Everglades of the Past

Florida Museum of Natural History

           Long ago, the Everglades stretched over almost 11,000 square miles of land in Southern Florida.  Water once surged freely in Florida from the southern Kissimmee River north into Lake Okeechobee and southward over low altitude grasslands into the Biscayne Bay estuaries, the Ten Thousand Islands, and Florida Bay (National Park Service). This thin, slow-moving expanse of water formed a variety of ponds, sloughs, sawgrass marshes, hardwood hammock, and forested uplands. During the thousands of years in which the Everglades manifested, the complex structure of these different biomes developed into a sustainable yet fragile ecosystem that formed the biological infrastructure in the southern half of Florida.

Everglades Digital Library

            In the early twentieth century, colonial settlers and developers wanted to find out if the Everglades could serve as a potential farm land and a place to establish communities in the ever growing nation. As a result, they started to drain the swamps and build roads in the wetlands. As mentioned earlier, the consequence of these programs can be seen in the severe shrinkage in the size of the  Everglades, by about 67 percent of the original area. In the early 1900s, the drainage process to transform the marshes into arable land was underway, and the results would be severely damaging to the ecosystem and the species it supported.

Rescources: 

             National Park Service. "History and Culture of the Everglades". National Park Services. <http://www.nps.gov/ever/historyculture/index.htm>

             Everglades Forever. "Brief History of the Everglades". Florida Department of Environmental Protection. <http://www.dep.state.fl.us/evergladesforever/about/default.htm>