Everglades

About

Everglades, Florida — 1905 Guy Bradley, 1840s-1880s Logging, 1990s-2010s Everglades Trail 100-mi Flamingo. Long before wardens or park boundaries, the Everglades flowed through the ancestral territory of the Timucua of northern Florida, the Calusa of the south, the Seminole, and the Miccosukee. The river was a primary travel corridor, a fishing ground, and a gathering place. The 1823 Treaty of Moultrie Creek, the 1832 Treaty of Payne's Landing, and the Seminole Wars of 1832 to 1858 established the cession framework that reshaped the region, but the connection endured. Today the Seminole Tribe of Florida and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida maintain cultural connections and treaty-protected rights to many of these watersheds.

The wetland did not escape the industrial appetite of a growing state. From the 1850s through the 1920s the Everglades was logged to supply the Florida cypress and hard-pine industry of 1860 to 1910 — bald cypress, longleaf pine, slash pine, and pond cypress all fell — along with the Florida steamship trade and the phosphate and naval-stores turpentine industries. County sawmills, logging drives, and the cross-tie and pencil-cedar trades were the major operators. Large-scale logging finally ended with the 1920s exhaustion of the old-growth cypress, the establishment of the Seminole National Forest that same decade, and the Civilian Conservation Corps plantings of the 1930s.

As the timber era waned, surveyors arrived to measure what remained. The USGS Florida Survey of the 1900s through the 1930s, followed by the establishment of USGS Everglades gauging stations in the 1930s to 1950s and Florida water-quality studies through the 1970s, produced the first comprehensive hydrological assessments of the region. Later work by the Florida Department of Environmental Regulation and the Florida DEP Total Maximum Daily Load program from 2000 onward confronted more than a hundred years of logging, agricultural, and developmental impacts.

The damage to the wetland's natural hydrology proved harder to undo than to inflict. By the turn of the twenty-first century, generations of drainage and diking had severed the natural flow, and in 2000 Congress authorized the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, an ambitious effort to restore the region's natural hydrology and improve its water quality. Since 2010 the Florida DEP, working with Everglades Watershed partnerships and the Water Management Districts, has carried that work forward through streambank stabilization from 2015 to 2024, native fish restocking of species including largemouth bass and snook from 2017 to 2024, and the Florida Springs Initiative and Everglades Restoration projects launched by 2020.

For paddlers, the modern Everglades offers more than 200 miles of paddling, much of it part of the Florida State Paddling Trails system, including the Wilderness Waterway. The wetland supports the economies of Homestead, Florida City, and Flamingo — the last a former fishing village and settlement inside Everglades National Park, where mainland habitats merge with the waters of Florida Bay. The Everglades is part of the larger Florida Bay system and sits alongside Big Cypress National Preserve. The same waters Guy Bradley died defending still shape one of the continent's most singular ecosystems, now managed by the National Park Service.