The Tamiami Trail: Thirteen Years, Eight Million Dollars, a Swamp Defeated

The road that connects Fort Myers to Miami, the stretch of United States Highway Forty-One that runs south and east through the Everglades, was one of the most difficult engineering projects in the history of American road building. It is called the Tamiami Trail, a compression of Tampa and Miami, and it took thirteen years and eight million dollars to build at a time when Florida was not a wealthy state.

The idea started in Fort Myers. In nineteen fifteen, civic leaders from Fort Myers and Miami began agitating for a coastal highway linking Tampa to Miami. Their plan required crossing miles of the Everglades, terrain that was, at the time, largely unmapped and entirely roadless. Alligators, water moccasins, water up to the axles, and limestone bedrock just below the surface all conspired against the builders.

Progress stalled repeatedly for lack of money. The project finally gathered enough momentum in nineteen twenty-three when Barron Collier, a New York advertising magnate who had bought enormous tracts of south Florida land, agreed to fund the last difficult stretch through the Everglades. In exchange, the Legislature created a new county named after him. The bargain worked.

Workers used more than two and a half million sticks of dynamite to blast a roadbed through the limestone. They dredged a canal alongside the road so the excavated rock could be pushed into a continuous fill. It was brutal work in brutal conditions.

The Tamiami Trail officially opened on April twenty-sixth, nineteen twenty-eight. It made Florida accessible in a new way, stitching together the coasts and opening the Everglades to the commerce, settlement, and ultimately the agricultural drainage that transformed the region forever. Whether the road was a triumph or a catastrophe depends somewhat on whether you ask a farmer or an ecologist.