Showdown in Chokoloskee

This is how Old Florida gets destroyed.

The bulldozers come on little crab feet.

Just before daybreak, April 14, 2011, they silently crept onto tiny Chokoloskee Island. The largest atoll of the Ten Thousand Islands chain, Chokoloskee is a three-tenths-square-mile rise of Glades culture shell mounds, old barnacled crab traps and 393 residents at the extreme southern tip of Southwest Florida.

It’s a balmy, fish-jumping, palm tree-swaying, osprey-crying cracker paradise.

On orders from a pack of wealthy Highlands County land speculators, the heavy equipment began chopping up historic Mamie Street, a principal road on Chokoloskee, named more than 100 years ago for the wife of pioneer Ted Smallwood. Townfolk, awakened by the rapture, stood in shadows nearby, shocked, yelling curses and flipping their bird fingers and coffee at the vandals.

When the dust of limestone, asphalt and fossil had settled, the lower 983.64 feet of Mamie Street was gone. It was now an impassable mess of piled rubble, chunked with fragments of aboriginal mound, and pocked with VW-deep chasms of mosquito water—in short, a bombed-out landscape like those you see on TV in Beirut. A tall fence, covered by green tarp with little square eye holes, stretched across the heart of the island, blocking the only access to the legendary Smallwood Store and Museum, where the now-deceased Mamie Street once met the water’s edge at sparkling Chokoloskee Bay.

An historic icon of the area known as Florida’s Last Frontier, the Smallwood Store occupies a special place in the histories of Seminole Indians, Gulf fishermen, the Everglades and Collier County and has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places for 40 years. Over the next six months, more than $50,000 worth of business rolled into Chokoloskee, saw the fence, turned around and got the heck out of town. Area seafood restaurants began talking class-action suit. Worst-off season since Hurricane Andrew.

Florida Georgia Grove LLP (FGG), owners of the land the road transverses, had no real permission to take out the road, nor did they notify Collier County public safety officials. Though the Sheriff’s Department refuses to comment, many witnesses reported Collier County deputies on hand to protect the road busters.

“There were threats,” explained FGG attorney Jim Kelly, who noted the site wasn’t far from the spot where outlaw Edgar Watson was gunned down by citizen vigilantes in 1910. “We didn’t want anyone to get hurt.”

“Have we finally run out of places to despoil elsewhere in Florida in the name of progress? Must we now suffer swarms of developers, like mosquitoes in a hot windless summer day, here in the paradise of the Last Frontier?” -Peter Matthiessen, author of Killing Mr. Watson

There aren’t many roads down here in the Last Frontier.

Fact is, the extreme bottom Southwest Florida hinterlands of the United States, where the Everglades, Ten Thousand Islands and Big Cypress Swamp lie, is considered the largest most roadless area in the lower 48 states.

For that reason alone, it’s a big deal when they come and take a road out.

But what happened on tiny Chokoloskee in the early dawn hours of April 14 is a black-topped nightmare still alive as this is written. Out of business for six months until FGG “complied” with Circuit Judge Hugh Hayes’ order to put back the road, the reddish, weathered, peckerwood 95-year-old Smallwood Store and Museum reopened to a poor excuse for Mamie—a dirt driveway full of potholes, bumps and tire-sucking mud provided by the FGG crew.

Then, two weeks later, on the 101st anniversary of Watson’s murder, with photos of the wreck of a road in front of him, and lawyers arguing about grading and paving, Judge Hayes abruptly recused himself from the case. While the judge will not comment, an FGG motion accused Hayes of not being impartial since the 1999 Collier County Court House Annex was dedicated in his name. Courthouse observers were stunned at Hayes’ backing off, wondering if any of the senior judge’s previous cases would be similarly affected.

“That’s absurd,” says Collier County Commissioner Jim Coletta. “We put the man’s name on a building and now he can’t be a judge anymore? Absurd.” But, in reality, it was merely the latest absurdity in a case pitting a hardball cadre of deep-pocket outsiders versus a national historic treasure that has stood sentinel here. All in a county which, until recent times, was among the national leaders in population surge, new homes built and just about every other statistic having to do with wild, rampant development.

Oh, and did we mention that Coletta, publicly referred to as “Commissioner Foghorn Leghorn” by FGG attorney Kelly, is well known for his acting role as Edgar Watson in the county’s annual “Killing Mr. Watson” production?

“Smallwood Store is collateral damage to them. That’s all. I guess this is how it happens all over Florida. It’s how everything gets ruined. They just come in and take you down. And then get away with it. I just never thought they’d ever find us way down here.” -Store/Museum proprietor Lynn Smallwood-McMillin

In the middle of all this, last Aug. 2, the area celebrated the unveiling of four Neighborhood Watch signs in Everglades City, Chokoloskee, Plantation Island and Copeland.

“Neighborhood Watch? It’s a little late for that. Someone should have been watching the neighborhood when those boneheads came down and took out that road,” says Lee Noble, owner of Leebo’s Rock Bottom Bar, the area’s main watering hole. “You mess with Smallwood, you messin’ with all of us natives. That store been mindin’ its own bidness out there for a hundred years. Leave it alone!”

“Well how do these guys continue to get away with this?” a customer wondered. “I mean, if the sheriff won’t help, if the county don’t care, isn’t it time for frontier justice? How come a group of good ole boys don’t just go out and do a ‘Mr. Watson’ on those guys?”