The Road That Drained a Swamp

The road takes its name from the two cities at its ends. Tampa on the Gulf, Miami on the Atlantic, with the word Tamiami stretched between them the way the pavement is. It opened on April 25, 1928, the first road ever to cross the Everglades, 264 miles of it laid over country that had never carried anything heavier than a canoe. There were speeches and a motorcade. Hardly anyone at the ceremony understood that the road was also a dam.

Water had always left South Florida slowly. It spilled out of Lake Okeechobee and spread into a sheet sixty miles wide and a few inches deep, drifting south so gently that you could wade into it and never see it move. Marjory Stoneman Douglas gave that sheet the name people still use, the River of Grass. The Trail was built straight across the current.

The push to build it came out of the Florida of the 1920s, a state in the grip of a land boom and sure that the way to sell the interior was to make it reachable. A road from Tampa to Miami would open the southwest coast, Fort Myers and Naples and the new town sites, to buyers driving down from the north. The Everglades in between was treated less as a living system than as an obstacle to be crossed and, where it could be, drained and sold.

Eleven Years of Blasting

Construction started in 1916 and nearly died there. Laying a roadbed across open swamp cost far more than anyone had budgeted, and within a few years the money was gone. The project was rescued by one man. Barron Collier, an advertising millionaire from the north, had bought close to a million acres of southwest Florida and needed a way to reach it. In 1923 he offered to pay for the stalled western leg out of his own pocket, better than half a million dollars, on a single condition. The legislature would carve a new county out of Lee and Dade and put his name on it. It did. Collier County was drawn on the map in 1923 for a road that would not open for another five years.

The work itself looked more like mining than roadbuilding. There was almost no soil to push around, only limestone lying a few feet beneath the muck, so the crews drilled into the rock and blew it up. The common estimate is around three million sticks of dynamite in Collier County alone. Each blast helped open a canal along one side of the route, and the broken rock dug out of that canal became the bed the road rode on. A walking dredge crept across the swamp on its own feet, digging as it went. The men worked in heat and mud and clouds of mosquitoes, far from any town, living in camps strung along the half built line. Eleven years and roughly seven million dollars after the first charge, the Trail finally ran coast to coast.

What It Carried

For people behind the wheel, the Trail was a wonder. It ran arrow straight through cypress heads and sawgrass, past gator holes and rafts of wading birds, opening a piece of Florida that most of the state had only heard described. For the Seminole and Miccosukee families who had lived in the Everglades for generations, it landed differently. The highway brought tourists to the door of their camps and drew them into a cash economy of crafts and roadside stops, and at the same time the canal running beside it began drawing the water out of the country they depended on.

The Cork in the Bottle

The harm took decades to read in full. The roadbed ran east to west, square across a flow that moved north to south, and it behaved exactly the way a wall behaves. Water piled up on the north side, in the basins now called the Water Conservation Areas, and everything below the road went short. Starved of fresh water, the lower Everglades began to unravel. Tree islands shrank. Seagrass died in broad brown patches across Florida Bay. Algae bloomed where the water turned too salty and too still. Fires burned down into peat that should have stayed too wet to catch. The huge nesting colonies of wading birds, once thick enough to cloud the sky at dusk, thinned out season after season, and even the alligators that dig and keep the gator holes through the dry months fell off. The builders had meant to join two cities. They had not meant to cut a river in half, but that is what the road did.

Collier County was drawn on the map in 1923, for a road that would not open for another five years.

Removing the Cork

When the repair finally came, it amounted to taking part of the road back out. Engineers use a plain phrase for it, removing the cork in the bottle. Rather than a solid berm, long sections of the Trail now stand on bridges, so the sheet of water can slide underneath and reach the national park and the bay it had been shut off from since 1928. A one mile bridge opened in 2013. A longer span, better than two miles of it, followed before the decade was out.

None of this registered as loss for a long time. Everglades National Park was established in 1947 near the southern end of the country the Trail had cut off, and for years the park slowly starved without anyone tying the shortage to the road across its top. Only as the science caught up did the Trail come to stand for a whole way of thinking about Florida, the habit of solving a problem in a straight line and finding the bill much later. The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, approved in 2000, made undoing some of that damage an official project running to billions of dollars, and the bridges on the Trail are among its most visible pieces.

We keep the photographs from the building years. Men standing waist deep in black water. A dredge parked against a wall of sawgrass. An early car making the crossing with marl dried halfway up its doors. They are worth holding onto for a plain reason. They show a decision being made, the moment a state chose a straight line over a river and then spent the next hundred years learning the price of it.