How Everglades City Became the Stone Crab Capital

How Everglades City Became the Stone Crab Capital

Everglades City’s story starts with mangroves, not crab traps. George Storter Jr. built a trading post here in the late 1800s, and the town stayed a quiet river settlement until Barron Collier bought the surrounding land in the 1920s, pushed the Tamiami Trail through the Everglades, and made Everglades City the seat of his brand-new Collier County in 1923. The town Collier built ran on mullet fishing and winter vegetables, not claws. Down the block, the Rod & Gun Club was hosting presidents and industrialists the same years local families were running trotlines and hauling net skiffs out of the Barron River, the working waterfront and the tourist front growing up side by side.

Stone crabs were always here. The maze of mangrove islands, tidal creeks and grass flats that make up the Ten Thousand Islands is close to ideal crab habitat, skinny water, soft bottom, and enough tidal flow to keep the flats productive year-round. Local crews fished for them as a side catch for decades, running a handful of wire traps between mullet runs. It’s one thread in the wider story of this coast, but it took a change in the rest of the fishing economy to turn stone crab from a side hustle into the industry the town is now known for, and that change arrived in a single summer.

Some of the names behind this fishery are documented well beyond the docks. Totch Santini, the Chokoloskee-born fisherman whose memoir "Totch: A Life in the Everglades" traces a life that ran from moonshining and gator poaching to legitimate commercial fishing, spent his later working years pulling stone crab traps in these same backwaters. His story is an extreme version of a pattern that shows up across the fleet: families whose working lives spanned several fisheries and several eras of Everglades City history long before the rest of the town was forced to follow.

Why the Claw-Only Harvest Makes This One of America’s Most Renewable Fisheries

What makes the harvest remarkable is what doesn’t get taken. A stone crab harvester works a trap line, pulls a legal-size crab aboard, twists off one claw at the joint, and puts the crab back in the water alive. Left alone, that crab can regrow the claw over roughly a year to eighteen months and get caught again down the road, the rest of the animal is never harmed if the crew handles it right. Compare that to almost any other commercial fishery, where the whole animal comes out of the water, and it’s easy to see why stone crab claws are held up as one of the most renewable harvests in American fishing.

That biology is the whole reason a small fishing town could build a permanent industry on a single species. A trap line worked responsibly for one season can be worked again the next, and the next, because the crabs stay in the population instead of leaving it. It’s also why the practice has stuck around with so little controversy compared to other Gulf fisheries: the crab that gave up a claw off Chokoloskee this fall is very likely still working the same flat, one claw lighter, when the traps go back in next season.

From Mullet Nets to Crab Traps: How the 1995 Net Ban Reshaped the Fleet

For most of the 20th century, mullet was the backbone of Everglades City’s fishing economy. Roe mullet, run through smokehouses and shipped out by the truckload, kept net boats working the passes and back bays around Chokoloskee and Goodland. Stone crab traps were something crews set on the side, mostly in the cooler months when mullet schools thinned out. Then, in November 1994, Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment banning large entangling nets in state waters, and by July 1995 the ban was law. For netting families who had fished these waters for generations, the change was close to overnight: a primary livelihood was gone.

What happened next is the real hinge point in this story. Rather than leave the water, most Everglades City and Chokoloskee families who had already been running a few stone crab traps went all in, adding rigs, boats and permits and building out full-time trap operations. Blue crab trapping grew alongside it. Within a few seasons, the harbor that had been built on mullet nets was full of stacked wire stone crab traps every fall, and the industry that had been a side catch became the town’s main event. It’s the reason Everglades City wears the stone crab capital title today instead of a mullet-town nickname from an earlier era.

What the Working Trap Fleet Looks Like Today

Run out through the channels around Everglades City and Chokoloskee once the season’s underway and you’ll see the fleet’s fingerprint everywhere: strings of numbered buoys marking trap lines across the grass flats and passes, each one tied to a specific harvester’s permit. A captain who works these waters can read a trap line the way you’d read a street sign, whose gear it is, how fresh the sets are, which flats are producing. That local knowledge, passed boat to boat and generation to generation, is as much a part of the industry’s identity as the traps themselves. In the weeks before opening day, the docks around the Barron River fill with stacked traps and coiled rope waiting to go back out, a working scene that hasn’t changed much in shape even as the boats and gear have modernized around it.

The town leans into it, too. Everglades City throws its Everglades Seafood Festival every February, built around the claw harvest that carries its name statewide. If you want to plan a visit around the harvest itself, our stone crab season itinerary lays out what a trip looks like start to finish; if you’re after the species itself, size, habitat, how the claw regenerates, our fish guide covers the biology. Either way, the best seat for watching this industry work is still the deck of a boat, on a fishing charter that runs these same backwaters every day of the season.