16 Feb A History of Everglades National Park: Palms and Ponds at Anhinga Trail
An anhinga with its wings outstretched. A cormorant gulping down a fish. Alligators basking on the bank. These were the things that grabbed my attention the first time I visited Everglades National Park’s Anhinga Trail. It wouldn’t be until several visits later that I would venture onto the adjacent Gumbo Limbo Trail to wander through Royal Palm Hammock, and it wasn’t until I began work on my newly published Everglades National Park pictorial history book a couple of decades later that I gave much thought to what this iconic area might have been before. Clearly the parking lot, buildings, and boardwalk were added by the Park, but what of the very attraction itself? Was this pond that teams with life in wet and dry season alike also a human construct?
The deep fresh waters of Taylor Slough drew indigenous fishermen to the area for thousands of years; but this particular spot, idyllically called Paradise Key, first drew modern attention because of its uplands. It was a forest of tropical trees, ferns, orchids, bromeliads and its crowning glory, royal palms that towered 100 feet up into the sky to merit the name Palm Hammock. These magnificent palms now line many a Florida road but at the time this was one of only a few known natural royal palm forests in Florida, all others occurring across the Florida Straits in Cuba. These palms lured early botanists and nurserymen in the late 1800s to slog for several days through flooded pinelands and sawgrass marsh to study and bring these plants into cultivation. Paradise Key was a special, isolated spot, though eventually not beyond the reach of development. In 1915, a road was plowed through the middle of this unique forest to access lands Henry Flagler’s company had received as compensation for building the Florida East Coast Railway to Key West in order to make them available for sale. Fortunately, there were a few who believed the forest was too precious to simply be bulldozed and developed.
One of Coconut Grove’s early environmentalists, Mary Barr Munroe, led the movement to protect this piece of paradise. She recruited May Mann Jennings, a skilled politician conveniently married to past Florida governor William Jennings, and the Florida Federation of Women’s Clubs to help. They eventually succeeded in protecting the hammock and 900 acres of what became the Royal Palm State Park in 1916. An impressive crowd gathered beneath the palms to dedicate the new park and yet here is where the irony begins, an irony that seems to replay throughout history. While the park was successfully established, there was no money. The Women’s Clubs needed to raise funds for its protection and maintenance, a task that involved attracting and caring for visitors. It began modestly enough with a rustic lodge set in these special woods, but it became more elaborate in the 1930s when the Civilian Conservation Corps stationed there for half a year to assist with tourist-attracting improvements. It was then that bulldozers, dynamite, and cement, elements the park was established to prevent, created a lily pond, a tiki overlook, and a 10-acre deer feeding pen, all improvements that altered and distracted from the wonderous forest the site intended to protect.
Today Anhinga Trail is known as a wetland site, a giant alligator hole housing iconic Everglades’ animals throughout the year; yet what alligator could establish a pond of this size? The very reason we know the area was an ancient fishing hole is because artifacts were uncovered during a 1960s dredging done to maintain this now so important wildlife habitat during years of drought. It is a feature that humans have helped perpetuate, and this is nothing new in the Everglades. This is a resilient landscape that evolved alongside people. Palm Hammock mostly burned to the ground in the 1940s and after recovery was leveled by two hurricanes. It’s a cycle that will no doubt repeat but as my co-author Jim Kushlan and I recently explored Gumbo Limbo Trail, there were still royal palms towering above and many smaller ones regenerating the forest below. We slipped off the trail into a dense thicket of tropical trees and there, in the middle of the woods, still stands the 1933 stone building that was once part of the deer feeding station. It’s the park’s oldest building, a reminder of the women whose efforts set the stage for the eventual establishment of Everglades National Park and a reminder that given the opportunity, mother nature can reclaim what once was hers.
Learn more about the natural and human history of Everglades National Park in my latest book. Please join James Kushlan and me for a 75th Anniversary Book Talk hosted by the Florida National Parks Association at the Coral Gables Museum on February 24. RSVP here.
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