The Rod & Gun Club: Everglades City History

From Homestead to Trading Post

Long before Everglades City had a name most visitors could find on a map, this bend of the Barron River held nothing but a homestead. Local history places the first structure on the site back in the 1860s, decades before this stretch of coast had anything resembling a town. By the 1880s and 1890s, the Storter family had taken the property over and grown it into a trading post and a rough hunting-and-fishing lodge for the little river settlement they ran, which everyone at the time simply called Everglade. Guides, gunners and backcountry travelers passed through on their way into the Ten Thousand Islands, trading fish, hides and supplies before pushing off into a mangrove maze that still confuses first-time visitors today. The Storters’ Everglade was the kind of frontier river outpost you read about in old Florida guidebooks — isolated, self-sufficient, and reachable mostly by water. That isolation is a running theme through the whole story of Everglades City, and it’s exactly why the little lodge on the river stayed a well-kept regional secret for decades before it became a name recognized well beyond Southwest Florida.

Barron Collier’s Private Club

Everything changed in the early 1920s, when developer Barron Collier bought out the Storter family’s holdings as part of assembling the land empire that became Collier County. Collier renamed the settlement Everglades City, made it his company town, and poured resources into finishing the Tamiami Trail through some of the wettest, wildest ground in Florida. He needed a place to entertain the engineers, investors, politicians and journalists whose goodwill the road-building project depended on — and the old river lodge was perfectly positioned for it. Collier rebuilt and expanded the property into the white clapboard clubhouse still standing today, with a cypress-paneled trophy room, screened porches strung along the water, and a private dock for the boats that were, for years, the only reliable way in or out of town. He named it the Rod & Gun Club, and it operated as a members-only retreat for the kind of company Collier kept: the people who could get a highway built through the Everglades, and the people who wanted nothing more than a few days chasing fish on a river most of the country had never heard of.

Presidents & Famous Guests

The Rod & Gun Club’s reputation as a first-class sportsman’s retreat is what put it on the map with the country’s most recognizable guests. Local history and the club’s own guest lore count several U.S. presidents among the anglers who made the trip down the Tamiami Trail to fish the Barron River and the passes beyond it — names commonly attached to the story include Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower — along with a steady stream of business titans, politicians and, later, Hollywood names drawn by the same thing that pulled everyone else in: water most people couldn’t reach on their own. Take the guest-list lore with the grain of salt any small-town legend deserves; not every name in every retelling is independently documented. But the pattern behind it is real. Everglades City was, for decades, one of the only ways into genuinely wild backcountry fishing in Southwest Florida, and the Rod & Gun Club was the only address in town nice enough to put a president up for the night. An exclusive lodge sitting on a fishery this good is exactly what built the legend that still draws history buffs and anglers off the beaten path today.

The Fishery That Built the Legend

What actually pulled all those famous names to a remote river town wasn’t the trophy room — it was what swam past the dock. The Barron River empties into the same tidal maze of passes, oyster bars and mangrove shorelines that our boats still run today, and it remains one of the better tarpon and snook fisheries on Florida’s Gulf coast. Tarpon here are catch-and-release only, full stop, and snook fishing is seasonal and regulated — the same rules any licensed fishing charter along this coast operates under now, with a single vessel license covering every paying guest aboard. The presidents and celebrities who fished out of the Rod & Gun Club weren’t casting into a stocked pond; they were working the same wild, tide-driven water that makes the Ten Thousand Islands one of the last true backcountry fisheries left in the state. That part of the story hasn’t changed a bit. The passes silt in and scour out differently year to year and the mangrove shorelines shift with every storm, but the fish are still there, and a captain who reads this water the way the old Storter guides did can still put you on them.

Visiting Today

The Rod & Gun Club still operates on the Barron River in Everglades City, with rooms, a restaurant and the same riverside porch that hosted a century of guests before you. It’s weathered plenty since Collier’s day, including the 2017 storm surge from Hurricane Irma that flooded low-lying downtown Everglades City along with it, and it’s still worth a stop on the way to Chokoloskee or the Ten Thousand Islands backcountry, if only to stand on the dock and picture the boats that used to line up there. But the honest truth is that the club today is a building you look at, not the water you fish — the fishery that made it famous sits out past the mouth of the river, in the passes and mangrove shorelines a private boat or guided charter actually reaches. If you want to experience what drew every one of those famous names down the Trail, that’s the part we can put you on directly: a run through the same backcountry, past the same kind of water Collier’s guests once fished, aboard a private charter built for exactly this stretch of coast. Dig into more of the real, documented stories behind this coast on our local history hub before you go.