Everglades City History: Collier’s Company Town

Before Collier: the Storter trading post

Long before anyone platted a street grid here, this stretch of the Barron River was a trading post the locals just called Everglade. The Storter family ran it, doing business with Seminole traders, backcountry fishermen and cane farmers who had no other way to reach the outside world except by boat. There was no road in, and there still isn’t much of one out to the barrier islands and shell mounds around it — you still need a hull to see most of what made this stretch of coast worth settling in the first place. A few miles south, the Smallwood family was running a near-identical operation on the shell mound at Chokoloskee, trading with the same isolated fishing families and Seminole communities scattered through the Ten Thousand Islands. Everglade was small, remote and thoroughly out of the way — exactly the kind of place a Gulf Coast fortune could remake overnight.

Barron Collier builds a company town

Barron Collier didn’t make his money in Florida. He made it selling advertising space on streetcars up north, then went looking for land to sink it into. Starting in the 1910s he bought up an enormous stretch of Southwest Florida swamp and coastline, and by the early 1920s he’d set his sights on the little trading post at Everglade. Collier didn’t just buy it — he rebuilt it from the ground up as a planned company town, laying out streets on a grid and putting up a bank, a hotel and a city hall, then renaming the place Everglades City. Read the full story of the man behind the name on our Barron Collier page. Workers, engineers and Collier’s own money poured in, and for a few years this remote river town looked less like a fishing outpost and more like a company’s idea of what a Florida county seat should look like.

Headquarters for the Tamiami Trail

Collier didn’t rebuild Everglades City for its own sake. He wanted a highway. The Tamiami Trail — the road meant to finally connect Tampa to Miami straight across the Everglades — had stalled for lack of money, defeated for years by sawgrass, limestone and swamp. Collier struck a deal with the state: he’d bankroll finishing the trail through his territory in exchange for a brand-new county carved out and named after him. Everglades City became the operations base for that push, the place where dredges, dynamite crews and rock haulers staged their advance on the Everglades a few miles at a time. The full grind of that construction, and how brutal it actually was, is its own story on our Tamiami Trail page. The road finally opened in 1928, and Everglades City had earned its keep as the town that built it.

Collier County's first seat of government

The deal paid off in 1923, when the state carved Collier County out of Lee County and named Everglades City its seat. For a brand-new county that was mostly mangrove, sawgrass and open water, that meant the courthouse, the bank and the county offices all sat in a town Collier had built on purpose, on a river most residents could only reach by boat. It was an odd capital for an odd county — more people lived scattered through fish camps and backcountry islands than in any single town, and Everglades City functioned as the government seat for a county that barely had the population to fill it. For a while, that arrangement held. The town had the buildings, the bank and the backing of Collier’s fortune to carry the role.

Hurricane Donna and the move to Naples

Everglades City sits low, close to the river and close to the Gulf — which is exactly what made it vulnerable when Hurricane Donna came through in September 1960. The storm surge flooded the town, damaged homes and businesses, and made painfully clear how exposed a low-lying river town really is when a major hurricane tracks straight over it. Naples, by contrast, sat higher and drier and was already growing fast. In the years that followed, Collier County’s government offices relocated to Naples, and Everglades City’s run as county seat came to an end. The town didn’t disappear — it just stopped being the government hub Collier had built it to be, and settled back into what it had mostly always been underneath the bank buildings and street grid: a small fishing town on a beautiful, difficult stretch of water.

Gateway to the Ten Thousand Islands today

What Hurricane Donna took away turned out to preserve something. Everglades City never grew into a resort town or a suburb — it stayed small, stayed a fishing village, and leaned hard into the industry that had quietly outlasted the county courthouse: stone crab. Every October, boats here still run traps much the way crews have for generations, a tradition you can read more about on our stone crab industry page. The town’s other lasting role is as the front door to the Ten Thousand Islands and the Gulf Coast side of Everglades National Park, the same backcountry the Storters and the Smallwoods once ran trading posts through. If you want to see stone crab traps, redfish flats and the same mangrove maze firsthand, a fishing charter out of this coast puts you right in it. And if it’s the history you’re after, this town’s whole story — the trading post, the company town, the hurricane, the quiet comeback — reads best from a boat threading the same channels on a Ten Thousand Islands tour.