Everglades City Town Guide: Stone Crabs, the Smallwood Store and the Ten Thousand Islands
Everglades City is the last harbor on the mainland before the Ten Thousand Islands. Barron Collier built it as a company town in 1923, it served as the first seat of Collier County, and today it runs on stone crabs, boats and the edge of Everglades National Park.
The Rod and Gun Club
An 1864 house that Barron Collier turned into a private club in 1922, with a veranda above the Barron River.
The Smallwood Store
The 1906 trading post on stilts on Chokoloskee Island, kept with its shelves and ledgers and now a museum.
Stone-crab season
From October to May the fleet works the Gulf and the docks fill with traps.
The Ten Thousand Islands
The Gulf Coast side of Everglades National Park begins at the town's waterfront.
History
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, raised after a hurricane destroyed the first, now serves as City Hall on the town circle. The county government later moved to Naples.
The town incorporated in 1953 as the Town of Everglades and took the name Everglades City in 1965. Hurricane Donna struck in 1960, one of the strongest storms in Florida's history, and the town rebuilt around the same waterfront.
Culture
For a town of 352 people at the 2020 census, Everglades City keeps an unusual share of its past. The 1906 Smallwood Store on Chokoloskee Island, raised on stilts, still holds its original stock and ledgers as a museum on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Museum of the Everglades, a Collier County Museums branch in the 1927 laundry building, tells the story of the Tamiami Trail and the company town. The Rod and Gun Club, an 1864 riverfront house that became a private club in 1922, remains the town's social landmark.
Businesses
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. Only the claws are taken; the crabs go back into the water.
Licensed guides, charter skiffs, park boat tours and kayak outfitters carry visitors into the backcountry, and airboats run the brackish creeks outside the park boundary.
The park and the islands
Everglades National Park's Gulf Coast Visitor Center stands at the edge of town. From there the Ten Thousand Islands begin — a roadless maze of mangrove keys and shallow bays that runs about sixty miles toward Cape Sable.
State Road 29 ends here, about 35 miles southeast of Naples. South and west of the town circle there are only marked channels between mangrove islands.
Reading the town in a day
Start at the Smallwood Store on Chokoloskee, stop at the Museum of the Everglades and the old courthouse on the circle, spend midday on the water in the Ten Thousand Islands from the Gulf Coast Visitor Center, and end with stone crab in season near the Barron River.
Read the full city record at /cities/everglades-city.
Photo credit
Rod and Gun Club, Everglades City, by Ebyabe via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Everglades_City_FL_Rod_and_Gun_Club01.jpg