Barron Collier and the County He Bought With a Road

Barron Gift Collier was a Memphis-born advertising entrepreneur who invented the concept of selling advertising space inside streetcars, made himself a millionaire, and then decided that southwest Florida was where he wanted to leave his mark on the world. He began buying land in the region in the nineteen teens and eventually accumulated more than one million acres, making him the largest private landowner in Florida. He loved the territory and intended to develop it, but development required infrastructure, and infrastructure required a road.

The state of Florida was attempting to complete the Tamiami Trail, a road connecting Tampa and Miami through the Everglades, but had run out of money on the most difficult stretch: the long, sodden crossing through the swamps from the Ten Thousand Islands coast east toward Miami. Collier offered to fund the completion of that stretch himself, millions of dollars of private capital for a public road, in exchange for a single favor. He wanted a county named after him.

The Florida state legislature agreed, and on May eighth, nineteen twenty-three, Collier County was carved out of Lee County, taking with it the territory that included Naples. Collier funded the construction. Workers using a method called rock plowing dragged heavy equipment through the muck and limestone to build the roadbed through one of the most inhospitable stretches of wetland on the continent.

The Tamiami Trail officially opened on April twenty-sixth, nineteen twenty-eight. Barron Collier died in nineteen thirty-nine, eleven years after the road opened. He had built its essential connective tissue and made Naples accessible to the twentieth century in exchange for the honor of the name on the map.