Everglades

Historic Smallwood Store

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Back in February, we got the opportunity to head down to Chokoloskee Island on the western edge of the Everglades in the heart of the Ten Thousand Islands and tour the fascinating Historic Smallwood Store. Opened in 1906 by Ted Smallwood, the Smallwood Store served as a vital trading post in the area until 1982 and has since been converted into a museum that features a “time capsule of Florida pioneer history,” according to the official website. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Questionable Name of Progress

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“Now, of course, having failed in every attempt to subdue the Glades by frontal attack, we are slowly killing it off by tapping the River of Grass. In the questionable name of progress, the state in its vast wisdom lets every two-bit developer divert the flow into drag-lined canals that give him ‘waterfront’ lots to sell. As far north as Corkscrew Swamp, virgin stands of ancient bald cypress are dying. All the area north of Copeland had been logged out, and will never come back. As the glades dry, the big fires come with increasing frequency. The ecology is changing with egret colonies dwindling, mullet getting scarce, mangrove dying of new diseases born of dryness.” ― John D. MacDonald, Bright Orange for the Shroud (1965)

A River of Grass

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“There are no other Everglades in the world. They are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth, remote, never wholly known. Nothing anywhere else is like them; their vast glittering openness, wider than the enormous visible round of the horizon, the racing free saltness and sweetness of the their massive winds, under the dazzling blue heights of space. They are unique also in the simplicity, the diversity, the related harmony of the forms of life they enclose. The miracle of the light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slow-moving below, the grass and water that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades of Florida. It is a river of grass.” —Marjory Stoneman Douglas, The Everglades: River of Grass, 1947