MUSEUM & CULTURE
Museum of the Everglades
Collier County · South Florida & the Keys
The Collier County museum at 105 West Broadway in Everglades City, in a building that was the town laundry.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
It was put up in 1928 as a community laundry, at a time when Everglades City was the company town Barron Collier built as the headquarters for driving the Tamiami Trail across the swamp. Hundreds of men working on that road had to be fed, housed and have their clothes washed, and this building did the washing. In 1965 it became the clubhouse of the Everglades Women's Club. The Collier County Museum opened it as a museum in 1998, and the building went on the National Register of Historic Places on September 22, 2001. What is inside covers the whole span of who has lived on this ground: the ancient Calusa, the Seminole, the pioneers who came to fish and farm, and the entrepreneurs, Collier chief among them, who tried to turn the edge of the Everglades into a working county. It is a small museum in a small town, and the two explain each other
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