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The Tamiami Trail: A Road That Changed the Everglades

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.