Everglades City, Florida — Stone-Crab Capital & the Gateway to the Ten Thousand Islands
Inside Everglades City, FL — Barron Collier's 1923 company town and Collier County's first seat — the Smallwood Store, the Rod and Gun Club, a working stone-crab waterfront, and the last harbor before the Ten Thousand Islands. October 2026 deep-dive from Florida Slice.
The Town at the<br/>End of the Road
Everglades City sits where the Barron River meets Chokoloskee Bay, at the western edge of the Everglades and the northern door of the Ten Thousand Islands. It is the smallest city in Collier County — 352 people at the 2020 census — and yet it was the county's first seat of government, the headquarters of Barron Gift Collier's empire, and the self-declared stone-crab capital of the world. From its docks, the mainland simply stops: beyond the last channel markers lies one of the wildest coastlines left in the lower 48.
History
A County Seat in the Mangroves
The town began as a company camp. When Collier County was created in 1923, advertising magnate Barron Gift Collier — its largest landowner and the man financing the Tamiami Trail across the Everglades — laid out Everglades City as his headquarters, and it became the new county's first seat. The 1928 courthouse, a two-story classical building raised after a hurricane destroyed its predecessor, still stands; when the county seat moved to East Naples decades later, the building became City Hall.
The town incorporated in 1953 as the Town of Everglades and took its present name in 1965. By then its identity had shifted from construction camp to fishing village: stone crabs, mullet, and the guide boats that carry visitors into the backcountry. Hurricane Donna tore through in 1960, one of the strongest storms ever to hit Florida, and the town rebuilt around the same waterfront it has always worked.
The Local Scene
Stone Crabs, Skiffs & the Store
Everglades City runs on the water. From October to May the stone-crab fleet works the Gulf, and the docks along the Barron River fill with traps and pickers. The 1906 Smallwood Store, raised on stilts on Chokoloskee Island, kept its shelves and ledgers intact and now operates as a museum — the best single room in Florida for understanding how the frontier coast traded. The Rod and Gun Club, in an 1864 house that Barron Collier turned into a private club in 1922, hosted presidents and film stars on the veranda above the river.
The town is also the practical gateway to Everglades National Park's northwest corner: the Gulf Coast Visitor Center stands at the edge of town, and from there the Ten Thousand Islands begin — a maze of mangrove keys and shallow bays reached by tour boat, charter skiff, or kayak. Airboats run the brackish creeks outside the park boundary.
Arrival
Where the Map Gives Up
State Road 29 ends in Everglades City, and so does a certain kind of Florida. South and west of the town circle there are no more roads — only channels, marked by posts, threading between mangrove islands that have never been settled. The Ten Thousand Islands begin at the edge of the harbor and run for sixty miles toward Cape Sable.
That geography explains the town's whole history. It was never a place you passed through; it was a place you launched from. Barron Collier launched a highway from it. Fishermen launched mullet skiffs and crab boats from it. Today the National Park Service launches its boats from the same shore.
The Record
What the Waterfront Kept
For a town of a few hundred people, Everglades City preserves an unusual share of its past. The Smallwood Store survived because its family never modernized it — the stock on the shelves is the stock that was there. The 1928 courthouse survived by changing jobs. The Rod and Gun Club survived as a club. The Museum of the Everglades, in the old laundry, holds the Tamiami Trail story.
The result is a place where the twentieth century is still legible at street level — and where the older record, the Calusa shell works of Chokoloskee and the islands, sits just offshore in the park's wilderness.