For Sale —American Paradise (39 page)

The
Herald
noted that the county's welfare board—which was responsible for providing help for those in need—had “almost ceased to function” because the county had not had the money to keep the board funded. The
Herald
editors asked “generous-
minded people of Miami” to make donations to the welfare board.

Around the time that the
Herald
was seeking donations to help the city's needy, an innocuous businessman rented a bungalow for a winter vacation in Miami Beach. He said his name was Al Brown, and his business card said he was a dealer in secondhand furniture.

Brown was a beefy, jowly man with thinning black hair who might have been regarded as just another businessman who'd done well enough to afford to take several months off in the sun. But a long, nasty-looking scar on his left cheek belied his bland-sounding name and set him apart from the typical vacationers. Clearly, Brown had incurred some risks on his path to success.

In the coming months, Brown would provide a small stimulus to the ailing South Florida economy. And his presence would not go unnoticed by local officials or the national press.

By mid-February, the Red Cross was ready to fold up its tent and get out of Miami. On February 14, vice chairman James Fieser sent a special-
delivery letter from Miami to Red Cross National Headquarters saying the Red Cross's mission did not include staying in Florida to help those unable to find work. Besides, they couldn't stay if they wanted to. They were out of money.

Solomon Davies Warfield was known as an autocratic business leader who could be very charming when it suited his purposes. As February turned to March and word spread that the Red Cross was pulling out of Miami, Warfield and other prominent Miami business leaders decided it was time to bury the hatchet.

On March 1, 1927, Henry Baker, the director of the Red Cross relief effort in Miami, was the guest of honor at a testimonial luncheon at the Columbus Hotel. The gathering was hosted by James Gilman, the former chairman of a citizens' committee formed to help with Miami's post-hurricane recovery.

Among the speakers who praised Baker and the Red Cross's relief effort was Miami mayor Edward Romfh, whose actions had helped to cripple the Red Cross's fund-raising effort.

Romfh said the Red Cross effort had been “magnificent,” and that the city had been very lucky that Baker had been in charge.

Baker was equally magnanimous, saying that he'd been in charge of 147 disaster-relief efforts across the United States, and had never seen such a “vigorous and intelligent” local relief effort.

“There is an elusive but definite something here which I can only define as the Miami spirit,” Baker said. “It is a spirit of cooperation, understanding, and vigorous determination to overcome all problems.”

The following day, Baker was invited to a smaller gathering with a few of Miami's high rollers. This gathering was held at the First National Bank in the private dining room of the bank's president—Miami mayor Edward Romfh.

Warfield, the charmer, had an ulterior motive for meeting with Baker in a more private setting. He wanted to coax information from the Red Cross official. Joining Baker, Warfield, and Romfh at the lunch were
Miami Herald
publisher Frank Shutts and Glenn Curtiss, the aviator turned developer.

Baker sent a letter the following day about the meeting to Fieser, who had returned to Red Cross headquarters in Washington, DC, “The luncheon did not have to do with our disaster relief except in a rather indirect way,” Baker wrote.

Baker said that the reason Warfield and the others had invited him to lunch was to ask him what he'd learned during his Red Cross work about the “financial matters of Miami and the East Coast of Florida,” adding that “Mr. Warfield was quite interested in this phase of post-hurricane developments.”

Baker said Warfield had asked him and the others to keep their conversation confidential, and went so far as to ask Baker not to say anything to his supervisors in Washington. Baker honored that request in his letter, but he did say that the conversation was related to “a big reclamation project” in the Everglades. He promised Fieser that he would fill in the details in a private conversation when he returned to Washington.

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 say 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.