MUSEUM & CULTURE
Marco Island Historical Museum
Collier County · South Florida & the Keys
The island museum at 180 South Heathwood Drive, run by the Marco Island Historical Society inside the Collier County museum system.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
The permanent exhibit, Paradise Found, covers six thousand years of people on this island and holds more than three hundred indigenous artifacts along with a life-size reconstruction of a Key Marco village. The Florida Association of Museums recognized it in 2015 and the Southeastern Museums Conference in 2019. The Calusa are the reason the exhibit exists. They held the southwest coast of Florida for centuries, built their power on shell and fish rather than on farming, and were skilled carvers in wood and shell, making ceremonial objects and tools of a quality that startled the archaeologists who first uncovered them. The Key Marco Cat, a small carved feline figure and one of the finest pieces of pre-Columbian art found in North America, came off this island; the museum holds a bronze casting of it made by the sculptor Samuel Murray around 1896 to 1900. The rest of the museum covers the pioneers, the clam industry and the building of the modern island
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