|
Building
of the Tamiami Trail
In the early days, there
was no feasible means of transportation to make the area
easily accessible. That is why the Tamiami Trail was so desperately needed.
Unfortunately, the state ran out of money.
Barron Collier
 made a deal with the state
that if he finished the road through the area today known as
Collier County, the state in turn would name a county after
him. A retired naval officer and engineer D. Graham Copeland,
was assigned the seemingly impossible task of building a town
in the Florida wilderness as a site for directing construction
work on both the Trail, and a new highway and railbed north,
to Immokalee.
By the time the state road
department came to his aid three years later in 1926, Collier
had sunk over $1 million in earnings from his streetcar
advertising business into construction of the Tamiami Trail.
The final cost was a staggering $8million, or about
$25,000 a mile.
Our original county seat
was in Everglades City, which was the hub of Collier holdings.
This town was built out of the swampland, and it was
isolated even after the trail was finished.
Businesses began to move toward Naples in the 1950’s,
and after Hurricane Donna hit in the fall of 1960, Collier
Enterprises moved to Naples.
|
The
completion of the Tamiami Trail across the
Everglades
in 1928, opened isolated Seminole camps to the
rapid tourist development of southwest Florida.
