For Sale —American Paradise

by Willie Drye

  Baker added that Warfield had nothing but praise for the Red Cross’s efforts in Florida, and invited Baker to visit his office in Washington sometime. Apparently, Warfield’s determined effort to discredit the Red Cross’s integrity wasn’t mentioned.

  Baker’s private comments to his colleagues when he returned to Washington are lost to history because there’s no record in the National Archives of what he said about his private meeting in Miami with Warfield, Romfh, and the others about the 1926 hurricane in the Red Cross files. But it’s likely that completing the construction of the Tamiami Trail was one of the Everglades “reclamation” projects they discussed.

  And another tycoon was pouring money into that project.

  Barron Collier had persuaded the Florida legislature to essentially give him his own county—a county larger than the state of Delaware—in 1923 in exchange for promising to complete the Tamiami Trail through the Everglades and his namesake county. If Collier hadn’t realized how difficult it would be to keep that promise when he made it, he certainly realized it three years later. And he may have been wondering if he’d have been better off promising to build a road to the moon instead.

  Today, the Tamiami Trail, 274 miles between Tampa and Miami, is part of US 41. Much of the Trail is lined with strip malls, shopping centers, franchise restaurants, convenience stores, and gated communities. And even along the stretches where development is restricted and the Everglades are relatively undisturbed, a motorist speeding along the wide asphalt highway at sixty miles an hour is not likely to notice much of what makes that stretch of road so unusual.

  But it is unusual—in fact, it’s one of the most unique stretches of highway in the world.

  “It leaps like a flung lance, blue-black in the blazing distance, shimmering with a mirage, clear and clean across the whole of South Florida,” author Marjory Stoneman Douglas said of the Tamiami Trail in her classic work, The Everglades: River of Grass. “Along it buses thunder between Miami and Fort Myers and Tampa, and automobiles and huge trucks. The road roars with their passing, but after that the silence flows back again, the ancient inviolable silence of the Everglades.”

  The Trail “reaches and vanishes from sky to sky; from dawns of pale silver and tangerine over the grape-colored ramparts of Gulf Stream clouds to sunsets in the blue winters like explosions of orange and bronze and brass,” Douglas wrote.

  “People rushing across it look and see nothing,” she continued. “‘But there’s nothing,’ they say. They see neither the Everglades nor the Trail’s drama.”

  For all of the exotic wildlife in the Everglades, it is indeed surprisingly quiet. Silence and stillness are mandatory for a first-time visitor to even begin to comprehend this strange and wonderful place.

  There’s a twenty-four-mile remnant of a branch of the original Tamiami Trail just off the modern US 41, about forty miles west of Miami. The road was rebuilt in places after Hurricane Wilma sent floodwaters across it and washed out some sections in 2005. The road remains unpaved and still resembles the Tamiami Trail as it was when it was opened nearly a century ago.

  A canal, created when the limestone underlying the Everglades muck was used to build the original roadbed, runs parallel to the Trail.

  It’s not unusual to see an alligator sunning on the far bank of the canal. If you get out of your car to take a photo of the gator, you begin to absorb the silence. And if you remain quiet and still and allow your eyes and your consciousness to adjust to the surroundings, sometimes you see the wildlife.

  Of course, it takes no adjustment to see the small, jet-black mosquitoes that immediately surround you. After a few moments of stillness, perhaps you’ll see turtles on a log; or a huge frog whose natural camouflage makes it nearly invisible in its surroundings; or several otters somberly watching you from the canal in the near distance; or a motionless anhinga perched on a limb, its wings spread to dry; or a thick, dark water moccasin gliding through the black water.

  You don’t see these things when you’re in a hurry.

  Suddenly a splash will break the silence. A turtle or a frog has dropped into the water, and instantly alligators you had no idea were so near rush from the grass and flora and hit the water in frenzied pursuit of whatever made the splash. That’s the drama Douglas alluded to.

  You hurry back to your car a bit shaken as you realize unseen deadly predators were watching you the entire time you were standing there.

  The wilderness seems endless and impenetrable and untamable. And Barron Collier promised to build a road through the wildest part of it.

  By September 1926, work on the Trail had been starting and stopping for ten years, and many people doubted it would ever be completed. Collier’s work crews still had thirty-one miles to go to reach the Dade County line.

  The national publicity about the September 1926 hurricane’s devastation in Miami may have spurred Collier to push to finish the trail as quickly as possible.

  Collier had made his fortune in advertising, and he understood how a public image affects business. With Miami on the ropes after the storm, Collier and other Florida boosters knew something was needed to boost morale and redirect the nation’s perception of Florida away from images of death and destruction.

  Otto Neal, who worked on the Tamiami Trail construction project, recalled that in late September 1926—when newspapers were full of stories about the hurricane’s devastation—he was told to report to the office of David Copeland, a former US Navy engineer that Collier had hired to supervise the work.

  Copeland asked Neal if they could push the road to the Dade County line by April 1, 1927. “He said that it HAD to be done,” Neal told the Collier County News shortly before the Tamiami Trail opened in late April 1928.

  Neal told Copeland that he thought they could make the deadline, but suggested that another piece of heavy equipment known as a “walking dredge” should be put on the job.

  Within a month, Collier had tracked down one of the remarkable contraptions, bought it, and shipped it to the job site.

  At first glance, the walking dredge, built in Bay City, Michigan, looked immovable. Seen in profile, the machine, made of steel beams, could be said to vaguely resemble a giant praying mantis. It was essentially a large scoop attached to a steel frame. The machine, which now sits at Collier-Seminole State Park near Naples, was so ingeniously designed that in 1993 it was designated a National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

  That designation gave the walking dredge the same historic significance as the Saturn V rocket that carried men into space between 1967 and 1972.

  The engine that powered the dredge sat on a large wooden platform on the steel frame, which was about forty feet wide by about thirty feet long. The operator’s controls were in front of the engine, and the engine and operator were protected by a shedlike wooden shelter with a tin roof.

  The platform and frame were supported by four wooden “shoes” at each corner of the machine. Two more shoes were at the center of the frame. Using a system of cables and pulleys, the operator could lift the four corner shoes off the ground so that the weight was temporarily supported by the middle shoes, and thus move the frame and platform forward about ten feet.

  A long boom in front of the platform supported a one-cubic-yard steel bucket with manganese teeth. The bucket could scoop up about 2,800 pounds of rock with each bite.

  But it was a long, grueling, and dangerous process to reach the point where the dredge could scoop up chunks of limestone and pile up the rock to be used for the roadbed. And it took a special kind of construction worker to plunge into the Everglades to build a road.

  Accounts vary about how many men died building the Tamiami Trail. Meece Ellis, who worked on the construction project for eight years, told the Orlando Sentinel in 1998 that only one man was killed. That man died when he fell off the platform of the dredge and hit his head on the bucket, Ellis said.

  But other other accounts sa
y that men died from construction accidents, alligator attacks, and snakebites.

  Many men who hired on with the construction project were former farm-hands from Georgia. The state’s cotton crop had been devastated by the boll weevil in the mid-1920s, and the south Georgia farm boys had heard that workers were needed to build the Trail. They were willing to work and live in horrendous conditions for a few dollars a day, plus room and board.

  The men had to literally take on the Everglades with just a few tools and their bare hands. And they surely saw the sights that had prompted Dr. Jacob Motte to describe the Glades as “a most hideous region” in 1837.

  “First a crew went forward through sawgrass and water and rocky hammocks with axes and machetes, cutting a trail,” Douglas wrote. “They worked up to the armpits in water, tormented with mosquitoes in the season, always watchful for rattlesnakes and the uncounted dark heads of moccasins. They lived, ate, and slept in muck and water.”

  The men lived in rolling sheds that were moved along as the work progressed. It took men of unusual toughness and determination to stick with this type of construction and see it through to the end.

  At one point, Collier was asked how many shifts he had at work building the Tamiami Trail.

  Three, he replied—one shift on the road down from Tampa looking for work, one shift working on the construction project, and one shift who’d quit the project and were going back to Tampa.

  “The men on the job were wonderful,” Otto Neal told the Collier County News in 1928. “Many would work all night Saturday and Sunday to get their machines in perfect order for the new attack Monday. The men seemed to realize the proportion of the work and the benefits that would be derived by the travelling public and wanted to see the thing through. They did their part—and they did it exceptionally well.”

  Undoubtedly there was some truth to Neal’s glowing recollection of his fellow workers. But the men who built the Tamiami Trail were not saints.

  Ray Crews, who would become the father of Harry Crews, a legendary writer and instructor at the University of Florida, followed a childhood friend from Georgia to join a Tamiami Trail construction crew. He was seventeen years old.

  “They were not violent men, but their lives were full of violence,” Harry Crews later wrote about his father’s experience. “When Daddy first went down to the Everglades, he started on a gang that cut the advance right-of-way and, consequently, was out of the main camp for days, at times for more than a week.”

  During one of their expeditions away from the camp, Ray Crews was nearly killed when a steel cable broke. It looked like an accident, but the teenager was certain that it was deliberate.

  “When he almost got killed working out there on the gang, [his friend] Cecil almost killed a man because of it,” Harry Crews wrote. “Daddy’s foreman was an old man, grizzled, stinking always of chewing tobacco and sweat and whiskey, and known through the construction company as a man mean as a bee-stung dog. He didn’t have to dislike you to hurt you, even cripple you.”

  There were few comforts for the construction gang, most of them rough young men with no outlet for their hormones. Since Ray Crews could not have what he wanted, he tried to want what he could have, his son wrote.

  Ray Crews worked at that job for six years, and one of the few times he left the swamp was to seek treatment in the town of Arcadia for a case of gonorrhea after an ill-considered tryst with a woman—whose name he never learned—who’d snuck into the work camp.

  “He had not wanted her, but they had been in the swamp for three years,” Harry Crews wrote. “They worked around the clock, and if they weren’t working or sleeping, their time was pretty much spent drinking or fighting or shooting gators.”

  Someone had a camera, and when they had a few moments, Ray Crews and his friends shot photos of their adventures deep in the swamp.

  Moonshine was another source of diversion for the construction gangs. And it wasn’t hard to find. The late Ashley Gang had not operated the only stills in the Everglades.

  Ellis, the former dredge operator, admitted seventy years later that he kept a jug of moonshine at hand on his machine.

  Roan Johnson was another young Georgian who worked on the Trail. He left his home in Quitman, a few miles north of the Florida border, in 1926 to join a cousin working on the construction crew. He was eighteen.

  Like all new hires, Johnson started out working on the crew that hacked through the woods and swamp to lay out the right-of-way for the Trail.

  “I remember the water was everywhere . . . clear, clear water, just everywhere,” he told the Miami Herald in 2003.

  The men constantly had to pull off their boots and dump water out of them, Johnson said.

  Johnson also remembered the insects—hordes of horseflies and mosquitoes so thick that it was like the construction workers “had stumbled into a biblical plague.”

  At night, mosquito netting protected the men’s bunks. The nights were “dark as only a swamp can be dark,” Crews wrote.

  Johnson said the construction workers didn’t worry too much about the presence of alligators.

  “You knew they were there, but they didn’t bother you,” he told the Herald.

  Still, foremen slung high-powered rifles across their shoulders and constantly scanned the woods and swamps for danger while their men worked.

  The men were fed in the work camps, but Meece Ellis said the workers often didn’t eat the meat that was provided because by the time it reached the camp, it had gone bad. So the workers bought wild game such as turkeys, wild hogs, and deer from Seminole Indians who lived in the Everglades.

  Occasionally, the scent of fresh meat enticed Florida panthers—a smaller subspecies of the American cougar that lives only in South Florida—to prowl around the camp.

  The work gang that followed the crew clearing the right-of-way laid down a crude sort of railroad, using cypress logs for crossties and rails. A drilling machine had been rigged up to ride this cypress railroad. The wheels were automobile tire rims, which fitted over the logs so the drill could be pulled across the wet, soggy muck.

  “Sometimes the drills stuck in the mud and there would be days of back-breaking man-labor, with heavy hand jacks, to set them up again,” Marjory Stoneman Douglas wrote.

  It’s hard to imagine that the soggy Everglades has a base of solid rock beneath the black water and muck, but it does. And engineers eventually realized that the only way to build a road through that swamp was to clear away the muck and build the road on top of the limestone that lay beneath the water, muck, and saw grass.

  So the drilling crew dug holes every one hundred feet—thousands of holes. The men who worked behind the drill crew led ox teams pulling wagons of dynamite on the cypress railroad. They dropped dynamite into those holes. Every so often, the workers backed well away from the recently drilled holes, and the dynamite was ignited.

  From late 1926 until the Tamiami Trail was completed in 1928, more than two million sticks of dynamite were used to break up Everglades limestone. In its November 1928 issue, Explosives Engineer magazine reported that the Tamiami Trail construction crew was using about twenty tons of dynamite per mile.

  After each blast, the walking dredge was brought up, and the operator scooped up the limestone fragments, 2,800 pounds at a time, and piled them alongside the canal that was formed by the explosions.

  The limestone was crushed and compacted and eventually became a surprisingly smooth road. Working under these awful conditions, the construction crews built a mile or two of road each month.

  On April 10, 1927, Collier’s construction gang achieved a milestone—they reached the Dade County line.

  “Just ten days behind the schedule that we set for ourselves, and I tell you, that isn’t so bad,” Otto Neal proudly told the Collier County News. “After that we dug our way four miles on through the other side of the Dade County line to meet the dredges coming from the east coast, and the most difficult rock of all was found in this
four-mile stretch in Dade County.”

  It was around this time that Ray Crews and his friend Cecil quit their jobs with the Tamiami Trail construction crew and headed back to Georgia.

  They had money in their pockets, and each had a gold watch engraved with their name and “Pioneer Builder of the Tamiami Trail.”

  With a bottle of whiskey on the floorboard of a Model T Ford, Crews and his friend took nearly three weeks to amble up the Dixie Highway from Miami to Jacksonville.

  “In the car with him as they drove, there was a shoebox full of pictures of my daddy with five or six of his buddies, all of them holding whiskey bottles and pistols and rifles and coons and leashed alligators out here in the rugged dug-out sea of sawgrass and mangrove swamp through which they had built the Tamiami Trail,” Harry Crews wrote. “His is the gun that is always drawn; his is the head that is turned back under the whiskey bottle.”

  They had been deep in the swamp while the real estate speculation mania had swept across Florida and crested, and it had started to ebb by the time they finally came out of the Everglades. And while Florida’s economic conditions probably held little interest for two young men with money in their pockets, time on their hands, a bottle of booze, and years of pent-up libido, there were deepening signs of trouble all around them.

  About the same time that Ray Crews and his friend Cecil started their leisurely trip up the Florida coast, a heavily guarded armored car left Miami, bound for West Palm Beach. It was carrying $2 million in cash.

  Miami banks were sending the money to prevent three West Palm Beach banks from failing.

  The New York Times of March 8, 1927, reported that banks in Palm Beach County had been struggling since shortly before the hurricanes of September and October 1926. Bankers in Miami feared a domino effect that would drag down more banks if they didn’t step in and help.