Society of Architectural Historians’ SAH Archipedia entry explains that the fire-control area and the missile storage and launch area were deliberately built apart. According to the study, about 146 soldiers and technicians ran the site.
Always Ready, Until 1979
The NPS says A Battery soldiers kept 41-foot missiles in a constant state of readiness. Some missiles were fitted with nuclear warheads of up to 40 kilotons. The Park Service also notes that South Florida’s Nike Hercules sites were linked with Hawk missile sites to defend against aircraft at every altitude. The historic resource study says this combination was not used anywhere else in the United States. The study also notes HM-69’s rare mobile high-power acquisition radar.
The study says South Florida’s Nike sites were among the last active Nike sites in the continental United States. They stayed in service about five years after similar sites elsewhere had closed. According to the NPS, official use of HM-69 ended in 1979. The historic resource study says the former fire-control area became the park’s Daniel Beard Research Center in the early 1980s.
A Preserved Piece of the Cold War
The NPS says HM-69 includes 22 buildings and structures. These include three missile barns, a missile assembly building, a guard dog kennel and barracks. In 2004, thanks to the efforts of a Nike veteran, the site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Park Service also says it continues to collect histories from veterans of the battalion.
HM-69 shows that a protected landscape can also hold the story of national decisions made far away. Anyone hoping to visit should check current National Park Service information for Everglades National Park. When this article was researched, the NPS said access varies by season and staffing, with ranger programs in winter and partner-led programs at other times. A visit to HM-69 is separate from an airboat tour.
Learning the history adds another dimension to the landscape. If you would like to experience the Everglades for yourself, you can explore Miami Airboat’s tour options within the Everglades and Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area.
Sources
- National Park Service, HM69 Nike Missile Base (Everglades National Park; last updated February 4, 2026)
- National Park Service (Steve Hach, ed. Jennifer Dickey), Cold War in South Florida: Historic Resource Study, October 2004 (GovInfo)
- National Park Service, Veterans visit Park’s Nike Missile Site HM-69 (news release, October 18, 2012)
- National Park Service, Nike Missile Site Self Guided Tour
- Society of Architectural Historians, SAH Archipedia: HM 69 Nike Missile Base
Most of the Everglades’ modern history is about moving water somewhere else. Canals, levees and pumps were built to drain land, prevent floods and supply growing cities and farms. By the end of the twentieth century, federal and state agencies were working on a different question: could the same engineering be used to help repair the Everglades?
For people who explore the Everglades and Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area and the wider South Florida landscape, the answer came in a law signed on December 11, 2000. That law approved the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, usually called CERP.
A Water System Built for Flood Control
The South Florida Water Management District’s history page describes how the modern system began. In 1947, after years of drought, South Florida’s lower east coast received about 100 inches of rain, nearly twice the normal amount. Two hurricanes followed, and the region flooded. In 1948, Congress created the Central and Southern Florida Project. The district calls it the largest civil works project in the country, a “massive flood control plumbing system” stretching from just south of Orlando to Florida Bay. In 1949, the Florida Legislature created the Central and Southern Florida Flood Control District to manage the project. That agency later became the South Florida Water Management District.
The project did what it was built to do: protect against floods and supply water. It also changed how water moved through the natural system. The Everglades Law Center says Congress later acted to undo much of the environmental damage caused by the project.
From Study to Law
Restoration began as a study of the existing system. According to rules published by the Army Corps of Engineers in the Federal Register in 2003, Congress directed a comprehensive review of the Central and Southern Florida Project in 1996. That review, known as the “Restudy,” was completed in April 1999. The plan it produced had 68 major components. These included about 217,000 acres of reservoirs and wetland-based water treatment areas, along with wastewater reuse plants and seepage management.
Congress approved the plan in the Water Resources Development Act of 2000, Public Law 106-541. President Bill Clinton signed it on December 11, 2000. Section 601 of the law approved the plan “as a framework for modifications and operational changes” to the Central and Southern Florida Project. The goal was to “restore, preserve, and protect the South Florida ecosystem” while still meeting the region’s other water needs, including water supply and flood protection. When he signed the law, President Clinton described the plan as a partnership among federal, state, tribal and local leaders, and as a journey of more than 30 years.
What the 2000 Law Set Up
The law did more than name a goal. The text of Section 601 includes several provisions that still shape how restoration is organized:
- A shared partnership. The federal share of the cost of authorized projects was set at 50 percent. The non-federal sponsor was made responsible for the land, easements, rights-of-way and relocations the plan needs. The South Florida Water Management District describes CERP as a 50-50 partnership between the Army Corps of Engineers and the State of Florida, with the district as the state’s local sponsor.
- Water set aside for nature. Before most construction money could be spent, the law required a binding agreement between the President and Florida’s governor. Under that agreement, water produced by the plan could not be permitted for other uses until enough had been reserved for restoring the natural system. That agreement was signed on January 9, 2002, under President George W. Bush.
- A broad definition of the natural system. The law’s “natural system” includes water conservation areas, Everglades National Park, Biscayne National Park and Big Cypress National Preserve. It also covers other public conservation lands and tribal land designated and managed for conservation, as approved by the tribe.
- Outside review. The law called for an independent scientific review panel, convened by a body such as the National Academy of Sciences, to report to Congress every two years on progress toward the plan’s restoration goals.
The law also authorized a first group of pilot and initial projects. These included the C-44 Basin Storage Reservoir, the first phase of the Everglades Agricultural Area storage reservoirs and the Site 1 Impoundment. Other projects in the plan needed later approval.
Why 2000 Marks a Turning Point
The 2000 authorization did not finish restoration. It set a long-term framework, and the work has continued through later studies, approvals and construction. The status of individual projects is best checked through current releases from the Army Corps of Engineers and the South Florida Water Management District.
What changed in 2000 was the purpose of the system. The Everglades Law Center describes the aim as improving the quantity, quality, timing and distribution of water reaching the natural system. The same canals, levees and water-control structures that once served mainly drainage and flood control would now also be managed to help the ecosystem recover. For anyone looking across South Florida’s sawgrass today, the landscape reflects both periods of engineering.
Learning the history adds another dimension to the landscape. If you would like to see the Everglades for yourself, you can explore Miami Airboat’s tour options within the Everglades and Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area.
Sources
- U.S. Government Publishing Office, Public Law 106-541, Water Resources Development Act of 2000 (Section 601)
- The American Presidency Project (UC Santa Barbara), Statement on Signing the Water Resources Development Act of 2000, December 11, 2000
- The American Presidency Project, Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan Assurance of Project Benefits Agreement, January 9, 2002
- Federal Register, Programmatic Regulations for the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, November 12, 2003
- South Florida Water Management District, CERP Implementation
- South Florida Water Management District, History
- Everglades Law Center, Congress Enacts the Water Resources Development Act of 2000 and Authorizes CERP
