Welcome to Drive Thru Towns. In this episode, we journey to the edge of the map to Everglades City, Florida—a town where the line between the wilderness and the law has always been as thin as a mangrove leaf.

Everglades City isn't just a gateway to a National Park; it’s a monument to stubbornness, isolated ambition, and a local history that reads like a thriller. We dive into:

• The Vision of Barron Collier: How a self-made advertising tycoon bought a county’s worth of swamp and tried to build a corporate utopia in the middle of nowhere.

• The Tamiami Trail: The brutal, explosive saga of building the "Impossible Road," a feat of engineering that required millions of pounds of dynamite to blast through solid limestone.

• The "Square Grouper" Era: A look at the 1970s and 80s, when the town’s labyrinth of mangroves became the primary entry point for a multi-million dollar marijuana smuggling trade.

• Operation Everglades: The 1983 federal raid that saw nearly every able-bodied man in town arrested, leaving a legacy of local defiance and silence.

• Survival and Stone Crabs: How a community that has survived world-changing hurricanes and massive federal stings continues to reinvent itself as the "Stone Crab Capital of the World".

  Everglades City is a place where nature eventually wins every argument, but the people here have never stopped talking back. It is a town defined by what it chose to keep out—and what it was brave enough to let in.

Host: Andrew Wilcox

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Email: wilcoxlegal@gmail.com

Special thanks to Chloe Jones for the music: chloejonesmusic.co.uk