WHY DO THEY CALL IT TAMIAMI TRAIL...OR CALLE OCHO? (REWRITE)

WHY DO THEY CALL IT TAMIAMI TRAIL…OR CALLE OCHO?

Note; if you are interested the original of this article was posted on this blog on 7/6/11, like most of my original works were.

I have now added some additional information at the end of this article. 06/25/13

By Wellborn Phillips

   Miami is such a crazy town with crazy people with crazy dreams!  People elsewhere know that such things just don’t happen.  But part of Miami’s history was written by crazy people with foresight and ability to make their dreams come true. And one of the craziest of the crazy dreams was the Tamiami Trail across the Everglades

. For hundreds of years, people believed Florida’s vast interior from Cape Sable to Lake Okeechobee would forever be home only for the Seminoles, an assortment of wildlife, mosquitoes, alligators, and snakes. The Everglades was one of the last parts of the U.S. to be completely mapped.  Not until the Second Seminole War (1835-42), when General Zachery Taylor’s troops pursued the Indians into their swampy villages, were many of the geographic details filled in.

And not until Hamilton Diston’s arrival in the 1880’s, did Floridians decide that “something could be done”. Diston, a wealthy Philadelphia tool manufacturer, had saved the State from post Civil War bankruptcy by contributing $1,000.000 to its treasury. In return, Diston got 4,000.000 acres of state-owned “swampland” between Sarasota and Kissimmee (for 25 cents per acre). His ambitious drainage projects demonstrated that the Everglades was somewhat manageable after all.

But still the Everglades remained a “Chinese Wall” between Southwest and Southeast Florida. When Rudyard Kipling wrote

                            “Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”,

Kipling just as well could have been referring to the Southern tip of Florida. Into the early 1900s, there was no way to travel directly (by land) between Miami and anything south of New Smyrna along Florida’s East Coast with the Gulf Coast towns.  Roads were “local”, built by the Counties for short trips only from one town to the next. There were no State highways. And then Henry Ford came along…

Ford’s Model T, first produced in 1908, was not so remarkable by itself; it was the over-all program that was so revolutionary:  the Model T was much less expensive and they could be mass-produced.   Owning an automobile was no longer a luxury; it had become a necessity. And you no longer had to be a mechanic to drive one. Ford soon had a factory trained service department in every major community.

The U.S.-- and Florida-- would never again be the same.

A few years before, Henry Flagler and Henry Plant had pushed Florida into the 20^th Century with their railroads, hotels, and promotions. Now Henry Ford’s automobile sped things along even further.

Suddenly, people were demanding a well developed, modern state with good roads.  County projects were increased. The State Road Board was created--and appointed—and  a State-wide system of roads and other improvements began to evolve. Four projects were particularly popular; the Dixie Highway, the Gandy Bridge, the drainage of the Everglades…and the Tamiami Trail.

The Tamiami Trail was conceived and guided to completion largely by four individuals. It was the brainchild of Dade County Tax Assessor J.W. Jaudon, a dynamic person with unlimited energies. Long before the idea for the highway became popular, Jaudon was traveling his County—then Florida-- speaking, planning, arguing, campaigning for it.

Jaudon’s faithful  ally was William Stuart Hill of the Miami Herald who promoted the idea in news stories and editorials and  thought up –and sold the name Tamiami to the public.  It is, of course, a contraction of the names of the two major cities served by the highway—Tampa and Miami.

A third “father of the trail” was Ora E. Chapin who organized a group of several dozen activists known as “The Trail Blazers”. They made numerous well-publicized trips into the Everglades, demonstrating the need for the highway and bringing back valuable information.

The most famous of their expeditions consisted of 23 men, 2 Indian guides (one of them Tigertail, a decendant of the famous Indian Chief),  8 Model T’s, 1 Elcar, 1 Overland, and a bulldozer. The party left Ft. Myers on April 4, 1923 and they finally staggered from the Everglades into Miami 3 weeks later, minus the Elcar and 2 Model T’s which disappeared into Everglades muck and were never recovered.

The Trail Blazers played a vital role.  They prompted new life into the Tamiami Trail Project when ever its other supporters were almost ready to abandon it.

 The project had been conceived as a joint venture of 6 counties; Dade, Lee, and Hillsborough, with lesser participation by Manatee, Sarasota, and Charlotte, and with a lot of the work and financing done by local Road Districts.

On July 16, 1916 Dade County had floated a bond issue for $275,000 and awarded a contract for its pat of the work to the County Line. As work progressed, however, the contract had to be amended a number of times, and additional funds added. Finally, the road grading was partially completed but the rest was still undone and the contractor gave up.

Between Tampa and Ft. Myers, very much the same sort of thing happened. But in Lee County, things were much worse. The individual Road Districts had mortgaged themselves to the hilt, and they still did not have enough money to make any progress on the project.

The financial difficulties had been created by skyrocketing cost brought on by the complicated nature of Everglades. At first, the contractors had tried to build road beds on crushed rock laid directly on top of muck. But soon the individual pieces of crushed rock disappeared into the muck and the hard surface began to crumble. After further experiments over several years, the contractors and engineers settle on one of the most complicated road building methods used anywhere.

In effects, two ditches had to be dug across the everglades, side by side, with all the muck stripped from m both down to the solid bed rock. One of the ditches became the road bed when filled to grade with crushed rock. The crushed rock for the road bed came from the second ditch which had been used to float a dredge, and the dredge sucked up dynamited rock particles from its bottom and tossed them onto the road bed. The giant dredge was a mechanical miracle known as a “walking dredge”. It looked somewhat like a large metallic grasshopper with legs resting on both banks and these legs moved it forward.

To overcome the Trail’s gigantic financial problems, there evolved smooth working agreement between Barron G. Collier, who is also referred to as one of “the Fathers of The Trail”, the Florida legislature, and Road Board. By and Act of the legislature, Lee County was cut in half; the southern half would become a new County to be named for Barron Collier and Collier himself agreed to guarantee the completion of the Trail through the new County, either by the newly-formed Road Districts or by himself personally. Finally, the Florida Road Board would complete whatever remained to be done in the six County Area.

Barron Collier has a remarkable record: he made a vast fortune selling advertising to trolley car companies in America’s Northeast. He also becomes a local celebrity of sorts by inventing the yellow line down the center of streets for guidance of traffic. And he was a prominent Democrat; a confidant of Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt. And one of America’s truly great promoters.

 When Collier County was created, he owned most of it. He built his own city, Everglades and his own n sportsmen clubs. When he died in 1939, he was broke, but the thousands of acres owned today by his estate are worth a gigantic fortune.

The Tamiami Trail was finally, formally opened by Governor John W. Martin in April, 1928. Thousands of men had worked there. It had taken 13 years to build at a cost of $10,000.000. And now a trip from Miami to Tampa had been cut from a week or more to little more than several hours.

Additional information:

Another chapter of the Tamiami Trail story was written 31 years later after Fidel Castro came to power January  1, 1959. thousands of Cubans came to America then and many of them settled i the Southwest area of Miami known today as "Little Havana"... the area from NW 7th Street to Southwest 16th Street, and from 27th Avenue to I-95. Nearly 100,000 people live there today and an estimated 91% of these are Cuban. It is a colorful part of Miami:P a town within a town. And the Main Street of Little Havana is that part of The Trial, or SW 8th Street, which is now known a s"Calle Ocho".