Everglades City gets a million visitors a year but only 350 people actually live there

Everglades City’s deep history on Broadway

Everglades City sits about 35 miles east of Naples, tucked between the Ten Thousand Islands and the vast sawgrass wilderness most people only see from an airplane.

About 350 people live here year-round, but close to a million visitors pass through annually, drawn by the water, the wildlife, and something that feels like Florida before Florida became Florida.

The museum in the middle of town is a good place to start, and it won’t cost you a dime.

The pink building has been through more than you’d think

The Museum of the Everglades sits at 105 W. Broadway in a pink building that turns heads before you even walk in.

Barron Gift Collier had it built in 1927 as a commercial steam laundry, designed by architect William O. Sparklin, who also drew up the first Collier County Courthouse and the Bank of Everglades building.

Laundry workers kept linens clean for guests at the nearby Rod and Gun Club and for the crews building the Tamiami Trail. When World War II hit, the workers left, and the building closed.

Decades of odd uses before it found its purpose

After the laundry shut down, the building spent decades reinventing itself. A barber shop moved in.

Then an insurance office. At one point it housed a pizza restaurant.

The Everglades Women’s Club bought it in 1965, and in 1988 gifted it to Collier County on one condition: it had to operate as a museum, always. Restoration work started in 1997.

Workers raised the structure to limit storm surge damage and added an accessible entrance ramp. The museum opened in April 1998, right on the 70th anniversary of the Tamiami Trail’s completion.

Step inside and 2,000 years start talking

Self-guided tours run about an hour, and volunteers are on hand if you have questions.

The permanent exhibits pull you through more than 2,000 years of life in South Florida, starting with the Calusa people and the Seminole and moving through pioneer settlers, tomato farming and grapefruit canning.

A large section takes on the Tamiami Trail with photographs and storyboards that show what it actually took to punch a highway through the Everglades.

In the back room, mannequins and original equipment recreate the laundry as it ran in the 1920s.

The road they blasted through solid rock and deep swamp

The Tamiami Trail runs 273 miles connecting Tampa to Miami, crossing straight through the Everglades.

Construction in Collier County started in 1923 with a crew of just 15 men who moved at four-tenths of a mile per month. Heat, mosquitoes, alligators, snakes, solid limestone, and deep swamp slowed everything.

The amount of dynamite used, if laid end to end, would have stretched from Jacksonville to San Francisco.

The trail finally opened April 25, 1928, with a motorcade carrying the governor and Barron Collier from Tampa to Miami.

One man bought nearly the whole county

Barron Gift Collier didn’t build just a road. He built a county.

The advertising businessman started buying land in Southwest Florida in the early 1920s and eventually controlled roughly 90 percent of what is now Collier County.

He cut a deal with the state: he would finish funding the Tamiami Trail, and in return, a new county would carry his name. The Florida Legislature agreed in 1923, with Everglades City as the county seat.

Collier then built the town up himself, adding a hospital, movie theater, trolley, and railroad depot.

A 1960 hurricane reset the town’s entire future

Hurricane Donna hit Southwest Florida on Sept. 10, 1960, with winds estimated near 150 mph. Floodwaters rose about seven feet deep in Everglades City’s streets, and roughly half the buildings went down.

Two years later, the county seat moved to East Naples. The town never rebuilt to what it had been.

But it didn’t disappear either.

It stayed a tight fishing community, and that’s largely what it remains today, with a small year-round population and a slow pace that the storm, oddly enough, helped preserve.

Presidents ate lunch here, and the club still serves dinner

One block from the museum, the Everglades Rod and Gun Club sits on the Barron River. The site goes back to the 1870s, when Everglades City founder William Smith Allen built a home there.

George Storter opened a trading post on the property in 1892. Collier bought it in the 1920s and turned it into a private retreat for wealthy sportsmen.

President Truman lunched there in 1947 when he dedicated Everglades National Park. Several other presidents visited over the years.

The Bowen family has run it as a lodge and restaurant since the early 1970s.

Chokoloskee Island sits three miles away and feels like another era

Cross the causeway from Everglades City and you land on Chokoloskee Island, which rises about 20 feet above sea level because of shell mounds built up by Native Americans over thousands of years.

Ted Smallwood opened a trading post there in 1906 that served both pioneer families and the Seminole. The Smallwood Store has sat on the National Register of Historic Places since 1974 and reopened as a museum in 1990.

About 90 percent of the original goods are still inside, on shelves and in bins exactly as they were.

Ten Thousand Islands wait right outside the town’s back door

Everglades City marks the start of the Ten Thousand Islands, a maze of mangrove islands running along the Gulf Coast inside Everglades National Park.

The National Park Service authorizes boat tours from town out into that maze, where you can spot dolphins, manatees, sea turtles, and dozens of bird species working the shallows.

For paddlers, the 99-mile Wilderness Waterway from Everglades City to Flamingo is a serious multi-day route, usually taking about eight days.

Kayaking, canoeing, and fishing pull visitors out onto the water every day of the year.

Airboats cut through mangrove tunnels at full throttle

If you’ve never been on an airboat, Everglades City is one of the best places in Florida to fix that.

Local companies run tours through private reserves and into winding mangrove tunnels where the tree canopy closes over your head.

Alligators are common sightings, along with great blue herons, egrets, ospreys, and the occasional bald eagle.

Many boats have two-way headsets so you can hear your captain talk about the wildlife and the landscape while the flat-bottomed hull skims across water that’s sometimes only inches deep.

Stone crabs and seafood festivals mark the calendar here

The town runs on stone crab season, which opens mid-October and runs through mid-May.

Everglades City calls itself the Stone Crab Capital of the World, and the fishermen who work these waters take that seriously.

Every year on the first weekend in February, the Everglades Seafood Festival draws thousands of visitors to a town that otherwise holds about 350 people.

Historic buildings fill the small downtown: the Old Collier County Courthouse, now City Hall, still stands, along with the Bank of Everglades building that Sparklin designed the same year as the laundry.

Visit the Museum of the Everglades in Florida

The Museum of the Everglades sits at 105 W. Broadway Ave. in Everglades City and admission is free every day it’s open.

You’ll find it open Tuesday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Plan on an hour for the self-guided tour, though knowledgeable volunteers are usually on hand if you want to dig deeper into any of the exhibits.

The building is ADA accessible with on-site parking.

It’s also part of the Collier County Museums system, which includes four other free museums across the region.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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