History
Florida Photo Archives
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Only a century ago the southern third of Florida was an unwelcoming wet wilderness. Lake Okeechobee was nearly twice the size it is today. From the lake, water crept southward down the peninsula through swamp and sawgrass. Rainfall that didn’t soak into the underlying limestone sat on the nearly reliefless land. The only dry places were on the Atlantic coastal ridge and the Everglades hammocks.
Indians inhabited south Florida even before wetter climatic conditions
set into motion the beginning of the Everglades 5000 or so years ago.
At the time European explorers arrived in the 1500s, Indian cultures
were well established, and people lived by hunting, fishing, and gathering
of wild foods. Villages around Lake Okeechobee may have grown corn,
at least for a time. Most of the Indian population was in villages near
estuaries and on the coastal ridge. People traveled from these villages
back and forth to camps in the Everglades to hunt and fish, much as
modern urban dwellers continue to do today.
By the mid 1700s, the original Indian cultures encountered by European
explorers were gone, their members killed or enslaved, or dead from
diseases to which they had no resistance. A new group of Indians—a
few hundred Seminoles and Miccosukees—escaped to south Florida
at the end of the Second Seminole War in 1842. They established small
settlements on the tree islands, hunted, fished, gardened, and collected
wild foods. They plied the waterways in cypress canoes, and toward the
end of the 19th century began trading alligator hides and egret feathers,
desirable commodities in the world of women’s fashions, for sewing
machines and other goods. Today the Miccosukee Tribe, recognized by
the federal government in 1961 as a group separate from the Seminoles,
has perpetual lease control over 189,000 acres within the management
area and continues to use the land for camps, religious rituals, and
subsistence hunting and fishing.
Florida Photo Archives
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In 1948 Congress authorized the Central and south Florida Project to
protect agricultural and urban areas from flooding and to serve as a
source of fresh water for what was fast becoming the heavily populated
Gold Coast. The project entailed construction of three water conservation
areas, two of which (Water Conservation Areas 2 and 3) are today encompassed
by the Everglades and Francis S. Taylor Wildlife Management Area. Construction
of canals, levees, and water control structures began in 1949 and was
completed in 1962. Water Conservation Areas 2 and 3 are almost completely
enclosed by a levee and canal system that is approximately 150 miles
in length. The only portion of the area not completely enclosed by the
levee system is WCA3A where a seven-mile section of the western border
remains hydrologically connected to the Big Cypress Preserve. U.S. Highway
27 separates WCA2 from WCA3; U.S. Highway 41 (Tamiami Trail) borders
WCA3, and Interstate 75 bisects WCA3. These roads, in combination with
the existing levee and water delivery system, have altered the natural
hydroperiods and disrupted sheetflow throughout the management area.
Continued development to the east of the management area will likely
intensify environmental problems. The area is used for flood retention
during high rainfall years and as a reservoir for urban and agricultural
use during dry years.
In 1994 the state passed the Everglades Forever Act to address environmental concerns related to quality, quantity, and timing of water entering the Everglades.
For more information on Everglades restoration visit South
Florida Water Management.
