Everglades NP
Park History
Sourced
The Everglades is a river so gently sloping that no point in the park stands more than eight feet above sea level: a shallow, 50-mile-wide flow of fresh water that historically began in Lake Okeechobee and still moves slowly toward Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Marjory Stoneman Douglas named it the River of Grass in the 1940s. The park’s 1.5 million acres hold freshwater sloughs and prairies, pine rocklands, tropical hardwood hammocks, mangrove estuaries and the seagrass meadows of Florida Bay, more than 400 bird species, and the largest legislated wilderness east of the Rocky Mountains. It is the only place in the United States that is at once an International Biosphere Reserve, a World Heritage Site and a Wetland of International Importance. [1] [2]
Its archeological and historic sites span about 6,000 years. Congress authorized the park in 1934, but the land had to be donated, and President Harry S Truman did not dedicate it until December 6, 1947. It was the first national park set aside for its biological resources rather than its scenery or history. [2] [3]
The Park Service’s 2014 brochure describes what has happened since. Canals and levees shunt off water before it reaches the park, agricultural runoff and mercury pollute it, and wading birds nesting in southern Everglades colonies have declined 93 percent since the 1930s, from 265,000 to about 18,500. Congress has authorized the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, which the brochure calls the world’s largest environmental restoration project. [2] [1]
Indigenous peoples
The Spanish met the Calusa, a chiefdom built on fishing, hunting and gathering rather than farming, and the Tequesta. Disease, war and upheaval took a horrendous toll, Blythe’s 2017 park history says; many historians believe the last of them left for Cuba with the Spanish in 1764, though some may have stayed. Most of the people who became known as Seminoles were Muskogee-tradition people from farther north. In the Second Seminole War (1835–1842) soldiers killed Chekika at a hammock now inside the park and strung up his body; almost 3,000 Indians and associated Black people were removed west. After the Third Seminole War, 100 to 150 people held out, ancestors of all of today’s Seminole and Miccosukee in Florida. Officials then agreed to replace a 99,200-acre Seminole reservation inside the proposed park with land elsewhere; Blythe found no evidence the Indians were consulted. The 2017 foundation document recognizes the park as ancestral territory of Florida tribes. [2] [3]
Women
The Florida Federation of Women’s Clubs, led from 1914 by May Mann Jennings, won 960 acres of Royal Palm Hammock from the legislature in 1915, added a 960-acre exchange of land donated by Henry Flagler’s widow, and opened Florida’s first state park in 1916, running it with limited state funding until 1947. Marjory Stoneman Douglas, a writer and early park supporter, published The Everglades: River of Grass in November 1947, a month before the dedication, drawing on U.S. Geological Survey scientist Garald Parker; the first printing of 7,500 copies sold out by Christmas. During the fight against a proposed jetport she became president of the new Friends of the Everglades. In 1997 Congress renamed the park’s wilderness the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Wilderness; she was 106. [3] [3]
Climate & environment
The park’s 2017 foundation document reports sea-level rise already evident in estuarine and freshwater wetland gauges and saltwater intrusion and sea-level rise increasing, at a rate it says is rising because of climate change. It warns that rising seas and salt water could accelerate peat collapse and the loss of Everglades soils and marsh elevation, turning wetlands into open estuary; that stronger storm surges could overtop the marl ridge and threaten the Cape Sable wetlands; and that rising seas and larger storms threaten the park’s cultural resources. An earlier Park Service climate brochure noted that two-thirds of the park lies below three feet in elevation, and that under some sea-level scenarios the park’s pinelands, which hold most of South Florida’s remaining pineland habitat, could disappear. [2] [4]
Sources
- NPSHistory.com: Everglades National Park archive page — overview (from the 2014 NPS brochure) and establishment block
- NPS, Foundation Document, Everglades National Park, Florida (October 2017)
- Blythe, Wilderness on the Edge: A History of Everglades National Park (NPS / Organization of American Historians, September 2017)
- NPS South Florida Natural Resources Center, Climate Change and South Florida’s National Parks: portrait of a changing landscape (undated, after the 2005 hurricane season)
FLAGGED FOR REVIEW: Exhibit panels (12 items)
In 1927, journalist and conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas joined the committee to create Everglades National Park, beginning a lifelong crusade to save the 'River of Grass' from drainage and development.
Douglas's 1947 book 'The Everglades: River of Grass' redefined the swamp as a treasured river ecosystem and became instrumental in preservation efforts. Everglades National Park officially opened in 1947, protecting 1.5 million acres of unique subtropical wetland. Douglas founded Friends of the Everglades in 1969 and continued conservation work until her death in 1998 at age 108.
Among the content targeted: “River of Grass” — language that the administration has flagged for review under its directive to review historically accurate interpretive materials.
Why this matters: The Everglades represent a unique ecosystem where freshwater flows through a subtropical landscape, supporting wildlife found nowhere else on Earth. Over 1.1 million people visit this site each year.
Several of Everglades National Park's stories could be conceived as being disparaging to the development of industrial America. Because of the impacts that urbanization, agriculture, drainage, and industrialization, Everglades National Park was established because eventually society realized the significance of the ecosystem for being a source of fresh water for agriculture and people inhabiting South Florida and the numerous other resources it provides. This theme can be found throughout the purpose, foundation, and enabling legislation of what established Everglades National Park and is a th...
The purpose statement identifies the specific reason(s) for establishment of a particular park. Everglades National Park was established when the enabling legislation adopted by Congress was signed into law on May 30, 1934. The purpose statement lays the foundation for understanding what is most important about the park. Everglades National Park preserves the largest subtropical wilderness in the nation, a vast natural area in the southern Everglades and Florida Bay known throughout the world for its unparalleled ecological values, natural hydrologic conditions, vibrant cultural heritage, and...
Photographs attached to this park's records in the leaked NPS review database.
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